Web MiniDisc Pro

Copy audio to your NetMD MiniDisc device using only a web browser. Replace SonicStage, improve audio quality, and unlock new features.

Live @ https://web.minidisc.wiki/.

Full user guide @ the MiniDisc Wiki

• a NetMD recorder
• USB cable (most use USB Mini-B)
• Chromium web browser (Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, etc.) or any other browser that supports both WASM and WebUSB

it just works ® ... no need to download or install any software. Safari is not currently supported; please use a Chromium browser instead.

Some macOS-specific issues are documented in the troubleshooting page of the user guide.

For macOS developers, see here.

Follow the instructions from the user guide here or the linux-minidisc project here to grant your user access to the device. If you skip this step you'll likely get an Access denied message when trying to connect.

If you use a "packaged" version of Chromium, such as from the Ubuntu Store, you will encounter more issues. Refer to the user guide for more details.

The Windows USB stack requires a driver to be installed before using Web MiniDisc Pro. The driver installation requires Administrator privileges.

See the full details in the user guide here. - it is usually as simple as using Zadig to install the driver.

Note: restart your browser after installation.

Works without any additional set up - tested with 91 stable (91.0.4472.102). If your user account or device is managed (by your school or company) you may run into issues. If you are using a personal Google account on a personal Chromebook you should be good to go.

Web MiniDisc Pro was forked from the original Web MiniDisc to provide a more advanced workflow for interacting with NetMD devices.

In addition to the standard NetMD features that Web MiniDisc provides, Web MiniDisc Pro also features:

• The ability to connect to NetMD units available on the local network with the help of Remote NetMD
• Downloading tracks from the player via standard NetMD commands (Sony MZ-RH1 only)
• Improved handling of pre-encoded ATRAC3 tracks
• Song Recognition
• The ability to use an external ATRAC3 encoder for better audio quality when using LP modes

The following features depend on Factory mode commands. See netmd-exploits for a list of supported devices

• Downloading tracks from any Sony (or Aiwa) NetMD device
• Firmware and RAM dumping
• TOC manipulation
• Tetris

Development discussion and coordination happens through the MiniDisc.wiki Discord server in the #research channel

The project is built with Vite and requires Node.js 22.12 or newer.

• npm install to install the required node modules
• npm start (or npm run dev) to start the development server
• npm run build to type-check and build for production into dist/
• npm run preview to serve the production build locally at http://localhost:4173
• npm run lint to run ESLint

WebUSB only works in a secure context, so the app can reach devices when served from localhost or over HTTPS, but not over plain HTTP on any other host.

WASM modules are provided in the public/ directory. However, if you wish to build those binaries yourself, instructions are provided in the extra/ directory (see BUILD_FFMPEGJS.md and BUILD_ATRACDENC.md).

Dockerfile.server builds the app and serves it with nginx on port 8080, so the host only needs Docker:

docker build -f Dockerfile.server -t webminidisc .
docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 webminidisc

docker-compose.yml runs the same image without publishing a port, for use behind a reverse proxy. The proxy must terminate TLS: over plain HTTP the app loads, but it can never connect to a device. To serve from a subdirectory rather than the root of a hostname, pass --build-arg PUBLIC_URL=/some/path/.

(The plain Dockerfile is the one CI publishes to Docker Hub; it expects dist/ to have been built on the host first.)

No native toolchain is needed. Install Node.js 22.12 or newer (for example with Homebrew: brew install node), then follow How to build.

npm install may warn that the usb and dtrace-provider packages have install scripts that were not run. They are Node-only dependencies of the device libraries and are not used by the web app, so the warning can be ignored.

If there's a feature you'd like to see implemented in Web MiniDisc Pro, feel free to submit a pull request.

Feel free to submit any issues as a GitHub issue. Web MiniDisc Pro is a hobby project and the developers cannot make guarantees about timeliness of bugfixes. If you have the skills to implement fixes yourself, we're more than happy to review pull requests.

Web MiniDisc Pro and its predecessors are GPL licensed. You are free to fork or clone and create your own instance. However we ask that you:

• Change the name and description so that users do not confuse your fork with the upstream project
• Update bug reporting links to your own repo rather than this upstream one
• Remove the included reference to the LP encoding server provided by the MiniDisc Wiki project, or contact them for permission to include it

• FFmpeg and ffmpegjs to read audio files (wav, mp3, ogg, mp4, etc...).
• Atracdenc to support atrac3 encoding (lp2, lp4 audio formats).
• Emscripten to run both FFmpeg and Atracdenc in the browser.
• netmd-js to send commands to NetMD devices using Javascript
• MUI to build the user interface.
• linux-minidisc to build the netmd-js library.
• netmd-exploits For factory mode commands and track dumping