[Rickard]

Does anyone out there know of some way to use Sony's NetMD minidisc players with a Mac?

[tr]

Originally posted by Rickard:
Does anyone out there know of some way to use Sony's NetMD minidisc players with a Mac?

nope.

well, actually, there is some work being done. check out this:

http://www.sorted.org/~pete/Xmd/

there's no downloading feature, though. also check out the faq on that site, the author explains what problems he's encountering. here's a snippet:

When will Xmd be able to download audio data from my Mac to my minidisc by USB?

Possibly never.

Firstly, in their wisdom, Sony have chosen to encrypt all audio data that is passed across the USB to the minidisc unit. No doubt they feel this will help in the fight against music piracy. Personally I am not convinced that this will do anything but turn people against the minidisc format. People who want to pirate music will stick to MP3 players (or iPods), professionals and other people who want the quality of ATRAC reproduction will just become frustrated that this functionality is unavailable/obfuscated

Secondly, for LP2 and LP4 (ie MDLP) tracks, the audio data is sent to the minidisc unit in ATRAC format. There are no known open source implementations of an ATRAC CODEC, nor are detailed specifications in the public domain, making it almost impossible to implement such a CODEC from scratch.

So, it may never be possible to download LP2 or LP4 data. There is some indication that SP data is sent to the minidisc as raw, PCM audio... So it may be possible to download SP audio if we can discover a way around the encryption problem. Naturally this will be slower than downloading LP2 or LP4 and you will be able to fit less on each disc.

Verdict: There's maybe a 50% chance that downloading audio via USB will be possible at some point, but it is likely to take many months of effort before the problems are solved.

tr

[nbnz]

I've got a Sony MZ-N1 MiniDisc and recently had a email from Sony for a survey, one of the questions was do I want Mac support, so hopefully it'll be coming, but I won't hold my breath.

And I can't justify an iPod purchase while my CD collection is in storage in New Zealand during my travels.