i’ve blogged before how the software that’s bundled with sony’s netmd players is crap, and because of that i haven’t been using my md player as much as i would have. not to make my purchase a complete waste tho, i’ve spent time googling to see if there were any better software packages out there that could do the same thing. unsurprisingly, there are none.
fortunately for me, there’s a “quick” hack to record mp3s onto minidisc. i say “quick”, because it took me a long time to figure out (lots of forum surfing) and find the necessary components:
- download netmd drivers
- download openmg to convert mp3s to sony’s atrac3 format
- download winzip to retrieve specific components in the openmg installer
- download simpleburner
- download update for simpleburner
- download ui patch so that simpleburner can work in xp
- download new set of netmd drivers that work with my player
- download daemon tools to create virtual cd’s
oh yeah, i also forgot to mention all the time wasted experimenting with what order to install and uninstall the components so they’d work. anyways, once that was all done, the process to upload songs to the device still isn’t simple:
- write out mp3s as wavs
- create a virtual music cd from the wavs
- burn virtual cd in simpleburner.
what crap. in an ideal world, the md drive would just work as a usb drive and you could copy mp3s directly over to the drive; but i guess that’s just another reason why sony’s lost the portable player war to apple.
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