Hello, hello to all!

I would kindly ask for a little help regarding the transfer of music between MiniDisc and PC (for editting and creating CD).
I own a MZ - R91 Sony MiniDisc recorder, and with it you can make high-quality recordings,so I would really like to find a way to transfer them to PC with the best method. Tried till now by just connecting the MD's Line out to my Creative Audigy's Line in with an analog 3.5 '' jack cable and then recording the playing signal, but really - this is so poor. MiniDisc recordings deserve better transfer. Anyone have experience with this?

Best regards.

I have a fairly old recording MD Walkman (SP mode only), which produces recordings of very good quality providing I take great care to record in ManualREC mode (not the mode with Automatic Gain Control). I tend to use direct recording to PC more often these days especially now LAME VBR MP3 is almost exclusively my destination format.

I used analogue Line Out with a 3.5mm stereo jack to 3.5mm stereo jack lead and found quality to be very good recording to soundcard after carefully checking my levels to ensure I avoided clipping - often quickly setting to peak at about 50% (-6dBFS), which still provides ample signal-to-noise ratio and headroom to avoid clipping distortion. (With your Audigy, you might find that analogue recording at 48 kHz sampling rate is best as there are known issues with its hardware resampling every other sampling rate to 48 kHz on the fly, at least on its audio output. I'm sure there are forum posts you can search for regarding best analogue (analog in American spelling if you're searching, though Google search can be smart about alternative spellings) recording practices using this common soundcard).

I have used Line In recordings like these to make LAME VBR MP3s, though I always include a comment tag indicating that it has been transcoded from MiniDisc's ATRAC format (SP) via analogue line-in to LAME MP3.

Whilst I have heard of MD-compatible drives for PCs, used by radio editors to upload reports into editing consoles faster than real-time without transcoding, and these might be available on eBay, I suspect that the cost-effective approach to digital transfer would be the digital out on a HiFi separates MD player if you have one (this would presumably be S/P DIF over BNC cable or Plastic Optical Fibre) to a soundcard with S/P DIF input, though this would be the transfer of the ATRAC recording once it has been decoded to PCM - hence a source for transcoding albeit from a rather high-quality lossy source. As I recall, the Sony MD Walkman recorders only had an optical port on the Line In jack (not LineOut) which required a special 3.5mm plug that I never owned to utilise digital transfer, while the separates had both digital in and out.

Not only is it poor, it is the only way you can do it. SONY in its infinite wisdom has not allowed digital xfers of MD's until the new MZ-RH1 which can not only upload its own MD's but also legacy ones, like yours, digitally to the PC. That is how I do it. And I am doing it right now: xferring a recording of a bluegrass group I made earlier this evening.

So, you either continue real-time analog xfers, schmooz someone with a MZ-RH1 or go out and get one yourself. The latter is the best way to go. They supposedly have the best digital amp and pre-amp SONY has put in an MD unit. I sure love mine!

You may also want to check minidisc.org for support. They are quite helpful on minidiscs. For audio stuff stay here.

Thank you both for answering!

So as I see - I'm bound to remain on the current method or buy the RH1 (which obviously I would really really like) I did thought of buying an audiophile and improve the transfer but don't know... Anyway, thanks for the tips on recording!

The first thing I'll do is try to reach a radio employee here which mastered for CD(and radio broadcasting) some of my recordings made on MD and ask him how does he do the transfers. If I find something interesting, I'll tell you also.

Thanks for the support!

Hi, this is my first post on HA.

I also work at a radio station and find the same difficulties mentioned earlier about digital transfers from a Mini-Disc to PC. I use a Sony MZ-B100 Portable Minidisc Recorder. The Line-In recording method Dynamic posted above, is pretty much the way I transfer audio too. Not perfect, but I find line-noise is pretty low (almost imperceptible) for my journalistic purposes.

However, if you have access to a DAT (Digital Audio Tape) recorder, some of them do have digital inputs and outputs (and the DAT machine I use doesn't appear to have any digital copy-protection features that MDs do - though I can't be 100% certain of that). You could try using an Toslink connector (Phillips makes one, PH61043, that includes 3.5mm adapters for about US $15) to connect the digital out to a PC soundcard with a digital input. There are also external USB soundcards you can use that have optical inputs.

While this method doesn't use a MD, it seems to be the only all-digital method I could think of for high-quality audio transfers, if your original soundcard has only analog ports. Though it is by no means the cheapest way. Good luck.

Look on eBay.

Buy an old cheap stand-alone MD deck with digital output.

Connect it to any sound card with a bit-perfect digital input.

You may need an optical>coaxial converter if the MD deck's output is TOSlink and the sound card's input is SPDIF.

Result: bit perfect digital copy. Job done. (though re-inserting track marks is a pain - I don't know of an automatic way via this route).

Transcode to mp3 if you want. It will make it sound slightly worse, but given that atrac is already worse than comparable bitrate mp3 IMO it probably doesn't matter.

Cheers,
David.
P.S. - "bit perfect" is probably over stating it. Like mp3 decoders, not all atrac decoders are identical, but hopefully they're all "compliant".

@2BDecided:

Regarding the TOSlink method, I almost certain that my brother's CD and MD HiFi separates (Marantz and Sony respectively) were capable of sending track marks over the digital interconnection even for short silences or continuous/gapless CDs. It's years since I've done this, so I can't be sure, and both separates are currently mothballed. I don't know if digital soundcard inputs (S/P DIF is Sony/Philips Digital Interconnect Format, right?) can do this too and somehow store trackmarks or if I'm mistaken in my recollection.

You're right about trackmarks being sent.

Are there any PC solutions to read it at the input to the soundcard? Anyone?

Cheers,
David.

I thought I had read about one in 2003, but a search revealed only a solution for sending track marks from SPDIF to MiniDisc recorder using a momentary change of sampling rate or a momentary suspension of SPDIF output. (The other option was to burn a CD-RW and use standalone CD and MD decks).