I am flabbergasted by the Sony's audacity. We bought a HI MD walkman (MZ-RH910) specifically to use for field recordings -- our music lessons and jam session we played in. We just got back from a festival with over four hours of audio on a HI MD. It all played fine on the walkman, but when we tried transferring it to our computer using Sonic Stage, the transfer failed, and now the disc is corrupted and will not play.
So I called Sony's tech support. Their answer? Tough luck. "Any time you plug something into a computer, anything might go wrong and corrupt the data."
Which is, of course, total bullsh*t. I've used hundreds of external harddrives, and transferred thousands of hours of mini DV footage, and have never had the medium corrupted by transferring TO the computer.
The reason it happened is because Sonic Stage has to write TO THE MD everytime it transfers a file onto the computer. And this is because of Sony's hair-brained copyprotection scheme: "You can only transfer recorded files from the minidisc to the computer once." Which means that every time a file is transferred something is writted to the disc. Which means that any time Sonic Stage hiccups, the disc will be corrupted.
Remember, this is my own music: recordings of myself playing. Why shouldn't I be able to transfer it more than once?
And any computer person could tell you that writing to the original medium when not absolutely necessary does risk corruption. I should be able to transfer data from my MD to the computer with the WRITE-PROTECT set on the disk. I shouldn't have to write anything to the disk to get anything off of it.
And to have tech support tell you that the equipment is just that fragile so suck it up -- well, that's infuriating. By the way, Customer Relations will also tell you to take a hike. Not only will they not pay for data recovery, they won't even give you a refund for the device itself.
The moral of this story: if you plan to record live in the field, DON'T BUY SONY!
Is anyone else considering a suing Sony for lost data? Any attorneys out there interested in taking on a class-action?
Seems like Sony has developed Corporate Greed Syndrome(CGS). I will keep this in mind. I just bouth a used Sanyo portable MiniDisc system for field recording. It has a coputer link feature, but the disk was broke so I haven't tried it yet(until I locate software). But this poster is right. I have hooked up hundres of devices to computers. And yes, occasionally corruption of data occurs, but it has been the exception, not the rule for me. Sony just don't care about end users any more.