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 `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913