This is one very jealous Mac user listening to you guys wax lyrical about digital uploads from your Hi-MDs to your PCs. I really want to get a Hi-MD machine to do interviews, live music + vox pops for my work, but not being able to digitally upload to my Macs, as Sonicstage and Wave Converter are not compatible on the Mac platform, is a big disincentive. Such a shame, because I think Sony is missing out on a huge market share here in Australia because of the lack of digital Mac upload capablility. C'mon Sony, fight a REAL fight against iPod by enabling PCM upload for Macs.

dinky

^sorry to say, but you'll have a long wait. that is till Sony make their sonic stage software running natively on OS X.

hmm, before the site went down. someone posted that SS can be use with VPC. as in these steps.

CD -> OS X -> VPC -> Window OS -> Sonic Stage -> MDR. now, as a Mac user. why would I need to go thru so many steps just put stuff on MD eh? if that person can reply would be great.

how about solution #1,
CD -> your portable cd player -> MDR.

meanwhile, I am still waiting for this day to come sooner
CD -> OS X -> Sonic Stage -> MDR.
Come On now, Sony!! I know you can do it!

Well this sucks. I was hoping someone could tell me of a program to upload my music on to my mdplayer. It wasn't a problem till my pc died, which left my with only my mac and now my md player is useless... grrr...if anyone has thought of some that would be awesome!

Could it be that is Apple, and not Sony, the one keeping MacStage from happening? Think about it. Do you think they will benefit from a recorder/uploader machine like Hi-MD competing with their Ipod on their own platform?

I posted some info about this before forums crashed and an old backup had to be installed (shouldn't a, eh, daily backup routine be in order for such a large forum?).

Anyways, the short version is: This actually works!

Here's the post I posted earlier, with a few modifications:

Transferring files from the Hi-MD to the Mac using Virtual PC actually works. I've just recorded some sounds on my brand new Sony MZ-NH1 using my WL183 mics, connected it to my Dual G5 Mac with Virtual PC running Windows XP and SonicStage 3.0, connected the NH1 to the Mac, and then transferred the two recordings to SonicStage.

I chose to import the files as WAV, saved them on my Virtual
PC/Windows XP desktop, and then dragged them straight from VPC to the
Mac desktop. Opened them in Peak...and things are looking mighty find
indeed.

Things take a bit of time, but not as much as I initially feared. I've only tested this a couple of times, but I think the speed seems to be about 1:1 for Hi-SP-recordings made in Hi-MD-mode, and as slow as 1:3 for PCM-recordings (i.e. ten minutes recorded material would take roughly 30+ minutes to transfer and convert to WAV etc.).

However, I will try to install Windows 98 on another VPC-partition. I think maybe Windows XP is a bit too heavy for emulation, so maybe 98 SE will free up some resources that can be used for the transfer process.

But, in short: This is brilliant. Digital transfer of recordings from minidisc has been on the agenda for a while for me, and now that I can transfer my field recordings in PCM-format digitally to my Mac things are certainly looking up.

My Mac is running OS X 10.3.8, the latest version of VPC, and has 1GB RAM installed. The Hi-MD was immediately recognized by Virtual PC, and transfer(s) went without a hitch. I've tried this a few times now, and haven't had any problems (no crashes etc.).

Feel free to ask if you have any questions. Things may become problematic if you are using a slow(ish) machine, but, in theory, I guess this should work on most, if not all, current Macs.

Ø.

How is Apple going to stop someone from writing a Sonic Stage for the Mac platform? This is simply a matter that Sony doesn't want to, or is incapable of doing so.

I'm shopping for a MD recorder and have been checking around to find out about Mac compatibility with the different models. So it seems like the best solution people have posted about is to use Virtual PC on their Mac, which I'm loathe to do.

Has anyone found a utility that will transfer audio files to Mac which I'm hoping could then be edited with audacity or some other piece of software?

Or...

What about people using recorders thaet are not made by Sony? Sharp for example... what's your solution? I'm trying to read up on all the forums before posting, but I hadn't seen the answer yet.

Thanks!
-Mega Nano

A few points for Nano:

* Only HiMD allows transferring records from the recorder to a computer, which requires SonicStage
* Conversely, no portable consumer MD units from any company allow transfer from the recorder to a PC via USB
* Sonicstage will run under Virtual PC, see Oivindi's post above
* You can copy audio via analogue connections to your Mac from any recording device with a line or headphone output, including all MD and HiMD recorders, hard disc recorders, flash recorders, VCRs, video cameras, DVD players, microcassettes, 8-tracks, you get the idea
* People [including thousands of broadcasters worldwide] have been using the analogue method for over 10 years with excellent results
* Home or pro decks with an optical output can be used to copy MDs digitally to anything with an optical input [consumer equipment follows the restrictions imposed by SCMS]
* HHB make a professional [broadcast] MD recorder that has "in the clear" USB transfer capabilities: see here; note the pricetag is something like $1,500USD

Old Post , things have changed , Mac OSX 10.4 tiger support HiMD transfer 2.0 just for anyone venturing into this thread.

It's not all lost for Mac users -- If you have an "Intel" mac you can run a Windows Virtual machine under parallels etc. Then you can use the Windows tools for getting your music / recordings from MD to PC.

I'm still using a Windows XP virtual machine for running Simple Burner as a very quick way of transferring music to MD as this doesn't run on Windows VISTA. I also use Linux a lot and if I need to run Sonic stage etc then I also use the windows XP vm for this.


Your Windows VM will have full USB access etc. I also use a Windows VM to run adobe Photoshop.

Note whatever OS you use you can ALWAYS transfer in "Real Time" which is not always as bad an option as might appear.

Cheers

-K