minidisc1978

Hi there! I am returning to the world of MD after more than 12 years away and have picked up a couple of NetMD recorders (a NZ-N505 + NZ-710) and I also have an MXD-D40 deck allowing direct CD->MD dubbing. Maybe my memory is fooling me, but I didn't remember what a horror show SonicStage was. Wow.... I had planned to copy a load of compilation CDs to FLAC and automate some kind of workflow to burn to MD. Needless to say I have hit a few snags. One is the titling issue, SS not having a licence for CDDB anymore, WAVs not containing metadata, etc. So I would love to test out your utility. Even more so, because.... I have a lot of double albums needing gapless playback, very close to 80 mins each. So, in theory, 2x80 min CDs should fit on to a 80min MD in LP2 mode - right? Well.. not so easy it seems. Something is going on with SS.... I don't quite get the full capacity out of the MD - I don't know why - it is approx 35-40 tracks with fairly long titles. Are the titles eating in to the free space, or is SS just less efficient than recording via line-in/direct? I have used hours trying to solve this today. The last track of an CD I have here is 5:19 mins in duration, and I should have enough room on the MD - but after writing the previous tracks I end up with (2:37 in SP mode) 4 seconds short.. (even though the total of the CDs is like 79 mins and a few seconds). VERY IRRITATING! So, my next plan, is to copy from CD to MD directly in the MXD-D40 deck at LP2 - this works - and much easier to handle gapless playback - but, of course, I don't get any track titles. So, your utility script could be excellent to do a post-burn titling job on the PC. I will give it a try over the weekend and let you know how I get on! P.S. Running SS43Ultimate on Win 10 64bit. Works fairy well, but sometimes freezes when I initialise/erase a disk. Update: Tried with 'no titles', just a running number in the title field - but, exactly same issue, so it is not the title lengths causing issue.

This is an interesting topic, and even more so when it comes to GAPLESS playback. I have a load of compilation albums which are mixed and need to be transferred without gaps. I have the originals on my HD as FLAC lossless with metadata. To get these in to SS and transferred to MD without gaps, I have tried to first convert to losseless WMA - but that introduces a milli-second gap which is highly annoying. Converting the FLAC to WAV first, in to SS, and then to MD works fine - but I lose the metadata and get a job to do manually fixing the tracknames. Any ideas how to fine tune this? I am not sure if it is an issue with the FLAC->WMA encoding, or WMA->ATRAC3 encoding... I am using media monkey to convert to WMA.