jjbraunius

For me what killed the MD format the unwillingness of Sony to push it forward - they put all kinds of limitations on their new designs and music d/load and upload so as to make the technology clumsy and obsolete. I was looking to get one of their new ones and my buddy did until to his utter dismay he found out that he cannot upload recorded music but had to go through the audio inputs. That stopped me from going that route and went HD route instead. 2 years ago I bought an Archos Jukebox hd mp3 player and recorder and haven't looked back on minidisc. My portable minidisc unit then (Sharp) was skipping during recording at loud volumes and it was eating batteries like crazy. I've switched to HD-based recording and I can do at least 4 hrs of sound with my current setup on the rechargeable battery. As a musician I have many rehearsals and tracking sessions on MD so it doesn't seem like I'll abandon the technology right away, plus I have some music that I listen at home to on MD. I am stocked at the moment with 2 player/recorder decks and one player so for the long run this will stay. What really ticks me off is the way the MD never really made it as a backup solution until now, or altogether as the de facto portable format. It certainly had the potential but Sony stifled that by what seemed lack of interest in the product. The high prices of the units didn't help much either.

Jadeclaw - I think there's little hope here for the upload fix if Sony isn't interested in it. I believe Sony is still holding the standard hostage as they did with the home betamax while back... Well, if we're talking Wave record via the internal sound card architecture - that again depends on the quality of your sound card and its isolation from interference from the PC, especially the PC fan, so again on a cheapo card that equals crap. I believe Henris didn't mention anywhere that he'd be using the new generation of MD...

as far as I remember the thing on those units there was a way to set the recording type so you might be in the setting for stereo 2 track recording. I don't have the manual handy but that should be it -- look into the recording part of the manual or check to see it isn't in "rehearsal mode" - some of those had an option to play back a regular minidisk so you can play on top of that. Good luck!

I am trying to record my band's rehearsals and it is skipping like crazy...tried the sweater thing - still no good. Usually when I've had better luck it has been with a brand new MD and from the most expensive ones (Sony Gold, TDK Gold) and also when the MD was fully erased.

I have an audio card with TOSLINK in and out and an old school first edition Sony MD recorder that supports TOSLINK

depends on your sound card -- if you have a dedicated hi-fi or audio pro sound card you should be OK, in some cases even the good a/d converters make it sound better! Damn -- I am so pissed that Sony isn't letting upload/conversion to wav still be possible! That is a load of bull! Maybe the reason is that Sony is also a record company and not just audio manufacturer anymore!

Any audio stereo editor/recorder will do the job in this case. Audacity is free so you might want to start with that. You might need to get the lame mp3 encoder/decoder if you want to make mp3s of your recordings. You can purchase the expanded versions of Musicmatch Jukebox and Real Player One -- they both let you record from any source and convert the file straight to mp3 or real audio file. You get limited editing on these... You can try windows media producer - I think it is free download via microsoft's site. Magix Audio or some of the other Magix programs will do the job, but I believe once you buy them you have to dish out extra $$$$ for the mp3 encoding so keep that in mind. If you can afford Steinberg Wavelab, Cool Edit Pro or Sound Forge -- they'll do much better job. lso your quality won't be too great cause your built in PC card is usually a cheapo piece of garbage. You might want to start looking into getting decent audio card if you're trying to do this right.

Just select your audio cards output to be "Wav" or "Mixer" and then you can hookup any external audio source to the line out of your PC. Depending on your soundcard you'd get variable results. I used to get Real Audio files when I subscribed to Emusic - what you could do is use Real One player and burn CDs directly within it so you might want to look into that option if you're downloading the files and it is not real time streaming. You can also record your real time stream onto your PC and transfer it later -- you just have to pick the right source in the Control Panel, Sounds and Audio Devices, Audio, Recording. With a bit of trial and error you'd get it.

I'd suggest CoolEdit as well for minor fixes. You might also have some minor luck with eq if you only need to hit certain frequencies -- see if you can narrow them via spectometer

if this is the four track version of the minidisk format then you need a special minidisk that handles that, not any audio store one would work. I think you can get one from Guitar Center. Here is a link to what you need http://www.musiciansfriend.com/srs7/sid=04...ase_pid/240645/