[linux-minidisc] Presentation and issues with mz-n710

[Enrique Medina Gremaldos <quiqueiii@gmail.com>]

Hi folks, I've recently bought a pair of used minidisc recorders from ebay. A Mz-ne410 and a Mz-n710, both of them netmd. I have no Windows partition at home, so I've decided to give python-netmd a try. Mz-Ne410 works great, I can download songs from command line and list them. Great! Problem comes with mz-n710


When trying to download a song, some mechanical parts start moving inside recorder, and then word ERROR blinks on LCD and recorder shuts down. Due to its old age, I thought It was caused by a problem with laser calibration or a short circuit with usb ground. Think is, device can record from mic! so, can't be a laser problem.

I decided to take another test, and tried to download a track to a blankdisk, and it worked! But only for the first track, downloading a second one causes recorder to complain with generic ERROR message. 

As I have some good experience with python, tried to debug downloading process, and It seems to get freezed at sendKeyData command. Seems to be part of cryptography mechanism, but i am not good at that. :C

The funny thing is that I can reproduce all of that on a Windows environment with SonicStage 4.3 (the only one I could find) !!!

Maybe my mz-n710 has a corrupted firmware and all this feedback is useless. At least I can grant mz-ne410 works like a charm.


Regards