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?"

Comments

Not a lot of choice.

[Oscar_Wilde]

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.

Xmd

[p-p-pom]

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.

Lemme get this straight...

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.