HOWTO Use Sony NetMD Minidisc Players in Windows 10 (MZ-N505)

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I have had an obsession with the Minidisc format since my teen years. They were super popular here in Australia, UK, Europe and Japan but in the US minidisk never really took off. Its a dead format, well not to me. Now some of the things the later ATRAC3 players did better than MP3 players of the time was the Audio quality was superior and you could switch out discs really easily. This meant you could have 100 songs in your pocket. For the time it was some revolutionary stuff. The thing is though, the audio quality still holds up to this day and that’s kinda the reason for this video.

One of the later types of Minidisc recorders and players were the NetMD style players which basically worked like an MP3 player. Traditional Minidisc players you had to record the audio at a 1 to 1 speed so it was very time consuming. When NetMD came around it allowed you to plug your player into your computer and drag your favourite tunes from Napster and Limewire straight onto the player.

Now back then I never owned a NetMD player because they were just too expensive but now that I’m grown up and they are a lot cheaper I can finally play with one. Except for the fact that they don’t work with windows 10. I have seen heaps of videos with people using hacked unsigned drivers and having to jump through hoops with windows 10 to use them but it just seemed like it was too complicated and time consuming for a regular person.

In this video I’m going to show you the proper non janky way to use your NetMD player with Windows 10 in 2018 or whenever you people in the distant future watch this video using virutalisation. You’ll thank me later.

I forgot how much I loved minidisc until I made this video and I’m now using it as my portable music player again.