search

gavinbenda / platinum-md

Minidisc NetMD Conversion and Upload
MIT License
230 stars 38 forks source link

Support for MZ-N420D. #134

Open augustinwinter opened 2 years ago

augustinwinter commented 2 years ago

First, thank you for the hard work you've put into this. Actually made me get an MD recorder to try it out.

I'm having issues with both Mac and PC platforms working with the Sony MZ-N420D.

On the PC side, it is constantly negotiating.

On the Mac side, the device is recognized (sometimes), but will not copy tracks.

deenine commented 2 years ago

On the PC side, have you installed the Zadig driver? N420D should work..

cbmtrx commented 2 years ago

FWIW I've been using an MZ-N420D for the last couple of days doing heavy MD creation on a 2018 Mac Mini (OS X 10.15.7) and the app has worked...sort of. It's unfortunately rather unstable; I've resorted to quitting and restarting the app as well as unplugging the MD recorder before each new transfer.

I'm new to GitHub so I'm not sure where bug reports should go but here's what I've found so far (this is based on 20 WAV files, each named with track number, track title, artist name, multi-selected and transferred as a group):

  1. Frequently duplicates tracks, which have to be manually deleted; sometimes this fills up the MD so the last tracks won't be transferred.
  2. Sometimes omits a track (this is a worst-case scenario; see #3).
  3. It's also not possible to stop or pause a group transfer if a duplicate or omission happens; for omissions I have to quit the app immediately and disconnect the player. Then restart everything and delete the last track before continuing. Not ideal.
  4. Moving/re-numbering transferred tracks does not work; weird behavior here where other tracks seemingly get renumbered also, and so it's impossible to actually reorganize the track list. It's too bad because this would address some of the above issues much more easily.
  5. Occasionally it will just pause (idle) and not continue; the transfer button will be greyed out so I restart the app.

Also, I foolishly thought that recording an MD would be quick but it's really only around 2x faster than realtime :/

All this being said, this app has seriously good potential and at the moment it's faster than making MDs in realtime. A+

Shadester commented 2 years ago

To get more than 2x on SP recording you need a different recorder. The N910 and N920 is 4x, for example: https://www.minidisc.wiki/guides/net-md-speed-test

maverickmatt commented 2 years ago

To get more than 2x on SP recording you need a different recorder. The N910 and N920 is 4x, for example: https://www.minidisc.wiki/guides/net-md-speed-test

Thank you for posting that - I have been looking for it!

deenine commented 2 years ago

@cbmtrx regarding:

Frequently duplicates tracks, which have to be manually deleted; sometimes this fills up the MD so the last tracks won't be transferred.

Do you have examples you can share of this? I would like to try and debug. How many tracks are you transferring, is the disc blank or are there already tracks on it?

cbmtrx commented 2 years ago

Do you have examples you can share of this? I would like to try and debug. How many tracks are you transferring, is the disc blank or are there already tracks on it?

I actually don't have files I can share ATM (pre-release) but I can describe what I'm doing: 17 tracks in a folder, all 44.1kHz/16bit WAVs. I had the best results by quitting the app after each full transfer (17 tracks), then restarting for the next Minidisc. But it would still sometimes duplicate tracks.

Each MD is blank, formatted for standard SP. Sometimes, if the MD was full, I would delete the duplicates, quit, then restart and transfer only the remaining tracks. Sometimes duplicates would happen then too...

One thing I'll add is that many of these tracks have special characters in the filenames—dashes, underscores, and periods—but it's not always those that are duplicated. I have noticed, from session to session, that it's often (but not always) the same tracks getting duplicated. I don't know how helpful this is...

Last thing: I've also used WebMinidisc and did not see these behaviors. I'm not sure how much that matters.

deenine commented 2 years ago

@cbmtrx thanks, I will attempt to reproduce.

deenine commented 2 years ago

@cbmtrx when tracks are duplicated, do you see duplicate filenames in the track listings, or do you have the correct filenames, but with the contents of another track?

I have tried to reproduce on a nh700 and je780 and am not having the issue.

@gavinbenda I suspect this is some node async issue.

cbmtrx commented 2 years ago

@cbmtrx when tracks are duplicated, do you see duplicate filenames in the track listings, or do you have the correct filenames, but with the contents of another track?

Just duplicates—same name, track number, and running time. I don't think I ever actually played these to confirm as it was just easier to re-transfer.

gavinbenda commented 2 years ago

I've occasionally have this happen - usually it's due to the device being a bit slow to respond (or if transferring while on battery power), and it does try several times if it thinks the track has not transferred correctly. Would be good to re-factor the track transfer section of the app so it confirms that the track was transferred before continuing.

deenine commented 2 years ago

What devices have you had this happen with @gavinbenda ?

gavinbenda commented 2 years ago

A few - as I test with a lot! I suspect it's a hardware thing, perhaps devices that struggle to read quickly (also could just be a fault as it's hunting for data). I find devices like MZ-N910/20 are the most reliable and fastest. Hi-MD devices can often be a bit slower in reading regular MD in my experience.

Not very scientific I know !