Topic: Recommendations for transfereing MDs with ? new gear with no resampling?

[sunjan]

Not sure what HiMDRenderer does, but IIUC it only deals with HiMD, and not legacy MD.
HiMD transfers were never really a problem in the first place, the nut that most of us were trying to crack is transfer of legacy MD recordings.

[earmonger]

HiMDRenderer was for the dark days when you could upload from HiMD onto your computer, but it was then encrypted on the computer in ATRAC formats. 

HiMDRenderer made the computer think it was playing back the track and recorded it to .wav. It became unnecessary when SonicStage itself added .wav conversion--which might not have happened if HiMDRenderer hadn't arrived to kick Sony in the...amps.

Sunjan is right--it still doesn't address the legacy-MD transfer. RH1 for that.

[John Willett]

Going digital out from an MD is fine. Just never put it back to MD.

The wav output from the MD would be a clone of the MD quality - but if you go back to MD it will go through the ATRAC process again and throw away more data.

[sunjan]

I have the NetMDPyton scripts working on one of my computers now. So far, I like it!

Looking back at this, the documentation is a bit hazy on whether upload over Windows is actually supported (yet). The steps are just outlined for MacOS and Linux:
https://wiki.physik.fu-berlin.de/linux-minidisc/doku.php?id=netmdpython#upload.py_-_upload_tracks_from_standard_mds_using_sony_s_mz-rh1_m200

<edit>
I just got an answer on the German forum dedicated for this project:
"if you are patient enough to wait another 1-2 months, you will be able to download a more user-friendly version of the software which will allow NetMD down- and uploads (uploads for the MZ-RH1/M200 only)."
(from http://www.minidiscforum.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=18579&start=780)

Apparently, this is part of a Google Summer of Code 2011 project:
http://wiki.videolan.org/SoC_2011/LibNetMD

I also read in the footnotes that the python transfer might not work with certain tracks that has been transfered by SonicStage before:
https://wiki.physik.fu-berlin.de/linux-minidisc/doku.php#status

I guess it's The Sony DRM messing around with the file integrity. Might be worth waiting for the GUI version of this open source project...