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Hi All, I normally get the urge to fiddle with Minidisc once a year. Last year the urge lasted only a few days. The reason was that I got frustrated with the recording process. I could not find any decent music player on Linux that would let me have 2 seconds between each track for the auto trackmark insert. I eventually settled on trying foobar2000 on a WINE (a Windows emulator) which worked but seemed like "yak shaving" (eg. a lot of effort to do something simple). So here in 2013, I felt the urge again but this time I wanted to solve this problem. So over this weekend I built a neat little "mp3-to-MD recording station". What this consists of is a "small form factor" PC running Debian Linux. I use a console-based music player called "mocp" for playing the tracks. I use digital optical for the MD connection. Digital optical means I don't have to fiddle with recording levels and I can use syncro-record. This makes it as "unattended" as possible right now. I can start off playing a playlist and then return to a freshly burnt disc in an hour. What is interesting is a couple of things: 1. I can run the computer "headless" so there does not have to be a monitor or keyboard attached. I can just ssh to it from another PC and control it from there. I see the same mocp interface but just in a terminal window. Also it is just "one button" power on and off. I can press the power button to turn on and within 30 seconds it is ready to rock. 2. The maintainer of the "mocp" software added a feature to include a user-configurable pause between tracks just for me. (I found 3000ms was best) He literally coded in the feature within 24 hours of me making a request. That is the power of opensource software! Here are some photos: http://opticalgarbage.com/minidisc/image/2-IMG_20130527_090642.jpg http://opticalgarbage.com/minidisc/image/3-IMG_20130527_090710.jpg http://opticalgarbage.com/minidisc/image/1-IMG_20130525_083016.jpg I really like doing things on a budget and not overspending. This solution used hardware I already had. The Compaq Deskpro EN is now obsolete and can be bought for £10-£15 (1Ghz Pentium III, 384M, 20G HDD), I used a Trust-brand Digital audio PCI card for the digital optical connection (£5-15). The Sony MZ-N710 is a secondhand unit which no longer accepts power from a gumstick (£10-15) so is a good "record-only" unit. I recorded "Daft Punk - Random Access Memories" as my test disc (in SP recording mode) and it reminded me of how great MD can sound. Daft Punk used traditional analogue recording means where possible in this album so I thought it would a good candidate for an MD test. Although I prefer to record from mp3, I find that recording via mp3 this way actually "cleans up" the source a little. Maybe a little crazy but it works for me. I listen back on a Sony MZ-R900 portable. Theres a couple of things with this setup that can can be better: 1. I'd like a little series of "beeps" or something from the PC when the playlist has finished. As running headless means you don't know when it's done unless actively monitoring it. My goal was as little attendance as possible. 2. I'd like it to automount a USB stick when inserted. If you see on the back, I added a USB2 2-port PCI card to accept USB storage. Right now I have to mount them manually. I'm sure this is easily solved within software. I might look into adapting another lowcost PC like a Raspberry PI for this project. Sadly though it does not have digital optical out although I might be able to do something with a Xitel DG2. Maybe I'll save that project for the 2014 "MD urge" :-) Anyhow just felt like sharing. I documented the set-up so if anyone is interested in trying it then I can help.