Mini Disk drive for PC

[Jump]

Hi everyone.
Sony has built-in MD drives in some of their VAIO computers. They do not seem to sell MD drives separately, so they can be used in other PCs.
Does anyone know if there is any E-IDE MD drives for PCS available from other manufacturers?

[Charva]

Are you talking about Data storage on Mini Disc?

Read this link, it may answer some of your questions

http://www.minidisc.org/md_data_table.html

[Jump]

Hi Charva,

Thanks for the link.
I'm interested in copying MD music tracks back to a PC for editing.

[Nilbog]

Good luck.....

I wanted to do this with my md-8. I researched and found I could get a MD walkman that doubled as an external MD Data drive for about $150 off of ebay (this was a few years ago).

Even if you did set it up, you would find that the MD drive would not recognize anything on the disk. If your coming from an MD-8 or something it would probably tell you it's not formatted or something.

Course, I never did get to try it, thats just the story I got from Sony. I'm sure you could do it, but you would need to write some software that would recognize the file, and then be able to decode the atrac compression - not likely unfortuantly....

But there are people working on these types of things....
People are trying to hack the netMD players to allow uploads (these are not Data discs) - but you can check out progress on such progects here:

http://www.t-station.net/forum/index.php
(look under netmd)
And here
http://www.minidisc.org

[Jump]

Thanks,

I'll keep an eye on things at the link you posted.

I thought the new NetMD allowed uploads? Hmmm, that was my fallback option.

[DWBass]

You can use the NetMD's as drives! With the included software, it allows your computer to see the unit as a drive. You can drag and drop files just as you would a normal drive.

[Nilbog]

What software is that? I don't think that's right....

[mjbee]

Originally posted by DWBass
You can use the NetMD's as drives! With the included software, it allows your computer to see the unit as a drive. You can drag and drop files just as you would a normal drive.

The included software has limitations, as I understand it, to make it "look like" a drive, but it isn't. Data conversion and quality reduction is done on files, as well as attempts at rights management to stop you sharing music around too much. It's not as useful as it sounds on paper ...

Mike.