I have bought a Sony Net MD Walkman to record audio on location, and transfer digitally to a PC for editing. Sony's SonicStage 1.5 gives a fail message on attempting transfer of the sound file to the PC. Short of dubbing in real time, is there any other way of digitally transferring such a sound file, please? Richard Thorn
Not as far as I know. The "innovation" with Net MD was that you could do quick PC-to-MiniDisc transfers via a USB cable. It didn't allow the reverse. There was a petition about this in August 2002. In any case, I think the data is in copy-protected Sony Atrac format, so there's nothing else you can do with it.
Sony got the message and in 2004, three years after NetMD, it introduced the new high-capacity Hi-MD format. This can record audio in uncompressed linear PCM (ie, CD format), and a Hi-MD recorder should be recognised by a PC as a DOS-format USB storage device with no drivers required. (Record in Atrac, however, and you will have to use Sony's SonicStage software.) Hi-MD should allow fast file transfer, but I haven't done it myself. See the MiniDisc FAQ at http://www.minidisc.org/hi-md_faq.html for more details.
I'm a MiniDisc user who balked at the stupidity of NetMD and am now wondering whether Hi-MD is worth a go. But I'm more likely to buy a digital recorder such as the Roland Edirol R-09 or Zoom H4, now these are getting smaller and cheaper.
