GnatGoSplat_

Ok, free for the price of shipping. I paid $25 for it. If no takers after 1-week it goes in the white paper recycling bin at work.

Genuine Sony paper service manual. $1.00+shipping or best offer.

Do even non-Sony branded NetMD recorders use OpenMG or SonicStage? Also, is anyone working on figuring out the PCM encryption?

It won't read recordable MD's anymore. I imagine it needs a little tweaking of MO Focus Bias. There are 4-trimpots on the MD controlling board. Unfortunately, they are not labeled with anything other than VRxxx (where xxx is some 3-digit number). Does anyone have a KD-MX3000 service manual and can tell me which one is MO Focus Bias?

No, even if you could, the data signals are completely different and proprietary to each company. I wish they'd all go to a standard USB connection, but I guess it's not in the manufacturer's best interest.

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately, that's not the answer I was hoping for, it seems NetMD is not all it's cracked up to be. My MP3's are actually VBR and vary from 128kbps minimum to 320kbps maximum, so I believe they could benefit from SP mode. Not to mention my car MD players only handle SP mode discs anyway. I could burn MP3's onto a CD-R/RW with far fewer steps than the Imagedrive/Simpleburner trick. One of my decisions associated with whether to stick to MD was whether to repair my broken car MiniDisc unit, or dump it in favor of one of the cheap and plentiful CD-MP3 players that are available. It's a shame NetMD has been neutered like it has. When it came out, I envisioned an MD player icon showing up in "My Computer". Double-clicking the icon would open an Explorer-like window displaying all the tracks. Copying a track to the MD would be as simple as dragging an MP3 to either the Explorer-like window or the MD player icon. Transcoding from MP3 to ATRAC would occur in realtime, in memory. I wouldn't be surprised if that's what the original designers envisioned as well, but Sony Music said "NO!". Anyway, I tried OpenMG last night, and I hate it. It would freeze up at 9% conversion, not to mention was cumbersome to use.

I'm a newbie to this forum - sort of, I've been registered here for some time, just never posted. I'm an MD oldtimer though. Anyway, I have a Sony MZ-N505 I bought almost a year ago. I copied one track to it using OpenMG and then never used it again. It's time for me to decide whether to dump MD forever, or jump back in it. My decision lies entirely on NetMD, how it works, and how it could work for the purpose of using MD in the car. 1. Stupid question here, but I'm at work and my N505 is at home: It is possible to copy MP3's using OpenMG to the MD in SP mode, correct? 2. I've read that OpenMG and SonicStage both convert MP3's to ATRAC3 (equivelent of LP2). If this is the case, how does that translate into SP (ATRAC1) mode? And if this is the case, does that mean recording MP3's in realtime using an SPDIF connection can actually result in better sound quality than using OpenMG to do a direct high-speed recording? 3. Are the .omg (LP2 ATRAC3 files) saved for EVERY MP3 that's copied over? Can they be deleted, or am I just to expect the omg files to accumulate? 4. Is there a Check In/Out crack for OpenMG or Sonic Stage, so that they don't have to be checked in/out anymore? 5. Is there a way to copy MP3 tracks one-by-one at high speed to MD where nothing is checked out, no omg files are saved, and at SP quality? I realize converting to ATRAC is necessary, but I just don't want the overhead. 6. I have heard of ways to do my question #5 using Nero image files and SimpleBurner, BUT that requires that you already have planned out what's going on the MD and not a one-track-at-a-time recording. Basically, I don't see the point of this, I might as well just burn MP3's directly onto a CD-RW... so is this the only way? Basically, I guess what I want to do is the same stuff I used to do in real-time, which is recording MP3 tracks one by one, but I want to do it in high-speed and end up with a regular 80-minute SP quality MD. I would like my IDv3 tags from MP3's to automatically title the tracks I copy over. I don't want extra ATRAC3 files hogging space on my hard drive, and I don't want to have to check them in or out.