Sorry, late to this party. I am interested in transferring MP3 files to HiMD without conversion.

1. Which units will play them back?
2. Do I still have to use SonicStage?

Thanks

I believe the only units are as follows:

1) RH10, RH910, RH710, DH10P. These were the first generation with the capability to play MP3 files without conversion, and most people found the quality to be unsatisfactory. Without adjusting the equaliser settings, they tend to sound rather dull.

2) RH1, M200. I've played mp3s on my RH1 and am very happy with the results.

Yes, you do have to use SonicStage.

you could also use the MD as storage, but you wouldn't be able to play them on unit
Bob

In my case, I use a MZ-E105 (under $20) for playing back MP3's, yet still have a MZ-M200 for handling any MD uploading / live recording. The two work together well as the E105 will play anything that the M200 can create. In other words, I use it as the "portable counterpart" to the 200.
Regardless, you will have to use SS to add files to either unit to be played.

Yeah, did that. What a pain, won't be trying that voluntarily again. SS tied itself in knots to import each file, it seemed.

Luckily I never actually started with any MP3 files. Was just trying out to see that I could store a whole bunch of (mainly) speech files on mp3 CD and recover them if necessary. So I thought I would check it out whilst I was doing that.

I came away with the distinct impression that noone ever really wanted us to work with MP3.

Just my $0.02

FWIW, I have found that MP3 import and transfer works flawlessly since I have recently changed to SS 4.2....actually a little smoother than doing the same processes with ATRAC files, which is funny in a way. Of course this is not a fair comparison since a. the importing of the MP3 file really doesn't require an actual physical import since it is already on the hard drive, and b. I am transferring MP3's to a the E105 which is a flash player, therefore much quicker to write data than my M200 if I were to do the same process.
But to make matters a little more interesting, my computer is well under the minimum recommended requirements for any SS software, and my USB is 1.0...and it still works like a charm....but SS would totally bog my computer down with occasional lockup with the previous 3.4 version.

uh... I was running 4.3, and although it seemed to speed up a bit later, the first 10 files or so I imported took on average 1 minute each - I could hear the database grinding away on the HD, no idea what it could possibly have been doing.

Perhaps I was just unlucky - or SS has to do major "road construction" when you start to play with MP3 files - I would be prepared to believe that. But it was pretty slow.

The other problem I noted was that the track title gets encoded in the file (I guess the MP3 folks know this), so renaming it had no effect - bad titles before the rename showed up when looking at the file on my MP3-compatible CD player.

As far as MP3's go, I typically import one group of 4 files at a time (Coast 2 Coast podcasts). Each file is around 38 minutes long, all encoded at 48kbps. I have never actually timed it, but I am thinking the time for this is about 3 seconds, max...and we are talking about a PII, thrown-together computer.
Even when I do say 5-10 shows at a time (which could be as much as 40 largish files) it still takes maybe 20 seconds. So I would suspect some conflict in your setup. Maybe others can ring in on their MP3 import experiences...but with mine I could only imagine it working better if it was drag and drop. However, I have never paid much attention to the titles, as to what the software does with them, to them, etc.

I agree that later imports were quicker.