Looks like a cool project! I have a box of old mini discs (and a Sony player) in the basement that I've been wondering what to do with. I would love to give the project a try and get them converted for digital archival.
For archiving purposes, I recommend getting a Sony MZ-RH1 (and the MZ-RH200 IIRC) as its the only device that can upload regular MD tracks using NetMD over USB. All the other devices can only playback over SPDIF.
FWIW, VLC also contains a universal decryptor written by us for any OpenMG media files saved by SonicStage. So if you have recordings on your hard disk which cannot be decrypted with SonicStage anymore because you forgot to backup the decryption keys, VLC should just work.
I archived all my Minidiscs a few years back using SonicStage. My Minidisc was my field recorder. Archiving was a very emotional experience- both hearing the voices of dead friends, and prying my own history from a futuristic and beautiful but frustrating and pointlessly locked down machine.
