ark

Hello, (i hope this is the right place in the forum for this question) I have a sony MZ-R90 minidisc player/recorder. I take vocal lessons (not western) and my primary use is recording the lessons for practice. I find the track marks *extremely* useful as I can isolate specific portions of the lesson (say every line) and repeat them for learning. In fact this is the main reason I love and cannot do without my minidisc player/recorder. Now the problem is I want to be able to archive the lessons away (with the track marks) on something other than minidiscs - like a hard-disk or CD/DVD (i dont want to have 50 minidiscs lying around as i learn more stuff). So I need a way to effectively transfer the contents of minidisc with those important track marks to my PC AND then at a later time when I need to "brush-up" a lesson again be able to transfer it back to the minidisc with those trackmarks. Ability to do titling of the specific portions easily would also come in extremely handy . I see that the mironics solution would solve this but I also see that xitel md-port (and maybe other xitel products?) may also solve it but the approaches and I guess the technologies seem quite different. If I am not mistaken, mironics controls the minidisc sort of like how a remote would do except it does the "hard work" and hence titling, track mark setup/reorganization can be done much easier on the PC. The xitel approach seems to be to allow transfer stuff via optical port and so I am not sure how much control it has. I see mention that the hi-fi link has a discrete mode that transfers track marks (cant it extract from minidisc?) - dont know if md-port has the same. The only minor reservation I have with Mironics is that it uses parallel port which seems a little arcane nowadays (also does it work in win2k and XP). The xitel uses USB which seems very nice. But the mironics software (the minidisc suite) seems quite detailed and seems to do titling, even reorganize track marks from the computer. I dont know whether the xitel has this level of customizability - my guess is no but i hope to be wrong. To end this long story, is mironics a better solution for my problem as it is more flexible and powerful in terms of what it can do with the minidisc compared to Xitel? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks! Actually even with that cheapo mic i was *very* pleasantly surprised with the clarity I got with manual recording level set. However, that was because it was in a quiet room with only me. I am sure with more background noise or for live shows, a better mic would be mandatory to get good quality. Arun

I recently bought the Sony MZ-R90 (an 5 year old model?) on e-bay and have a question regarding the recording level capabilities. The minisdisc.org equipment browser page for MZ-R90 mentions that this recorder has no microphone senstivity setting. I also read in a microphone seller's page, some mention about several Sony md recorders which doesnt have microphone sensitivity control and the MZ-R90 is listed as one. However, the manual does explain a manual recording level setting. I have tried it (with a cheapo mic) and it does seem to make a difference. The auto-level setting seems to have a very loud "pickup", but the manual recording setting is much better and adjusting the level seem to make a difference. The highest manual setting also doesnt seem as "noisy" as the auto-level (?). Is the microphone sensitivity setting that i see mention about later MD recorders different from this? If so, can someone explain whats the difference between microphone sensitivity control, and manual recording level? Thanks! Ark