Best MD deck machine for use with Web Minidisc Pro or Platinum MD

[kgallen]

TL;DR Which MD deck is the "best" for using with a Windows PC (Win10) and Web Minidisc Pro or Platinum MD apps. When I say "best" I mean the most reliable (connection and transfer) and a machine that I have a fighting chance of finding in the UK and where SP mode works well and sounds good.

 

Those of you who frequent here will know that I do sound for a number of local theatre groups. During a performance I play music and sound effect tracks from MD using my MDS-E12 machines. Generally I will have two, one for the music (backing track) cues and one for the sound effects/incidental music and the like. The tracks are prepared on a PC with Audacity then I go through the laborious task of burning the tracks to CD-R using NeroBurning ROM, then I go downstairs and use my Tascam MD-CD1 to dub the CD-R across to each MD. Then if required I have to do some post editing on the MD - usually on the sound effects tracks - to trim them back to their required length. [Since CD enforces a minimum 4 second track length, many SFX tracks get bloated out to 4s when naturally they are 2s or less. The length needs to be trimmed (and MD will allow such short tracks) because they might need to be played back in quick succession and I don't have the time to allow that bloated track length to play the extra 2s of silence.]. Then after all of this messing about I need to listen very carefully to all of the MDs in real time to ensure nothing went haywire in all of this process and corrupted the audio or track titling - and if there is an issue I have to go back around the loop again. This is very time consuming...

 

I'm doing this mastering process now for our panto which is coming up in early January (oh yes it is! [before @BearBoy gets me again!])... and it got me wondering, now that we have some great apps like Web Minidisc Pro and Platinum MD, could I cut out the middle-man (the CD-R) and just write the MDs directly from the PC. That would save a lot of faff...

 

Now I know some of you are looking skyward and slapping your forehead because you have been doing just this for a long time. But you've probably been doing it with portables. But despite my rather healthy stock of MD machines I've never got into the NetMD thing. Basically because I'm more of a decks fella and I don't have a 980.

 

So... what are my realistic options here for deck machines? And as above, ones that work with NetMD and these apps reliably... Pros/cons of each candidate machine?

 

(I just rewatched the Techmoan video...)

 

[BearBoy]

Your options for Sony NetMD compatible decks are pretty limited tbh. I think the MDS-JB980 and MDS-JE780 were the only ones released in the UK and neither is cheap these days. There is a "midi" sized Japanese deck (MDS-S500). I think that's about it though.

 

There may well be non-Sony decks available and I think Sony made some NetMD compatible all-in-one Hi-Fi units.

 

Any reason you don't want to use a portable? I use an MZ-N910 with Web MiniDisc Pro and CD2NetMD and it works really well. I know when Stefano first released Web MiniDisc, it did not work with decks (I tried with my MDS-JB980) but that is sorted now. I've still stuck with using a portable though.

[BearBoy]

The other benefit of using a portable is the ability to download (upload?) the contents of a MiniDisc to your PC (previously only possible using an MZ-RH1) using Web MiniDisc Pro. Not sure if you have any need of that sort of functionality though.

 

I don't know how exhaustive this is but there's a list of NetMD devices over on the MiniDisc Wiki: https://www.minidisc.wiki/equipment/sorting/netmd

[kgallen]

Thanks for the listing link that’s really useful. Looks like the 780 or 980 (or S500 or NT1).

 

I was thinking about deck just for convenience so I can leave it connected up to the PC and they tend to be more robust. Maybe I should have a play with one of my portables, I’m sure I must have at least one working NetMD one!

[BearBoy]

Your MZ-N510 or MZ-NF610 should do the job!

 

There's a good guide to setting things up on the Wiki: https://www.minidisc.wiki/guides/webminidisc

 

Good luck! And shout if you get stuck.

[M1JWR]

what i found years ago with net md for example was originally i used a mz n1 before i got the 980, the n1 did the job

just aswell as the 980, well understand your being a deck man kevin, 980's and 780's are horrendous prices, the

n1's came with a dock, although if memory serves me right the operation was a bit slower through the dock, maybe

as bear boy says you could experiment with something like a n1 first though they are going silly land price wise too,

there are also others like mz n505 etc, and hope nobody left a battery inside, seems to be the main issue with the

portables these days, havent seen the n1 for years, i still own it, its either in carlisle or luxembourg and thats another

story by itself !!!

[BearBoy]

On 12/31/2022 at 4:14 PM, kgallen said:

Maybe I should have a play with one of my portables, I’m sure I must have at least one working NetMD one!

 

Did you get a chance to give it a try, @kgallen?

[kgallen]

3 hours ago, BearBoy said:

 

Did you get a chance to give it a try, @kgallen?

No not yet, been up to my eyes (and ears) with get-ins, tech and dress rehearsals. Performances this week. Maybe in the next couple of weeks when I’m over this show run. 

[BearBoy]

Good luck with the shows 🙂

[asivery]

Hello @kgallen!

I personally recommend any of the Sony Type-S portables. They're the most reliable when it comes to maintaining a connection to Web Minidisc Pro. Type-R portables like the MZ-N1 and alike still sometimes drop the connection mid-transfer.

Sony Type-S portables should also work best with Platinum, but I haven't tested it - they're just the most lax when it comes to following the restrictions imposed by the NetMD protocol.

When it comes to downloading data off of MDs via Web Minidisc Pro, that functionality only works on Sony non-HiMD portables - with Type-S you can achieve ~5x real time speed when ripping SP (~10x LP2, ~20x LP4), with Type-R ~0.5x for standard SP. It's impossible on the decks and non-Sony devices for now.

 

I myself use an MZ-N520 for pretty much everything and it's been very reliable, but I expect other Type-S portables to be the same.
Also, Web Minidisc Pro can use a remote Sony encoder hosted by the Wiki, which might produce better ATRAC3 than even SonicStage.

[BearBoy]

Hello @asivery. Welcome to the forum!

 

Just wanted to say a huge thanks to you and @cybercase (Stefano) for the amazing work you've done with Web MiniDisc and Web MiniDisc Pro. It's been a real game changer for me and it's great to see you've continued to develop it, enabling transfer of recordings from MDs to a PC without needing an MZ-RH1 and the improved ATRAC3 encoder.

 

When I started getting back into MiniDisc around 2015, I never thought I'd see people bringing the format back to life in the way that things like Web MiniDisc have. Fantastic 👍

[asivery]

Hi! Thanks for the kind words, if you have any suggestions or bugs to report, please let me know :).

 

I got into MD for the first time in 2016 thanks to the first Techmoan MD video ("Minidisc: An appreciation" I think it was called), when I got myself an MZ-R3, that died a few years later with error 40. Now I own 5 MZ-R3s - 1 working and 4 dead. If you know any fixes for that dreaded error 40, please let me know - I'd love to fix it one day.

[BearBoy]

3 hours ago, asivery said:

Hi! Thanks for the kind words, if you have any suggestions or bugs to report, please let me know :).

 

I can't say I have ever encountered any bugs, not that I can recall anyway. Both of the things I originally flagged as being nice to have (ALAC support and compatibility with Sony NetMD decks) have both been implemented, although I've stuck to using portable devices tbh.

 

One thing that is a (very minor) inconvenience is having to re-install the drivers if I connect a different model of NetMD Walkman (e.g. if I change from using an MZ-N910 to an MZ-N920). Note sure if there is anything that could be done about this but it is only a minor issue and I generally just stick to using the same device.

 

3 hours ago, asivery said:

I got into MD for the first time in 2016 thanks to the first Techmoan MD video ("Minidisc: An appreciation" I think it was called), when I got myself an MZ-R3, that died a few years later with error 40. Now I own 5 MZ-R3s - 1 working and 4 dead. If you know any fixes for that dreaded error 40, please let me know - I'd love to fix it one day.

 

Techmoan has a lot to answer for 🤣 I think he's been the cause of many people getting engulfed in the format...

 

I'm afraid I can't help you with your MZ-R3 problem but it might be worth starting a thread asking for assistance. There are others on here who are much more clued up on the technical side of things than I am. Good luck!

[asivery]

9 minutes ago, BearBoy said:

I can't say I have ever encountered any bugs, not that I can recall anyway. Both of the things I originally flagged as being nice to have (ALAC support and compatibility with Sony NetMD decks) have both been implemented, although I've stuck to using portable devices tbh.

Yeah the Sony NetMD decks were a painful mess to implement 😆.

 

11 minutes ago, BearBoy said:

One thing that is a (very minor) inconvenience is having to re-install the drivers if I connect a different model of NetMD Walkman (e.g. if I change from using an MZ-N910 to an MZ-N920). Note sure if there is anything that could be done about this but it is only a minor issue and I generally just stick to using the same device.

That's the problem with using Zadig, Web Minidisc can't do anything about it, sorry...

 

21 minutes ago, BearBoy said:

I'm afraid I can't help you with your MZ-R3 problem but it might be worth starting a thread asking for assistance. There are others on here who are much more clued up on the technical side of things than I am. Good luck!

Thanks, I'll try that later.

[BearBoy]

10 minutes ago, asivery said:

Yeah the Sony NetMD decks were a painful mess to implement 😆.

 

Feel a bit bad for requesting something I've ended up not making much use of 😳 Well, although I've never really used it, I am sure lots of people are very grateful for your efforts 😀

 

13 minutes ago, asivery said:

That's the problem with using Zadig, Web Minidisc can't do anything about it, sorry...

 

No need to apologise! I thought it might be more of a Windows/driver issue than a Web MiniDisc one. Like I said, it's really not a big deal.

[asivery]

1 minute ago, BearBoy said:

Feel a bit bad for requesting something I've ended up not making much use of 😳 Well, although I've never really used it, I am sure lots of people are very grateful for your efforts 😀

 

Don't worry about it - I got myself a Sony LAM for testing and ended up falling in love with the whole LAM series of devices. I have 3 now, so I use that functionality regularly 😆

[BearBoy]

Haha. Yes, it's very easy to get dragged down a (very expensive) rabbit hole with this stuff 🤣

[sfbp]

Quick question: (and very happy you did all this for NetMD owners)

Your mention of Zadig is entirely due to the need to use 64 bit windows, right? So anyone misguided enough to install a 32-bit windows doesn't have to use it, and can therefore do all the download/upload stuff on that (32-bit) machine without installing anything.

 

Or am I missing something else?

Sadly virtual 32-bits doesn't work all that well for time-sensitive things like sound transfer over USB. Virtual PC supports drivers similar to what Zadig does, I have been running M-Crew on XP mode on Virtual PC. The only problem there is that the CD support fails, sigh.

[asivery]

That's not really the case - Zadig is used to install the libusb driver, that makes it possible for Chrome to access the USB devices. Sony driver (the one used for SonicStage) locks the NetMD device down - it makes it unavailable for other apps to use. It's still necessary to use Zadig (or a 32-bit libusb driver in general) to run Web Minidisc on a 32-bit Windows system.

[sfbp]

Very interesting. thanks for the clarification.

 

I've certainly seen performance problems on time-sensitive (and interrupt-dependent) software designed for 32-bit windows running on a 64-bit box. So it didn't seem much of a stretch (to imagine the main barrier being 64 vs 32 bits).

 

I wonder what exactly Sony did (yeah I know, they got over-the-top paranoid at one point)? Or does this approach completely bypass Sony's driver?

[asivery]

This completely disables the Sony driver, and replaces it with a generic one.

[sfbp]

I am about 99% certain I've seen the Sony device "connected" in some Windows configuration/status display (once Sonic Stage starts then I agree it disappears). So I wonder if it simply needs a key...... but no idea how that would work in practice.

 

The Sony driver for 64 bits works reliably for all NetMD, the only problem is installing it, which problem has been solved for quite a while.

[asivery]

I'm not sure - I haven't looked at the Windows side of things personally, since I use Linux and the libusb driver gets loaded there automatically (no Zadig or any tool like that required), but I don't think I could get the Sony driver to work with Web Minidisc unfortunately, or even if it were possible, I just don't think it would justify the amount of work required to do so unfortunately. The solution that could solve all the problems would be to make a custom driver that just modifies the libusb inf file to include all the NetMD devices - then you wouldn't need to reinstall Zadig for every device. I might look into that at some point.

[sfbp]

That would be brilliant. You can look at the inf file(s) for the "everything" netMD here that I made - they've been installed thousands of times. I just did exactly what you said, modified it so it installs for everything. Signing is another matter, but you've already got that under control.

[BearBoy]

@asivery - just wondered if you could shed some light on the download functionality of Web MiniDisc Pro (i.e. transfer of tracks from MD to PC) please.

 

A user on a different forum mentioned they had used Web MiniDisc Pro to transfer some music to their PC and it had come across as .wav files, rather than the .aea files I get when I use it. I wondered if the difference was because they were transferring LP2 tracks and mine were all SP or whether the application had been updated. 

 

I did a quick test by recording a song from CD to MiniDisc three times: once as SP, once as LP2 and once as LP4 (using optical connection into an MDS-JB980, not via NetMD). I then transferred them from the MiniDisc to my PC using Web MiniDisc Pro and an MZ-N910:

• The SP track came across as a .aea file (7.58MB)
• The LP2 track came across as a .wav file (3.43MB / 132kbps)
• The LP4 track came across as a .wav file (1.72MB / 66kbps)

Looking at the media files in VLC, the SP track is marked as ATRAC 1 and the two MDLP tracks as ATRAC 3 (as you would expect). They are all 32bits/44.1kHz.

 

Just wondered why there is a difference in file type (.aea v .wav) between the SP and MDLP tracks?

[asivery]

@BearBoy - Yes - there's a difference. ATRAC3 data is stored in WAV, because the RIFF container (the specification that WAV files follow) allow that to happen. For ATRAC1 I couldn't go with WAV, since ATRAC1 isn't supported by the RIFF container. Instead WMD downloads these files as AEA (an old format that was created by MD Editor I think). Sir68k - another developer of netmd-exploits managed to add the ATRAC1 specification to the matroska file format, and we'll probably also try to do the same with ATRAC3, so that the container format will be unified. I'll soon publish a patch to FFMPEG which patch the matroska demuxer there. AEA files are terrible because it's hard to identify them - they don't have a "magic number", unlike WAVs, so the sooner we switch from them the better.

[BearBoy]

Many thanks for the explanation @asivery.

 

One of the results of the different containers/file types is that WMD doesn't seem to recognise the SP .aea files so you can't rip them from one MiniDisc and then copy them back to another without do some sort of file conversion. Unless I'm missing something obvious?

 

The other thing we noticed was that when you rip LP2 tracks from a MiniDisc and then try to copy them over to another one, they get added to the new MD in reverse order.

 

e.g. I ripped some LP2 tracks from a MiniDisc and it created a series of .wav files on my PC:

• 1. LP_Song title one.wav
• 2. LP_Song title two.wav
• 3. LP_Song title three.wav etc

When I then transferred these files back to a blank MiniDisc, however, the track order on the new MD was reversed:

• 3. LP_Song title three.wav
• 2. LP_Song title two.wav
• 1. LP_Song title one.wav

I've never experienced this track order reversal when copying files from PC to MiniDisc using WMD before and the tracks show in the correct order prior to copying when I click "Show Tracks" in the Upload Settings box.

 

I've got the same CD ripped on my PC via iTunes as .m4a files. When I selected those files as a group, they transferred across to a MiniDisc in the correct order.

 

You can re-order them in WMD (so they show in reverse order in WMD but copy to disc in the correct order) as part of the transfer process but just wondered why it happens. Any ideas?

[asivery]

9 minutes ago, BearBoy said:

One of the results of the different containers/file types is that WMD doesn't seem to recognise the SP .aea files so you can't rip them from one MiniDisc and then copy them back to another without do some sort of file conversion. Unless I'm missing something obvious?

No, you aren't missing anything obvious. NetMD doesn't support putting raw ATRAC1 back on the discs. However, if you would like to test it, here's the unreleased version of WMD, which does support that on some devices: https://testing.minidisc.wiki/b0824780-3c0c-11ed-b994-2c56dc399093/

 

10 minutes ago, BearBoy said:

The other thing we noticed was that when you rip LP2 tracks from a MiniDisc and then try to copy them over to another one, they get added to the new MD in reverse order.

That is a bug I am aware of, I'll fix it as soon as possible. It's still not fixed in the testing version I linked above.

[BearBoy]

Thanks, again, for the reply @asivery. I might have a play with that test version if it works with any of my devices 🙂

[asivery]

@BearBoy - No problem 🙂. This is a developer snapshot, so it contains all the newest features, including HiMD stuff, but that's not complete yet (no audio upload, should let you edit metadata though).

[imkidd57]

@asivery - very nice work indeed with the .aea files. I was able to upload some previously extracted files to an MZ-N10, and it was very quick (about 25s for a 3.14 min track). In fact it was so quick that could I ask if there is any conversion stage prior to the upload i.e. is this true SP being uploaded, as opposed to an LP2 labelled as SP (what we used to call 'fake' SP).

[asivery]

23 minutes ago, imkidd57 said:

In fact it was so quick that could I ask if there is any conversion stage prior to the upload i.e. is this true SP being uploaded, as opposed to an LP2 labelled as SP (what we used to call 'fake' SP).

Yes, this is 100% true SP being uploaded back. The new version reprograms the player temporarily mid-transfer to allow that to happen.