Sony Hi-MD design flaw

[David Ennis]

I'm quite disturbed to learn that there is no override setting to prevent a Sony MZ-M100 connected to a mixer at line level from creating new tracks when the sound man mutes a mic. I've taken the customer support route to the end of the line.

The unit split the second act of my last show into 71 tracks, a virtually unmanageable mess. I wish I had bought an Edirol.

[David Ennis]

In fairness, I'd like to follow up with the discovery that the SonicStage software that comes with the MZ-M100 allows you to combine the tracks after uploading.

Still kind of a pain, and it's a slow process even with 2.4 Ghz processor, but it's workable. Other than that, it is a dandy little device.

The unwanted splitting of tracks does not occur with the mic input, just the line input.

[Ty Ford]

Thanks for sharing that Fred. You mean, while you're recording a scene, if a mic is muted on one track, it makes a new stereo file?

Ty

[David Ennis]

Sorry for the misuse of the word "track" here. Not using the recordist's meaning of the word here, but rather the commercial CD industry's common usage. That is, sequentially numbered segments of the recording. For example, a CD song album might typically have 18 "tracks," one for each song.

The M100 does this mainly with a line input. I'm not sure exactly what operations at the board can trigger it but I'm assuming its muting.

The unit is a lot more likely to tolerate silence in the mic input than in the line input without creating a new track. In the mic input mode, only pausing the recording or actually pulling then reinserting the mic plug it creates a new track.