I expect you all know this but… after years of recording sessions / workshops on minidiscs, long before the HI-Md came along, I’ve discovered a neat way of transferring them to CD.
I bought a Creative Zen little mp3 player to be able to take music on holiday with me - and when I got it, I noticed there was something called “mp3 encoding”! This means that the Zen will record (through its line in) directly from a minidisc player.
Once the minidisc recordings are on the mp3 player, it’s easy to transfer them to computer and edit / track mark them with Audacity, and then write them to CDs.
I’m so excited - I’m going to spend the summer copying / sorting / editing my minidiscs!!!
(so… am I behind the times? and what other really cool things have I been missing out on?)
You’ve added an extra step. You can do the same thing straight to your PC without needing the mp3 player. Just connect the MD player to the mic jack on your sound card (like you did with the mp3 player) and play from the MD when you press the record button on the PC.
There’s nothing wrong with your method, but you could have been doing the same thing all along from your mini-disc directly into the sound card of your computer to record it there as wav.s or mp3.s or whatever.
Thanks for the comments - but one of my problems has been that I don’t have a mic or line in on my computer, although I’ve been all over it looking… don’t know how much it would have cost to upgrade or buy a sound card, but this seems to work.
One day, when the minidisc recorder breaks down, I really fancy replacing it with an Edirol R-09 or whatever improved version is around.
Yeah, you definitely need a mic/line in to do it that way. I’m surprised you don’t have one. It should be right next to wherever your speakers plug in.
One day, when the minidisc recorder breaks down, I really fancy replacing it with an Edirol R-09 or whatever improved version is around.
Sony really shot themselves in the foot by making it nearly impossible to transfer recordings from MD to PC. We don’t want people “stealing” music now, do we?
I would have spent far too much money on MD stuff if I had been able to do that without using the play/record method.
A lot of computers don’t have a mic or line in. Even the Apple iBook, which I owned for a while, didn’t have them and you could only record sound via USB.
Personally I’m kind of glad it’s hard to transfer music from minidisc to computer, as it forces me to transfer only the stuff I really want to keep instead of just dumping everything onto my computer.
Just to say that there are Macs that have line in - Powerbooks for example and the old bubble iMacs, also the Cube and plenty of others. It’s just to connect your minidisc and transfer over to the Mac. Also streaming audio such as RTE’s “Late sesion” or Ceilidh House can be captured by coupling the Mac’s headphone output to the minidisc’s line in and just record it - then put it back onto the Mac via the Mac’s line in and burn the program with Toast onto CD, if you want.
You can do the same thing straight to your PC without needing the mp3 player. Just connect the MD player to the mic jack on your sound card (like you did with the mp3 player) and play from the MD when you press the record button on the PC.