Mac and Sony

[kokoshka]

I've been using Sony MD, then HiMD, and am between players. I thought to make the leap across to MP3 etc., but am frustrated by the limited number of players that will work with my Mac. I've rejected iPod and Archos, it's a personal issue I know, but I don't consider 10-15 hours of (non removeable) battery life to be truly portable. So, my question is: has anyone had any success with the Sony NW HD5 using, for example, Virtual PC? Or any news on the software for the HD5 replacement? And if it all works out, which is better, Atrac or MP3?

[Ryzir]

I have heard that SonicStage works on VirtualPC but is extremely slow both converting and transfering music. Here is a thread on the Minidisc Community Forums about Sony & Mac http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php...virtualpc&st=0

Hopefully the new Connect player will be Mac compatible but don't hold your breath.

As far as Mp3 and Atrac goes I prefer Atrac for sound & gapless playback but Mp3's encoded with Lame also sound very good but are not gapless.

I have a Powerbook 1.5 with 512RAM 80GB hard disk - and a HD5H.

It worked fine for me but was a bit of a pain in that I only had 20GB of hard disk available on my MAC.

What I did was:

1. Install Virtual PC
2. Install Win XP
3. Install SS 3.2
4. Went into my MAC iTunes directory structure and copied a 5GB 'chunk' of music onto the C: drive of my Virtual XP machine. This is due to the space restriction on my MAC. This process was a lengthy one.....maybe an hour? I forget now as I'd go and do something else! When I looked at the imported files using Win Explorer it seemed to convert the end parts of the track names to hexidecimal?
5. Started SS 3.2 and got it to pick up the 5GB of mp3's - which sorted everything out perfectly from iTunes, etc - no problems with the filenames.
6. Connect the HD5H to the USB drive
7. Transfer music to the player...this was particularly slow - I let it run overnight.
8. Once the mp3's were on the player I would then delete the mp3's from the C:\ drive of my virtual xp pc to free up more space.
9. I repeated steps 4 through to 8 until I had pulled all my music (25GB) out of iTunes.
10. Finally - I removed Bill Gates' pile of s**t from my Powerbook.....

Tip - make sure you edit all your music, genre info, etc correctly in iTunes first as it is a serious pain to have to do it once it's on the player i.e it's very slow!

My friend has his HD3 using SS 3.2 on his PC laptop and is forever updating his player....something which I don't do, but as my entire collection is now on there I'm not bothered. I may in a few months reload it all when I have a bit more music to put on, so I guess I've lost a bit of flexibility/functionality....

I use MP3's as they are universal - although not as good as ATRAC in quality for the size, I find that MP3's at 192 offer a good balance between both ie. size and quality.