> new Sony 1Gb Minidisc system, the iRiver Hard drive audio systems
> and the 60 and 80 gigabyte Neuros seems to offer non-compression
> wave recording.
NB: there is a well-documented bug in the iRiver iHP series such that when
recording uncompressed it drops a few hundred samples from time to time;
at one point people assumed this could be fixed with a firmware patch but
it's been a long time and nothing is forthcoming -- and the new releases
by iriver don't offer uncompressed recording anymore. The consensus seems
to be that it's not going to happen. :(
I don't own one btw, I have just been following this end of the
market avidly.
Some things to know about the Sony Hi-MD: to digitally transfer your
uncomrpessed recordings, you can't drag-and-drop them off the deck, you
must upload them using Sony's software (I don't know if there's a Mac
version!) -- and then use their "unlocking" utility to convert the
DRM-locked files into normal WAVs. Sony's utility will only "unlock" files
recorded from analog inputs. HOWEVER, a third-party developer has
released a freeware app that will also unlock recordings made with the
optical (digital) input -- cf www.mindisc.org. But I'm not sure if it's
100% at this point.
Also Hi-MD is AFAIK impossible to find in quantity yet.
Personally I'm hoping Sharp will release a DR77 (top-of-the-line
portable consumer recorder) successor that supports Hi-MD, but I'm not
holding my breathe.
You might consider the Edirol R1 recorder; it's biggest limitation is that
it has no digital input...
best regards,
aaron (long-time MD user)
http://www.quietamerican.org
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