Re: [linux-minidisc] Mac OS X: Sony MZ-RH10, nothing transfers?

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>]

Hello Kevin!

There are some misconceptions behind your assumptions which I will try
to clear up before answering your questions.

First of all, there are two principal formats which are used for
MiniDisc devices, the classic MiniDisc and HiMD. These are fundamentally
different from each other and one should always clearly distinguish
when talking about transferring music to and from these media.

The classic MiniDisc, which was introduced in the early 90ies, has a
format very similar to a classic audio CD. Each song is stored as
a separate track and they are written in real time while recording
very similar to how a tape recorder works, except that the audio
is stored digitally and compressed in ATRAC.

Sometime when portable MP3 players became popular with their capability
to transfer music between your PC and the devices through USB, Sony
thought it would be nice to have this functionality added to their
MiniDisc portables as well. So they came up with an extension called
"NetMD". NetMD adds the capability to transfer music tracks from the
PC to a NetMD-capable device over USB with faster than realtime
speed, meaning you can download a 3-minute track in less than a minute.

While NetMD was a nice addition to the MiniDisc, it didn't cope with
the limit of just being able to store 74 minutes (sometimes 80 minutes)
of music to one MiniDisc and also didn't allow to transfer tracks
back to the PC. Thus, the only real advantage of NetMD over standard
MiniDisc devices was faster transfers to the recorder from your PC,
everything else was still pretty much unchanged.

Now, when iPods started to push the MiniDisc out of the market, Sony
came up with another to extend the life time of the MiniDisc, the
HiMD.

HiMDs are a reinvention of the MinDisc format. They do no longer store
audio data as separate tracks. Instead, HiMDs are DOS-formatted like
normal PC floppies and all tracks are stored in a big container
file located on the DOS filesystem on the HiMD. This allows you
to conveniently use the HiMD as an external hard drive, even
though the up 1 GB aren't really that much nowadays with USB pen
drives with 64 GB and more being around.

HiMDs also introduced new a physical format with higher data densities
allowing up to 1 GB of data per MiniDisc as opposed to a standard
74-min MD which offers around 250 MB when formatted as a HiMD.

Additionally, HiMDs offer the possibility to transfer tracks to
_and_ from the device. The latter feature that was previously
unavailable with NetMD recorders.

As a gimmick, HiMD recorders also support standard MiniDiscs and
when you insert a standard MiniDisc into a HiMD recorder, the
HiMD recorder will switch into NetMD mode meaning it will behave
like a normal MiniDisc recorder with NetMD extensions, meaning
the capability for transfers to the PC are no longer supported.

So, when talking about transfers, it's really important to know
whether your device is operating in HiMD or NetMD mode as these
two modes are fundamentally different and MiniDisc recorders
behave differently and have different features.

Now, for your questions:

On 01/10/2014 11:35 AM, Kevin Ingwersen wrote:
> I recently bought myself a MZ-RH10 off ebay. Everything on it works, except one thing. Transfering music.

It does work.

The MZ-RH10 is a second generation HiMD recoders which means the
hardware has the following capabilities:

- HiMD mode

  * transferring HiMD audio (both MP3 as well as ATRAC3+ and PCM)
    tracks to the PC (supported by our software)

  * transferring HiMD audio (both MP3 as well as ATRAC3+ and PCM)
    to the device (currently supported for MP3s only in our software
    at the moment)

- NetMD

  * transferring PCM (WAV) audio to the device and recording
    them in ATRAC-SP (supported since version 0.9.12 of the
    graphical user interface of our software; LP2/4 downloads
    are possible, but there is no way to encode them on a PC;
    ATRAC-SP encoding is performed by the recorder itself)

  * transferring audio to the PC in NetMD is *unsupported*
    by the hardware and will never work, unless you use
    the methods using analogue audio cables and having the
    devices controlled through USB which is slow and you
    need to use a sound card

> Transfering non-audio files works as expected and is quite useful.

That's a standard feature of the hardware and independent of the
software being used. You don't need our software for that.

> But when I try to use the Qt GUI for himdtransfer, it just won’t do anything.

It does, just not for the MZ-RH10 when in NetMD mode when using
standard MiniDiscs. If you were using version 0.9.12 or newer,
you could at least transfer NetMD audio to the Walkman.

> And alongside, I can not access the actual „audio-only“ MD’s, as they’re not mounted as volumes.

That's because those aren't actual volumes containing file systems
but audio discs. You cannot mount audio CDs either, can you? Yes,
I know Windows shows the audio tracks on your CD when inserting
an audio CD, but you can't actually mount the CD and copy single
tracks as files off it.

>
> I also saw that there are problems with most recent builds of
> the software?

No, there aren't. As I mentioned before, the virtual machines running
various versions of MacOS aren't currently unable to connect to the
internet and therefore download, build and upload the latest versions
of the software.

This has got nothing to do with our software, it's just a (virtual)
hardware issue which I hope to have resolved soon.

> Well I can do the building here, as I have a mac server that runs 24/7.

Building the code on MacOS X such that it can be distributed and used
on any Mac isn't actually that trivial, but you can have a look at
the build instructions yourself [1].

It's important to create the app bundle in the end which will result
in the necessary dynamic libraries (.dylibs) being included in the
app bundle as otherwise the application won't run on any Mac besides
the one that was used to built the code.

> Will building a more recent version of the application solve the transfer issue?

It will allow transferring audio to a NetMD device, yes. It will never
allow to transfer audio from a NetMD device unless you have got
the one and only model which actually supports this feature, the
Sony MZ-RH1 (and it's variant model, the MZ-M200).

Cheers,

Adrian

> [1]
https://wiki.physik.fu-berlin.de/linux-minidisc/doku.php?id=compilingonmac

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
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