Sony are evil*.

I mentioned a while back that I was gonna record the last few games sessions I have here in sligo. Well I did on my shiny Sony NetMD. I had a brief listen to it on the MD afterwards and it sounded good. Next Day I hooked up My MD to the p.c via the USB cable browsed to my new audio tracks and click the "check in" button. A message appeared "the selected tracks cannot be checked in" .

Huh? try again. same message.

try everything and anything.. nothing doing. Figuring I'm just not doing something right maybe the tracks were too big or something. I decided to go to the 'net to find out.
the first thing I found was this.NetMD for Minidisc to Computer*
Audio Uploading: A Proposal


I started to have a bad feeling about this.

Then I found The petition reply. and my fears were confirmed. I can't transfer my recorded audio digitally to my p.c. That sucks big style. There does not seem to be a discernable good reason why not either. In fact as far as I can tell all it would take to implement is a tiny patch to the Sony PC-side software. Sony seem to have taken a policy decision on this possibly for copyright protection reasons.

Anhoo what all this means is I gotta record the audio realtime to my p.c via the analog in so 4 hours of gaming audio will take 4 hours to transfer..Yawn.
Not a huge deal I suppose but its inconvenient.

Today I found out sony are bringing out new Hi-MD format, discs and Players. I get the
impression they will be less draconian regarding digital transfer of material recorded on the MD.

*This does not of course include the wonderful folks you gave me Ripley, my Sony Viao ;)