MiniDisc Players

News

Nineteen years after the introduction of the MiniDisc format, Sony announced in July 2011 that it would stop shipping its MiniDisc Walkman products in September 2011. It will continue to produce blank media.

File Format & Compatibility Issues

The Sony MZ-RH1/MZ-M200) is the only model that Sony has produced since about 2006. It is also the only machine which allows digital transfer of any recording ever recorded on any MD machine. There were some older HiMD machines which allowed digital transfer of recordings made only on HiMD machines, as far as we are aware, the MZ-RH1 is the only portable Sony machine ever made that allows digital uploads of recordings made on older equipment. See Sony's website for details.

If you have a Hi-MD player, it should have come with SonicStage software can transfer at least the recordings you made with that Hi-MD player. The SonicStage installer is available on SurveyWiki through this link.

For regular MD recordings, as far as we’re aware, the only unit that can transfer them is the thin black MZ-M200, which seems to be able to transfer any MD or Hi-MD recording.

You may find the Sony .hmd > .wav converter useful. It's available on SurveyWiki from this link.

Windows 7 Issue

In Windows 7, the SonicStage song database develops a glitch and insists on connecting to the Internet to fix it. Unless you have Internet access to resolve this, you may find it unusable. Uninstalling SonicStage doesn’t help.

 Some of the above content was contributed by Nathan Statezni and Eric Pawley.

Links: Equipment Reviews