Not quite an egg / not quite a box ? ?

[tshorba]

Sonic stage the check in check out on Net-MD players caused some issues. The recordists out there know that you should have been able to transfer any of your own recordings back through the PC but sonic stage didn't allow this. I recorded a number of live gigs and had no real way to export them without doing a real time transfer to another device. Sonic stage was also full of DRM crap
The user interface and indexing of sonic stage was not as good or intuitive as itunes.

Disagree? Actually you just validated my point, the sonic stage was the proprietary software making the proprietary files that you couldn't share on with any other device except Mini-Disc's.

I don't hate them though, I have some players and mess around with them now and then.

Incorrect again, my points were about the interface of sonic stage vs itunes and has nothing to do with the ATRAC format. Your original post was solely about ATRAC and lack of other codec support with minidisc.