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

[Kevin Ingwersen <ingwie2000@googlemail.com>]

Hello Adam!

Thank you for your very detailed answer - it helped me get my mind clear about NetMD and HiMD.

In the meantime, I have set up a little VirtualBox with Windows XP and SonicStage 4.3 in order to do some simple things with my MZ-RH10. And these things work very nicely - I am just waiting to copy an entire audiobook to it for later use.

But the actual problem I had with your software was, that I can not transfer MP3 to a HiMD. I did the following:

1. Inserting the HiMD into my recorder.
2. Connecting it via USB. The volume mounted on my Mac as a FAT file system with an unknown partition scheme.
3. I opened QHiMDTransfer and selected my recorder path - which in my case was: /Volumes/HiMD (I had renamed it).
4. The software now shows me a blank list, as there is no actual track on there. So I select one song by Dr.Dre on the right side. When I do, the <- arrow lights up. But when I click it, nothing happens at all - letting me sit there, slightly confused.

So for now, I am using a VM to manage the actual audio transfer - and to work with NetMD. But as I can not transfer NetMD tracks back to my computer, I’ll have to turn back to Audacity and my external sound card (Traktor Audio 6).

Why is it, that I can not transfer trivial MP3s to a HiMD? I can even format it - I can hear how the files on the disc are re-written by listening to the recorders activity. But I can not transfer any MP3 unless I use the original SonicStage 4.3.

For the building: I have read the instructions - and I don’t use MacPorts. I build everything on my own, thus I use Fink instead :). I am a PHP, C, C++ and Obj-C++ developer myself, so I know how building works. :)

Kind regards, and thanks for the explanations,
Kevin Ingwersen

Am Sa. Jan. 11 2014 02:40:47 schrieb John Paul Adrian Glaubitz:

> 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