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Hello and thanks for keeping the MD dream alive!

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sunder56

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You guysl rock. I'm very happy to have found such an amazing resource on the interwebs. I've been a huge MD fan since the late 90s and have several different units. I'm still looking for that elusive PC deck that would fit into a 5 1/4" bay - though I'm thinking such a thing has gone the way of the unicorn. I did find a picture of an MD deck for the PC from years ago that was used for data storage and if I remember correctly it was only available in Japan in limited quantities. Has anyone ever seen or heard of something like this?

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Funny you should ask that. I think my MDS-PC3 looks like it might be 51/4"-drive-sized. They might have been intending to sell it as a drive then changed their mind at last minute. It doesn't really have the right form factor but one of these days I might actually try it.

Head units look about the same size (the DIN casing is a bit closer to a PC-insertable drive), and run off 12V. However they don't really connect properly to anything. Someone put one in a PC box.

Forget the drives listed here - they are MD Data. And none of them is MDLP, either***. A Hi-MD drive might have actually gotten used, but as you probably know HiMD's are rather heavily protected with encryption.

*** sorry, except for the MDM-111's successor which I cannot find anywhere as a separate product - someone here on the board has a Sony computer (tower, not notebook) with a built in MD drive. I don't remember what it's called. However you still cannot get data from music recorded on it, sigh.

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Good to know sfbp. I've been kicking around the idea of modifying a car MD deck for use in a PC, but so far I've only come across units that wouidln't meet the form factor of a 5 1/4" basy. My current plan (paper only right now) is to mount a car deck vertically rather than horizontally in a PC utilizing a PC case with 5, 5 1/4" bays. It would take a bit of modificaiton to the 5 1/4" inch bays to mount vertical slots and I would also like to install 1 or 2 CD/DVD/BD units vertically along side the MD car deck. Most car decks are just over 7" wide and the power requirements look like it could be possible. I still need to find a deck that is strictly a head unit with no amp and the biggest obstacle of all will be converting the audio (data) signal into something a PC will recogniz/accept via SATA or IDE ports or even perhaps USB for a nice clean install. The dream is full integration in to the PC, but perhaps the easiest way to go is to come up with a wiring harness to a discerete sound card auxillary ports. Yet another thing to look into.

Likely a pipe dream, I know, but I'm going to keep looking into it until I hit a big brick wall. I'll let you all know how it goes.

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I just took the lid off the PC3. It really does look remarkably like it should fit. Optical and Analogue in and out (4 connectors), headphone, PS/2 for PCLink (M-Crew) and power.

One of the neat features is that you can daisy chain these devices - record on the MD but still send the optical out to something else. That applies to any deck with both optical in and out, of course. And the PC3 allows you up to +18dB input gain, which is quite useful.

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Looks like the MDS-NT1 has built in USB capability. It would be very easy to wire up the USB port on the unit to a free USB header on any mother board. Removing the shell/case may very well chop it down from almost 6" to 5 1/4", but it's to hard to tell from the pictures I've found thus far. Tack on some drive bay rails and you'd be in business. The only problem is power......

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I don't think this deck does what you want. No NetMD device (except the RH1 5 years later) allows data to travel UP the USB cable with music on it. And this device has no other digital I/O.

I actually don't understand why they came out with this device. If it did what you want, there would have been people jumping up and down, dancing in the streets.

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Indeed. I found a Sony PC that has a built in MD drive, having difficulties translating the manual, but if i does what I hope it does, then I might just pay a pretty penny for one and rip it out for a custom install in my PC. Boggles the mind why Sony of all companies never made PC compatible drive - every MD person I've met is usually pretty tech savvy/PC savvy.

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It *still* won't do what you want. Sigh. The whole paradigm is about getting music to flow from the pc to the md, and for it to be non-copyable when it gets there. Even the MD data disks are different, and won't play back in a conventional MD. Normal MD disks can *play* in an MD data drive but not be recorded there.

They were quite thorough to make sure there's no loophole. I can't be sure about others here, but I for one have gone through the same logic as you, looking for it. Functionality-wise, the closest you can get is the Pro (MDS-E series) decks or PCLink + M-Crew.

What you *can* do is to build a library with SonicStage (and there's a way to decrypt the uploaded stuff which you may have found out about, it's called the File Conversion Tool). Uploaded (using the MZ-RH1) decrypted files can be edited by the Sony version of Sound Forge which is not quite free, but a valuable tool nonetheless. It also knows how to WRITE files to NetMD/USB. So (recently) does the Linux-minidisc project.

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