marksturdy

Yep, that's just what I'm doing! It sounds OK, probably better than if I'd just gone MDportable line out > analogue line-in on my old soundcard. Obviously the quality of LP recordings isn't so good anyway, so there's less at stake in a way!

Just an update on this - I managed to score a Sharp MD-R1 MKII player from Ebay for about £15, and an Emu 0404 for about £40, and have since been using the setup to optically transfer a huge backlog of minidiscs. The results have been great - there are quite a few recordings that have been brought back from the dead as the original signal was just too quiet and as a result had previously picked up unmanagebale amounts of noise through an analogue transfer. Only problem is that the MD-R1 doesn't seem keen to play LP discs. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has a solution to this. (Incidentally, as my new soundcard has an optical output but not an analogue mini-jack one, I've been using the Optical In and phone socket on my Sony Net-MD as a makeshift Digital to Analogue converter to link the soundcard up to my amp. Probably not the best use of the technology, but it works!)

Thanks for all the suggestions guys. I now have a couple of units in my sights on Ebay - will let you know how I get on!

Yes, this is the thing. It seems that a lot of the very early MD machines had optical out, but a lot of those are collector's items in their own right. I don't really care about owning a piece of consumer electronics history, I just want something I can plug into the SPDIF on my soundcard! Although both would be pretty cool...

I'm trying to find an MD player with an optical output. Can anyone recommend a cheap'n'cheerful model to me? It seems to be quite a rare feature these days. Other features aren't important really - if there's an old model I can pick up on Ebay for a few beans (or even buy from anyone on this forum who wants to sell theirs...) then I'd be more than happy.

Thanks guys - I will try and get hold of a deck with digital out. As an aside, I've been turning the volume of my player (a Sony Net MD MZ-N510) up to the max and it just doesn't have enough power to boost these signals to a decent level. Do different players have different maximum volumes, or is top volume on one deck going to be the same as top volume on any other?

It's a fairly standard on-board soundcard - don't know the exact type but it's Creative, 2003 vintage. I've been sampling at 44100hz, 16 bit. I think Greenmachine may have hit the nail on the head here, thanks everyone!

SP as far as I can tell. (Is that right? Let me know if it sounds like I'm talking crap) I do know that the recording process involved bouncing the audio between a couple of different mindisc players. Maybe the artefacts arose at that stage?

Another question here, maybe someone will be able to enlighten me. I've got a couple of live recordings on MD where the signal is very, very weak - to the extent that you've got to turn it up VERY loud to even detect whether there's any music on there at all. I've attempted to rescue these recordings by transferring them onto the PC and normalising them in CoolEdit. However, boosting them in that way obviously means that the background noise is boosted along with the signal, and you're no better off than when you started. Is it possible that the background noise, rather than being inherent to the actual recording, is being picked up during the transferring process via my line-in lead and fairly ropey soundcard? If so, is there a way of boosting the original signal in a way that doesn't pick up deafening amounts of hiss?

Hello people. New here, so be gentle with me! I'm currently transferring some old tracks (precise origin unknown, except that they're home studio recordings circa 1999, standard play, stereo) from an old mindisc onto my PC. The problem I'm having is that the higher frequencies (and this is especially noticeable on cymbals) seem to be distorted by a strange 'squishing' effect, which sounds kind of like (but isn't) badly-applied digital noise reduction. Is anyone else familiar with this syndrome? Is there a way of getting rid of it other than EQing the track so the high frequencies in general are less audible?