Hello all. I have about 150 minidiscs and I now want to convert some of them to MP3 so I can play them on my car mp3 player. What I plan to do is record from md to my Pioneer cd recorder (hifi separates), and then rip the cd using cdex. I know I could endlessy experiment but I'm hoping that someone here might have done the same.

I am aware that minidisc is compressed to around five times the original cd size and compressing again with mp3 is likely to result in some pretty duff sounding songs. On the other hand maybe they will be equivalent to mp3 128k.

Anyway, cheers for any tips.

I'm assuming that most (if not all) of your minidiscs were recorded from CD's you own? You would be far better off locating the original copies and ripping them using EAC and LAME than recording 150 MD's to wav files in realtime and then recompressing them with LAME :x ATRAC already won't win any awards for sound quality on it's own, but your music will sound even worse once transocded to MP3. Always use original copies to make encodings, if possible. In this case, doing so will not only result in better-sounding files, but will save you weeks of recording and encoding.

If you don't own the originals to some of the discs you wish to record, do what you described and then rip the CD using EAC (which, unlike CDex is a secure ripper and will give you the best results). Use LAME 3.90.3 as your encoder and --alt-preset standard as your commandline for the best results.....for CD's, --alt-preset standard usually results in transparent files with bitrates around 200kbps. For recordings from minidisc, this should keep things sounding as close to the original as possible.

Ok, I'll come clean. I've done this.

The answer is is that it doesn't sound *that* bad at all. Really. The thing which I noticed is that when you do this sort of transcode, then the problems which rear their heads are the ones which all those "I'm an Audiophile, I write for a major publication" people jibba jabba on about. Things like "Lack of Body, loss of Soundstage, not much Foot-tappity-ness"

What I mean is that there are not an insane amount of artifacts added, but the recording is 'dulled' down.

Btw, my MD stores at 292kbps, but I forget which variant of ATRAC it uses... YMMV

If you can manage a digital/optical xfer from MD to WAV you should get a fine audio file. Not as good as if recorded directly to WAV, but better than "acceptable." Real-time, analog transfers can be quite good, too. I have gone direct to MP3 from MD player using TotalRecorder as software and coming in through the computer's line-in from the headphones output on the MD player and have gotten pretty good sound. My advice is to try it on one or two. What do you have to lose but the price of one or two CD's and some of your time, which is free?

The discussion of just how good the quality of ATRAC compression in LP, not LP2 or LP4, mode is has been covered on this board and can probably be found with a simple search.

B)

That "dulled down" impression that you are getting (and I got when doing one MD-->MP3) is from pre-echo. ATRAC has problems with this, so compressing with MP3, another format which can suffer from pre-echo problems, only magnifies it. But, like I said, using --alt-preset standard should keep things as close to the original as possible for MP3....if hardware compatibility weren't an issue here, MPC would be a far better choice.

Thanks for the replies. Glad to hear it is worth at least making the attempt. By the way, all the md's are recorded using 'atrac type R' which I think is still the best sounding.

Sadly, all the originals cds got sucked away in a tornado along with my left arm and one of my ears. Still, mustn't grumble eh?

Lev, you are absolutely right mate. The sound is not bad at all. Way better than mp3 128kb. Probably as good as 192kb with something such as musicmatch. Maybe even better. I have done some tests and from now on I will transfer to mp3 using alt preset extreme (cdex 1.50 SE).

Thanks for coming clean!



Thanks Cygnus x1, APS and APE were very similar sounding but I believe APE gave the better sound. I will use that to ensure quality.

You are right of course about using MPC ideally...