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A netMD Solution for the Mac?
SmackyTheFrog asks: "I recently purchased a Minidisc player with netMD capability. At first this was fine because I always had my trusty PC near by. Now that I have gone off to college, I no longer have the space for my big beige box and I only have my PowerBook with me. Much to my dismay I discovered that Sony has decided not to grace the Mac with any netMD software. Are there ways to get netMD (ie 3 or more hours of audio) music onto a single minidisc using a Mac?"
Sadly Sony doesn't seem to care about these things (which might explain why MD isn't as popular as it could be). You can always try Xmd but it is currently limited in what it can do.
If you can afford it you might want to look into getting an old model iPod.
You must have aversion for sound quality. Minidisc is already heavily compressed to fit 70 minutes of music, what do you get when you fit 3 hours worth of it? Something just a bit worse than 64kbps mp3?
Maybe you could invest into a 64 or 128 MB Samsung Yepp with USB. That sould not be more than $100. Or get the Rio Karma 1.5GB (that houses X times more music) for $70. See slickdeals.net.
Boycott Sony.
Code poet, espresso fiend, starter upper.
you know you can just drag aac files into toast and make them into AIFFs.. I donno how lossy that is though
The NetMD Minidisc recorders/players I've been eyeballing claim to accept MP3 files.
Question: are these files being converted to ATRAC format, or are they written raw and played back using an MP3 codec?
My concern is that if they're converting the file, it's going from lossy MP3 to lossy ATRAC format, which just isn't going to have a good-sounding result.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Even with a PC, it's about as useless as a single media device can be.
Please tell me it was forced upon you. And if so, cut your losses and cut them early.
Actually this iTunes/Mac zealot started using the iTunes Music Store when he got an iPod - obviating any silliness you describe.
Including "buying WMA music [I] can use directly." Sorry, guy, no problems here.
First off, fitting 3 or more hours of audio has nothing to do with NetMD, this is the so-called Long Play mode (LP2 fits twice as much audio, and LP4 fits four times as much). Of course you have to accept a less than perfect sound fidelity for the higher compression rate. As for NetMD on the Mac, there's an application called Xmd that can do several interesting things like titling (good! especially if you choose to go with LP4 and have dozens of tracks on your MD) and playback, but it doesn't allow you to download music to your MD. And anyway, NetMD won't allow to download tracks *from* your MD to your computer (even, maybe especially, the official Sony software) which renders it next to useless in any case.
You'd minimize your losses, you'd lose no more information than was already missing from the AAC file.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
As an aside, I have to second the question above, why did you buy a minidisc player? I'm sure that as a /. reader, you're familiar with your other options; it seems like unless you got a -really- great deal on it, an eBay'd iPod would have been a better choice.
Oh well. Good luck with that, and enjoy your new toy. _
What's with all the MD bashing? Before I won my iPod (I could never afford one), I used MD exclusively. Why? 1) LP2 mode is great for the Essential Mixes I download from the internet. They are two hour sets that will drain the battery on an iPod very quickly (due to caching issues) sometimes before the 2 hour set is done. Splitting the track into smaller chunks isn't an option as it puts spaces between tracks. 2) Never run out of room, I've got over 70 MD's. I can't fit that much music on my iPod, granted I can fit much more on 1 iPod than on 1 MD, but this is how I feel about it. 3) As mentioned before indirectly, battery life is amazing on these things. 4) I run with my Sport MD, I fell on it once, scratched the surface but didn't skip a beat. My iPod would have been destroyed, guaranteed. 4) Line in. I'm a DJ (okay more of a pretend DJ), but when I mix I record to MD and listen to my mixes to improve them and learn the music. Very handy. Available on some MP3 players, but MD does it better IMHO. 6) Never had issues w/sound quality, yes it's lossy, but I'm not an audiophile. No self-respecting audiophile listens to MP3's either. Anyway, just my take on things. I love my MD and I love my iPod. The Japanese love their MD"s too, loved shopping there ;)
You're silly... you cannot BUY and OWN music you purchase through WMA format... you're just LICENSING it!
HAHAHAH.. good luck with WMA.... ahahahhah
You have a nice Apple Powerbook, and an unsupported MiniDisc player, and you want to transfer highly compressed 3-subband audio over USB?
If I may suggest a two step solution: 1. Ebay 2. iPod
you get: way more storage, way more quality, way more vendor support, and way more transfer speed. It looks like you're in for about a hundred bucks for an eBay upgrade.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
if only there were some kind of portable music player that you could use with a Mac. What would really be great is if it took regular MP3 files, and stored a lot of them, like maybe 1-2GB worth.
That would be sweet.
Maybe someday somebody will step up to the plate and fill this need.
Would virtualpc work? I have no idea, I don't own a mac. But I think it might.
Eventually libnetmd will be completed. That would be your best bet.
Personally, I think OpenMG (the sony program for managing your MD) is the most god-awful piece of software developed in some dark corner of Sri Lanka. It is very unstable, clunky, and limited. I hate it so much I ended up using Real One to upload music to my MD.. and I hate Real software as well (because it keeps hooking itself in my registry).. but at least the UI is more stable than OpenMG..
(MG = The G could stand for garbage, but that would be an insult to garbage everywhere.)
I don't need a new iPod. The problem is that the cache which is perhaps 32MB's is great for loading up several songs at once, however, when playing a long two hour continuous track the track is unable to load entirely into the cache, as such, the HD spin much more than when playing 5 or 6 MB files. Constant HD spinning = very bad battery life. Granted, Apple have gotten around this in later generations (I won the first gen 5 gig model), but that's how it is on mine. You're right, after the firmware update in the spring of 2003 I finally got good battery life on the iPod, about 6 to 7 hours. Previously, lucky to get 3 or 4, in fact, sent it back twice thinking something was wrong.
I'm a recent convert. I got to Mac just because I hate windoze, love Linux, but hate even more how I kept blowing up my desktop box or wasting away entire weekends everytime I went in pursuit of the next shiny trinket that wasn't rolled into whatever the distro D'jour was. Needless to say, enter OS X. BTW, all I could afford at this time was an iBook 800 but I'm much happier now nonetheless. I still use Linux for my house server/NAT box/firewall etc.
.doc Open Office could not handle. I have an windoze box around now 'cause work gave it to me - I feel so dirty...) I found the much-not-talked-about NetMD simple burner software that is on the same CD as that OpenMG atrocity. It worked quite well for simply ripping a CD, or tracks thereof, onto an MD. I also used to take MP3s and "burn" a CD image, usually much larger than 740MB, and then mount that image with a freebie 'doze CD image mounting tool and rip that virtual CD to MD.
;-)
;-)
So, yes, I too have an MD. Personaly, I think it's pretty neat. On Windoze (yes, I kept around an XP partition for awhile, mostly for just the MD or the occasionaly squirrely work required Orfice
All in all the sound quality was not as good as my 5GB iPod, sometimes very noticeably so, but still much better than tapes (remember those?) and, for the most important part, playable on a portable machine that if I destroyed it I'd be nowhere near as bummed as I would be if I had killed my iPod. I must also say that the battery life of that little thing and lack of skippage is quite good. The sound quality didn't bug me much because I used it when doing stuff like mowing the lawn our out mountain biking. Small headphones and low power kinda toss high quality sound out of the window in noisy environs. As for the biking, all it took was one yardsale (going over the bars and tossing all your stuff) with the ipod and scratching the bejesus out of it to get me using the MD for that activity. That little MD has been wrecked and beat to hell and still works fine. So, in short, the MD makes for a good little thrasher stereo. Kind of like a POS radio and speakers one would put in their beater work truck for a little entertainment noise, if one is into that sort of thing.
Now that I'm mostly Winfree I no longer have that MD option and miss it. I'm a clumsy bastard and just don't want to subject my ipod to the biking and yard-working tourtures anymore. I use my iPod mosty in lieu of a CD changer in my truck and it's enjoyable around the house with a good pair of headphones or jacked into my home stereo receiver.
I'd like very much to see Sony put out an OS X version of simple burner. As for DLing recorded tracks over USB from the MD I'll not hold my breath. That doesn't even exist in the PC world and folks have been asking for it since day one. Sony just poo-poos it even though many MD users have a valid and legal use for it. Ah well, their loss. It took 'em 10 years or so to start selling the damned thing en masse so it'll probably take another ten years to get truly good funtionality out of them for cheap. It'll come about the same time that they shit that proverbial diamond out of their collectively tight ass
Once I procure a PB or some kind of G4 or better desktop I'll try the VirtualPC route. I've read a few times that it works. Seems a shame to polute perfectly good Mac with that stuff though
I just purchased an Sony D-NF611. Can Someone suggest my way IF I can play the atrac files encoded for the some on my Windows Machine..
.::abbu::.
Thanks..
...I used to run a site on MD. Sony views the Apple/Mac platform as competition, and will never support it. Two years ago, I contacted a Russion hacker that was trying to reverse engineer NetMD for Linux, and perhaps Mac, but that ended up dead.
Bottom line...no NetMD support for the Mac.
Buy an iPod.
It's no different than Apple's DRM'ed AAC, except that it works with lots of portables and lots of media players, instead of 1 portable (iPod) and 1 player (iTunes).
You're free to lock yourself into Apple-only tech or one that's shared by several hardware manufacturers and several software vendors. Keep fighting the good fight and justifying your grotesquely overpriced, underperforming Mac.
I can see 2 parts of problem :
p ?page=AT RAC
.nrg (CD-image) you just created. Lets say Drive 'F' for this example.
.nrg file sitting on your desktop.
1. encoding to/from ATRAC
2. Downloading to/from device.
on p.1 go there:
http://faac.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.ph
there stated that ATRAC is used in RealAudio 8 so may be you can find appropriate tools from this side.
on p.2 try with Toast instead Nero this: (from your link)
Five easy steps to a clean and hassle free MP3->MD download
Open Nero, select Audio CD from the presets and drag all the MP3's you want into it. Nero is far less picky about formats and sample rates. I found this method foolproof.
Save or 'Burn' your CD to your hard drive (not your burner). Nero will give you a default filename of 'image.nrg'
Use Nero's Imagedrive (bundled with Nero) to mount the
I am not an expert, but I found these first 3 steps took around 2 minutes or less for a regular size audio CD (i.e. burning and converting about 10 MP3 tracks to an audio CD 'image' on my hard drive). I have a 1GHz/PIII, so that helps with the MP3->PCM conversion times. A faster machine would mean proportionately faster MP3 conversion and image creation.
Select your 'virtual F' CD drive in Simple Burner and burn it to Minidisc.
When you are done, trash the large
If your machine is fairly fast then Simple Burner's CD->ATRAC conversion is done in on-the-fly in RAM with the disk hardly ticking over at all.
http://www.tmdc.org/aramk/sandbox/minidisc.html
Here's one excerpt, though you should read the page for all the info:
"Transferring (Analog)
Doing an analog transfer is very simple - first, plug the analog cable from your Mac's headphone out jack into your recorder's analog input (on Sharp model's, this is the same as Line In). Now, open your MP3 player on your computer, and create a new playlist. In iTunes, this is done in the left hand side by pressing the + button.
Now, drag and drop MP3s in to this list and order them how you wish. Once you're done, you might want to add a blank 5 second sound between tracks to better allow your MD player to create the track marks [ Download 5 second blank track ]. Important notes: make sure that the playlist is not longer than the medium yourrecording to; if you're using a 74 minute MD, your playlist must be less than 74 minutes unless you are planning to use LP2 or LP4 compression. Once you're ready, simply press the record button on your recorder and press play in the MP3 program. While it's recording, check to make sure that the sound level is OK. If you think you need to adjust it; do so on the Mac by changing the system volume."
hehehehe was it ever so easy, except on a Mac?
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Have you ever used MD? It has great quality, and has for the last 6 years at least.
Standard (SP) MiniDisc encoding is 292kbps ATRAC. ATRAC in general is slighly more faithful than Fraunhofer MP3, so this is roughly equivalent to 320kbps (certainly better than 256kbps) MP3. That's pretty damn good sound quality, and that's what you get when you put 74 minutes of music (or 148 minutes of mono audio) on the disc.
The LP modes use a newer codec, ATRAC 3 (where was ATRAC 2??), which achieves even better compression/quality. They use 132kbps (roughly like 160 or 192kbps MP3) or 66kbps (~80 or 96 kbps MP3). So yeah, the lowest quality/highest recording time option ain't so great, but the middle quality mode is pretty damn good still.
Sure, boycott Sony, though. The Sharp machines are generally more solid & much better for live recording.
Well, you could just record through the line in or optical in jacks that every MD recorder (AFAIK) has. Just plug your CD player or computer soundcard into the MD, and hit record. It works almost just like a cassette recorder. You only gain two things from the software: faster transfers, and digital transfers. Digital transfers can also be done from some CD players, and even some soundcards (I had an M-Audio Dio 2448 for this purpuse in my pre-Mac, pre-NetMD days).
I switched to a TiPB and iPod (from a Tosh and Sony NetMD).
I love my iPod (using Shure E2 in-ear monitors) but when I travel, access to a power supply can at times be "difficult" (say on the side of a mountain or in the jungle), hence I prefer the MD player's longer battery life.
For those of you who want to "have your cake and eat it" and enjoy the strengths of both the iPod and the NetMD..
May I suggest using something like the Xitel Pro-HiFi Link http://xitel.com/ It has a USB in and a TOC-link out to feed your MD.
Cannot record as a NetMD but you can at least use your iTunes (after grabbing a script or mp3 file of a 2 second black to place in between songs), your playlists and record digitally.
I do hope Xmd comes on line soon.. but mean while.. keeping my fingers crossed.
...there's always 320kbit MP3 or AAC.
They'll both sound better than ATRAC as well.
Shut the hell up will you? Seriously, this guy came looking for advice and you bash him for his choice over an iPod.
The iPod just recently on the last release added support for recording. I have not been able to find any specs on this. Nowhere does it say what format it records in or at what quality. The only "approved"mic is for voice and in mono.
I bought a MD. Yeah that's right, because I wanted to do field recording with a small device. Show me an iPod that can get a high quality stereo field recording. Not gonna happen, at least not yet. Yes, hands down it is a better device for playing music, but a MD is a lot cheaper. His reason for buying one is irrelevant.
To the poster. I have wanted a way to copy the digital files directly onto my Mac for years. XMD is the only app for OS X and MD players and it has about zero use and functionality. The only way to transfer music or sounds to to and from the device is to record them. If you are in possesion of a audio card that has an optical input, you will have excellent quality. Even if you do it with an analog cable the quality is still quite good. Good luck.
BTW, I will be the first one in line to buy an iPod once I know it can record high quality stereo files. Until then, I am quite content with my MD.
Run Windows on your Mac with SoftWindows (Classic / OS 9 environment) or Virtual PC (OS X). Inelegant, and I HATE having Windows, but I have it because of work requirements. It works.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
have you looked here: http://www.minidisco.com/netmd-info.html ?
sounds like the open/nmd project might be for you.
and to all of those giving this guy crap for his netmd - i have one and love it. i tested out an ipod last week for a few days. different but no better.
the netmd battery lasts longer, there is no gap between tracks and no penalty for long tracks. it can record easily. (for someone who listens to lots of mix cds and dj mixes, the benefits are esp important.)
it just depends on what you want to do with it.
madeofglass.com
So you've never tried an MD right?
Seriously i use the highest compression rate, Atrac3+ which lets me put over FIVE hours onto a single MD. The audio quality is as good as listening to the original CD, at least in headphones (pedantic audiophiles may see things differently!). 5hrs in one tight little package is much better value than most mp3 players around!!
Of course, the software that comes with it for windaz is shite, use RealOne Player with the Sony devices plugin instead. But back to the real topic, software to burn MDs on a mac or *nix would be rather nice!
That said, here's how I transfer digital audio from the PBG4 to the Sharp MD mt-877 portable (using this one now after a Sharp 722 and a Sharp 702):
PBG4 USB out -> USB cable -> Edirol -> optical cable -> Sharp MD in
This Edirol UA3 has been working fine for me the past couple of years, no drivers needed on Mac OS X! All you have to do is to choose the right output device in the Sound System Preference.
Of course, the drawback is that everything gets transfered in real time - no such thing as iPod's thousands of songs per minute ;-)
Hope this helps, and here's the URL for newer Edirol's gear (the UA3 is no longer in production): the UA-1D for example.