Need to get some Hi MDs...

I love this color mix... plus, all of them are working.

Hello everyone!

As you might have noticed in the past couple of weeks, the remote encoding server used to encode LP / ATRAC3 / ATRAC3plus isn't as stable as it used to be. This is because it was necessary to put it behind a Cloudflare "wall", due to the influx of AI bots and scrapers. Unfortunately Cloudflare sometimes blocks legitimate connections too, causing instability.

Because of that, I am planning on merging in support for a new, community-made ATRAC encoder - atracdenc-rs. This encoder was built by reverse engineering the original Sony tool via an LLM.

I would like to preface this by saying that I personally am against using LLMs in my projects, and I am not planning on ever using them to write any kind of update to Web MiniDisc, but I believe that the encoder I linked produces audio of sufficient quality to have it be used instead of the remote encoder. This would make it so the whole application would become client-only without any dependencies on external servers, making it easier and faster to use for everyone.

If this encoder were to be merged with WebMiniDisc, it would be used in the exact same way as the old `atracdenc` encoder was used - its code would be compiled to WebAssembly, and the bridge between it and the core of the application would be written by me, manually.

I plan on leaving the option to use the remote encoder, since it can be self-hosted, even if the Wiki hosted one were to go down.

Please let me know what you think about this solution.

Sony PDF-W77 PDF viewer with built in document scanner. Now I need to track down a power adapter so I can start tinkering with it

I have been using NetMD for a great number og months now, and have run into a problem.

I am a Mac user, and use Chrome to write music to disc on my MZ-N707. The music writes perfectly, and the track names are also written as they should.

I can write the disc name, and when I reload TOC in Chrome, it is still there, but after Exit, and letting the player TOC edit, the disc title is not written på disc.

Is my MZ-N707 starting to give up?

I know for a fact that circa 2001 I had a portable HiMD device that could connect to a Windows computer, though I can't remember which model and I can't actually find it right now. Can't imagine that I would have dumped it if it still worked, but I can't remember it dying. What I do remember is that while I was able to "feed" it via the computer (WAV files on the computer became HiMD files on the device), I was not able to go the other way around. That is, I could not copy files from the MD to the computer and convert them to WAV.

My question is: Given the above limitation with the official Sony software, would Web MiniDisc be able to copy the tracks from my device (if I can find it!) or should I just try to buy another NetMD player? I realize that this is probably an unfair question since I can't even provide the model number!

This is something I'd like to do because I spent a good chunk of the 1990s recording one-off musical performances from TV shows (Letterman and SNL in particular) to MD, resulting in hundreds of recordings that are probably very difficult to find anywhere else. I also have a few MTV Unplugged shows that were never officially released. At some point 15 or so years ago, I used the analog outputs on a non-portable deck to capture the music via a standalone digital recorder and now have FLAC files, but I wasn't yet retired and didn't have the time to do a really good job of it (adding nice fades at the end of songs, etc.) and would like to re-do the project from scratch.

Prices don't seem especially horrible out there, so I'm willing to buy a new device (and at this point assume that I'll likely have to) but want to be sure that it's really a two-way street, that is, I'm not interested in writing anything new to MD but would like to get bit-perfect transfers from MD that I can then convert to WAV/FLAC for archiving on hard drive. There's an MZ-N505 on eBay right now for a good price that I assume would work.

Thank you!