can anyone save me from this MiniDisc HELL?

My best friend is stationed overseas in Afghanistan, and he wants me to record him some MD’s and send them to him. He arranged for his sister to send me her MD player so that I could do this.

It’s an MZ-N420D, or “Sony NetMD Walkman.” I figured that dumping some Mp3’s over USB onto the discs would be a piece of cake.

Now that you’re done cracking up, I need help! Is there a program out there that will convert MP3’s into whatever the proprietary MD format is, and then send them over USB into the player, onto the disc? Every MP3 -> MD program I’ve found is based around the idea of simply recording your music into the MD player in realtime - but this MD Walkman doesn’t have an audio input! The only input it has is the USB input.

The included software (“Soundstage”) just plain doesn’t work - it freezes 90% of the time, and keeps giving me bizarre errors when trying to transfer files to the player. I finally gave up a few minutes ago after it froze, leaving the player completely unresponsive. I had to take the battery out to get it under control!

Does anyone know anything about these things? Help!

The software you called “Soundstage” do you perhaps mean Sonicstage? If so then you will need to upgrade to ver 2.3 that will convert MP3’s to the sony ATRAC format. You will have to put the files into the sony Library and then transfer then to the MD. The updater is here http://esupport.sony.com/perl/swu-download.pl?template=EN&mdl_id=1064&upd_id=1468&PASSVAL=ALLOS

Follow the instruction of the website and you should be OK. One last thing, Sonicstage is not the easiest player to learn so spend a few minutes wioth it. The defalt compression is 132Kbits or about a dozen songs per disk. I have not noticed a loss of quality at lower rates so give that a try. When I do I get 50+ songs per disk.

My experience isn’t so great on this front either (I do realtime transfers on a Hi-MD recorder myself), but what little I know matches what Brendan Donovan says.

You might find some more help here and here, with more specific info here.