Poor MD, poor me

Yestoday, I was exhausted by the MiniDisk. I think I have never confronted such machines which try to protect audio copyrights so sucked as the MiniDisk. Some days ago, someone told me to export some audio tracks from several MDs, because another classmate recorded one teacher's lessons of a whole term into this disk, and she wanna share them. At beginning, I thought it was a much simple job.

I immediately borrowed a MD machine, an USB cable and installed the software sonicstage in my notebook, which is used to manage and transfer audio between computers and CD/MD machines manufactured by sony company. After completed these, I began to copy audio lessons from the machine, and I thought everything would finish soon.

However, to my surprise, I haven't found a nightmare just began. I got such a prompt when I wanted to transfer lessons to my notebook:

Unable to transfer the following tracks to My Library because they are recorded by Net MD or another computer.

I was totally astonished. The such fact as above means that, it's hardly to exchange music or other audio with each other, who uses MiniDisk to store his audio tracks, because you can only use the machine to manage the audio which it orginally recorded. You cannot upload or download tracks from your own MD, if you are using two different computers. You cannot acquire lossless musics you like from your friends, unless both of you transfer them by both sony MD machines. You can only import something into the MD from CD or your computers, but you will occours serial fantasic difficulties when hoping to share yours.

These tools, such as MD used for playing and amusement, in order to protect copyrights and sony company's rights, are designed so annoying and inconvenient, even weird. These technologies which are not open, not free and even not compatible with other audio formats, are totally out of date, and due to disappear earlier. No one should use it and no model would be seld in stores in this age, when everythig will be open, connected compactly and conveniently, because now it is the time of network and we need share, participate and communicate with each other.

In the end, I have to use audio cable to connect the MD machine and my computer, because I have to only use such original analog RCA style, to transform digital signal in the MD to analog signal by line-in, then again to digital signal in the computer, which process took me more than 10 hours for these lessons also spended so much time. So poor.