[Woehrle46]

I have been considering purchasing a minidisk player lately but i dont know weather or not they are compatible with my mac, iMac 266, the only ones i found were from sony, which connect to a compuet with a usb wire, and their software does not support mac, so my question is, how do i use a minidisk player with my mac?

[Emotionally Fragile Luke]

Never heard of anyone using one and Sony doesn't play nice with Mac's.

I think it would be better for you to save up for an iPod.

[rambo47]

I had a Sony MiniDisk player and it was problematic at best on my Mac. I dumped it and got an iPod, which totally rocks. With the MiniDisk you can only record in analog mode, which means a 4 minute song takes 4 minutes to get into the player. Plus it took lots of fiddling around with connections to make sure it would record at all - trial and error, emphasis on error.

With great deals available on 5 GB iPods they're not much more than a top MiniDisk unit (one that plays and records) like the Sony.

[icruise]

I used to be the biggest Minidisk nut, but now that I have an iPod I can't imagine going back. But since you have an iMac without firewire you won't have much luck with an iPod.

Minidisk players are still good, though. I would probably stay away from the ones that connect with USB (since even if you get it work with the mac it won't be any better than a normal analog connection -- still have to record in real time). Just get a normal recorder -- they are selling for pretty cheap nowdays. You can record to and from the computer without losing too much quality.

[slugslugslug]

Originally posted by rambo47:
.... With the MiniDisk you can only record in analog mode, which means a 4 minute song takes 4 minutes to get into the player...

Well, that's not entirely true of MDs in general anymore, what with the new NetMD players, which can actually xfer digital audio over USB. But it's only in the PC -> MD player direction, and it requires software that only (so far) works on Windows. The transfer protocol is an open standard, though, so somebody could come up w/Mac (linux, etc) software for it. In fact, I think there's an opensource project going, though I believe it's in the command-line-only stage now.

The other hitch is that the audio is always converted to MD's digital audio format (ATRAC3), which is compressed, before transferring. So even though the transfer speed is 36x real-time, there's overhead of decompressing mp3 and then recompressing (ugh) to ATRAC3.

So, it's not really a great plan for the mac right now. Which is a damn shame, because IMHO, the advantages of MD are incredible (small durable cheap media, great recording quality, etc..) but the disadvantages weigh at least as heavily.

BTW, most of the info in this post I got from reading the NetMD section of http://www.minidisc.org . Highly recommended if you want to do further research..

hth,
y.

[ranga]

I used to be a big MD nut, but I've pretty much gone off of MDs in the last year or so.
These days I wouldn't recommend the purchase of a MD player.

CD players that play mp3 cd-rs and cd-rws and mp3 players like the iPod make MD
pretty useless these days. About the only use I still have for my MD player is to listen
to music while I'm running or walking. Even for this particular application, the Nike
mp3 players are probably better.

Anyway, the fastest soln. I found for getting mp3s from my Mac to md was to burn a cd-rw
and then pop the cd-rw into my md/cd deck and rip the cd-rw to md at 4x. This is an
awfully inconvienent and expensive way to convert mp3s to MD, but it works.

As far as the NetMD (usb) players are concerned, I'd avoid them. Even under the PC they
don't work too well and as some of the other posters have noted the transfer process is
pretty slow.

--ranga

[Emotionally Fragile Luke]

I also was a MD nut. I got a MD player 3 years ago for $450. Now it is collecting dust even though I am just saving up for an iPod.

[motti]

Originally posted by Emotionally Fragile Luke:
I also was a MD nut. I got a MD player 3 years ago for $450. Now it is collecting dust even though I am just saving up for an iPod.

Same here, made two friends buy one as well as my girlfriend.
For the connection there is a PCI card with optical in/out, there was an opensource project to write drivers for this card, i have no idea how far it got.
What makes me angry is that the music industry is restricting the copying from cd to md and from md to md. A friend plays in a band, recorded directly to md and then wanted to make copies, but the player wouldn't do that, it just that, "copy protection"...

so, we all (except girlfriend, i have to work her..) ended up with an ipod, i sold my portable md to finance it, only have a md deck at home because i couldn't digitize all the md's i have..

[vmpaul]

Used my Sony MZ-R50 for 3-4 years. I have 100+ MD's.

When my unit finally broke down I started investigating MetMD. I was looking at buying another unit. From what I gathered NetMD wasn't all it was cracked up to be. It was flaky software and not very convenient to use. Plus it was PC only. Most of the people in newsgroup posts stopped using it altogether.

Even though it was a budget stretch I broke down and bought a 5-gig iPod. Couldn't imagine going back now. It's SOO easy and convenient. We have 2 now in the household.

I would save up for an iPod ($199 refurbished from Apple, full-warranty), and buy a FireWire adapter for your Mac.

I still use my MD for recording and I have a stereo unit that I use like a tape cassette. Also, a player in one of my cars. It's great technology but Sony blew it by not making ATRAC available to the general public like MP3.