New Sony MiniDisc- What's up with Sonic Stage??

R

rimawa

Registered
I recently purchased a shiny Sony Mini Disc recorder, and have found to my dismay that it claims to be incompatible with Mac. How is this possible?
So I cannot name MiniDisc tracks from my PowerBook, let alone transfer music files from the MD to the Computer, and vice-versa?
This cannot be? :mad:
How could Sony be so shortsighted in their design?
Has anyone written any software for OSX to correct this?
I refuse to believe that there is no remedy for this!!
Please help! :eek:
 
SonicStage has always been PC-only and no plans have been announced for an OSX port. Due to the proprietary nature of the ATRAC3 format, it is astoundingly unlikely that any third party support would be forthcoming.
 
I guess it's hard for me to believe that there is no way to get the mac to talk to the MD even just enough to label tracks, etc.

I have seen rumblings on the net that aatempts have been made. Anybody know any more?>

Thanks

Rich
 
http://www.sorted.org/~pete/Xmd/ - Abandoned 12/2002
http://libnetmd.sourceforge.net/ - Abandoned 3/2004
http://www.pdr.cx/projects/gnetmd/main/ - Abandoned 3/2003

These are the ones I was tracking before I gave up, as you can see even the most recent one has been dead for over a year, and I never got any of them to work properly. There are claims of some basic renaming functionality, but no one has even gotten close to song transfers yet.

I seem to recall back in the day some users had limited success running OpenMG Jukebox under Virtual PC, but I don't remember the specifics and what I do remember is that it was very hit-and-miss.
 
Thanks for that. Does that mean that libnetmd will at least allow me to name tracks and nothing else>? Or would it be dangerous to run an 'unfinished' bit of code>?

And what's behind this do you think? Why would sony want to make it incompatible with so many platforms>? :rolleyes:
 
I wouldn't advise trying it on irreplacable MD recordings - you may want to test it by recording an MD from a CD source and then titling. It's unlikely to cause any problems on your powerbook, though.

As for the incompatibility, my belief is that Sony quite simply doesn't need to support other platforms. The vast majority of their minidisc market is European and Asian, and a large portion of that predates the mp3 revolution and the use of computers for digital music. To them, the PC interface is a feature, not a core requirement of MD technology. It took ten years between the introduction of the minidisc and the introduction of NetMD, remember, and the other minidisc manufacturers don't even have a PC-compatible offering.
 
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