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MD Utility needs to DIE

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My MD player is about 5 minutes away from a gruesome death.
OK. Deep breaths.

I recently purchased a refurbished NE410 MiniDisc player to replace my old one. Also, I was looking forward to backing up some very old demos that I'd recorded a few years back. The player is great, and there hasn't been any problems with the hardware itself. I took a play through of all my old stuff, and it works beautifully.

So then, time to install the software so I can have all my old precious songs back! YAY!

I installed the software and it put about 12 utilities and drivers on my computer. OK, whatever. That's fine. I load up what I believed to be the burning software (SoundStage 1.5) and inserted my invaluable MD. First, I had to read the documentation a few times because this software is the exact opposite of "user-friendly". When I though I had it together, I pressed Play to make sure it was the MD I was looking to back up.

About 5 seconds of audio, and then nothing. Whoops, the battery's dead. OK, go get a new one.

I ran upstairs for a replacement, and came back to the PC to switch it in (making sure, as the documentation explicitly says, to remove the USB cord before doing so). With that all done, I turn the unit back on and check the software. Nothing happens. I check the MD player's display, and find that the LED display is blinking "BLANK".

...

So.

Oh look, here are about 5000 disclaimers that absolve Sony of responsibility should anything happen to data, even if the software is running properly. From what I've read through newsgroups, there is a large group of people unhappy with this software for similar reasons. Good job Sony, covering your ass when I'm sure your team knew full well that your software liked to erase discs at the drop of a hat. What kind of fucking software corrupts data on a device, even when it's not running a process like writing or reading? (See, you can run commands like "play and "pause" from the software, but you still need headphones, so there's no actual sound data streamed to the computer. That should be the limit of the interaction between software and hardware, or so sound logic would have me believe.) The software didn't crash, there was no interruption of data like your PC crashing while you're burning a CD, MD's are not dependent on a power source to retain data... it was just fucking playing on its own and the software decides to reach out through my fucking USB cable and shit all over my songs. When's the last time you heard of a memory stick in a digital camera being wiped clean just because it ran out of batteries? I do believe that this is a historical first. I could fucking pull the plug out of my PC right now being assured that Windows won't go out of its way to reformat the HD or any burned CD-RW I may have in my drive. I can't believe there is a piece of software so badly written that it invasively affects peripheral hardware to the point of being destructive. I'm sure that my sound data is somehow "in limbo", rather than actually being "gone", as I'd have to call fucking Ripley if Sony managed to write an app that does that.

</rant>

Anyway, does anyone have experience in MD utilities that might allow me to recover the data that I've been waiting for 4 years to attain?

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You actually have software for yours? The MD player I have never came with any, and if I translated the manual right, there was none. I thought only the Sony HighMD players had software. On mine, I have a mic-in, fiber optic in, audio in, and headphone out. The one time I did have problems with it (with the battery going dead very quicky) was due to me jiggling it so much in my pocket as I walked to school. A quick switch to carrying it in my backpack fixed that.

But I remember pulling up some really good sites through Google just before I got one. If I remember, there were some which pertained to this sort of event.

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I got a mz-420d and got a few problems with it too. It's been a year since I got it and now it started freezing pretty much at each song. Sometimes it locks the player and the only way to fix it is to open the MD while it's looping and reinsert the disk and pray it doesn't happen again while loading the song. Also Soundstage could't start on my PC when I installed and it took me 2-3 hours to get it to work. This forum helped me a lot so you could check it (http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php? ).

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