Recording Old Vinyl To Cd Via Hi-md

[vsander]

I'm a newbie! Just bought the mz-nhf800 because I was told that I can use it for a) recording live (eg my voice lessons and piano accompaniments) and copying my extensive vinyl collection to cd via the md. Sales reps told me this is possible but I have no idea how to go about it. Please help!

[Christopher]

Welcome to the forums, vsander.

To record with a microphone, you can either employ a standard mic that will plug into the microphone in, or employ a battery box and the like and go through the line in. I would suggest the latter if you're into serious recording, or just a standard mic if you wish to experiment. Run some searches and read some topics at our Live Recording forum and you'll learn a great deal.

Vinyl collection, eh? Well, what "outs" does your record player have [rca, etc]?

[Valder]

I have been pondering this as well as I have about 400+ albums and there are a few on there I would like to get them on my PC.

Can you record through the line in on the MD and still transfer it to the PC?

Valder

[streaml1ne]

I have been pondering this as well as I have about 400+ albums and there are a few on there I would like to get them on my PC.

Can you record through the line in on the MD and still transfer it to the PC?

Valder

←

Yes you can. It appears the essential/faq section has been mostly obliterated during the upgrade to this beta forum software. There were instructions in there for uploading to the PC. Essentially you can make your recording with the MD then use Sonic Stage v2+ to upload the track to PC. Then get yourself a copy of HiMDRender www.marcnetsystems.co.uk find the uploaded file and 'render' it to wav. Hopefully the FAQ section will return in full force soon

[Valder]

Cool. Then I also assume that you can adjust the recording level on the HiMD (yeah I never made a recording with a protable MD). Then all the original poster has to do is then hook the Hi-MD to one of his outputs on his Preamp/Receiver and adjust the levels on the MD unit and record away.

For those to young out there for vinyl the output of a turntable needs to go through a phono preamp first before listening to it or recording the output.

Valder

[streaml1ne]

Cool. Then I also assume that you can adjust the recording level on the HiMD (yeah I never made a recording with a protable MD). Then all the original poster has to do is then hook the Hi-MD to one of his outputs on his Preamp/Receiver and adjust the levels on the MD unit and record away.

For those to young out there for vinyl the output of a turntable needs to go through a phono preamp first before listening to it or recording the output.  

Valder

←

Yep, you can do that. Start recording on the MD, pause it, navigate through the menus to REC Set -> RECVolume and adjust accordingly then unpause and start (re)playing your vinyl.

Edited January 4, 2005 by streaml1ne

[Christopher]

Hopefully the FAQ section will return in full force soon 

←

Yes it shall. The board upgrade did not destroy those posts - we lost those topics when we were getting slammed by that worm. I was able to save alot of the information on them, though..

[streaml1ne]

Yes it shall. The board upgrade did not destroy those posts - we lost those topics when we were getting slammed by that worm. I was able to save alot of the information on them, though..

←

Need me to recreate the spectral graph topic?

[insurgente]

i'm interested in this topic too as i intend to record some of mine and other people's vinyl onto MD

[atrain]

if you have the hard disk space & the time i'd advise recording to a pc via a program like audacity or soundforge & saving as wav files. they can then be converted to the himd & also recorded on the cd as a backup.

[vsander]

Welcome to the forums, vsander.

To record with a microphone, you can either employ a standard mic that will plug into the microphone in, or employ a battery box and the like and go through the line in. I would suggest the latter if you're into serious recording, or just a standard mic if you wish to experiment. Run some searches and read some topics at our Live Recording forum and you'll learn a great deal.

Vinyl collection, eh? Well, what "outs" does your record player have [rca, etc]?

←

I am using a "Y" rca miniplug cable into the MD and have recorded one LP, which worked fine (haven't tried the Mic as I don't yet have one), and it sounds great on the MD, but I am stuck at the burn-to-cd stage, and I guess I'll have to bite the bullet and download "HIMDRender". But BoyOBoy there's a lot of information to digest at once! It would be great if I could just run my stereo right into the computer but it's logistically so impractical; hence the quest for MD transfer; why does sony have to make it so difficult!

I only hope that HIMDRender is not too complicated!

[Slooterdog]

Hey there,

well I have done quite a bit of Vinyl to CD-R work and have found the results to be very good. There is no reason why you couldn't have great success with vinyl to MD.

My technique however, while producing great sound, is slow and labour intensive.

I first record from my turntable to MD via my stereo amp in one a continuous file and worry about breaking it up later. This is the easy part. That is, I run a digital out (or RCA) from my amp into my MD recorder (an old and large component style unit), set the levels on the MD recorder and simply record.

I then connect the minidisc to my PC via an audio capture card 'Edirol UA-20' and save the file to 'Music Maker 7' (a cheap version of Cubase or such) and from there I can delicately break the file up, remove much of the noise and alter volume levels and so on. I have not done vinyl to CD or MD since getting my Hi-MD recorder so am not sure about USB connections as yet.

Next, I transfer the files to 'Steinberg clean 4.0' which I use to remove the last of the pop, hiss, crackle and so on.

Finally, I enter the song details and burn the song to disc!

Phew, what a mission...and yeah it is a real hassle, but at least at the end of it I get a sweet sounding and well structured CD-R or MD.

[streaml1ne]

I am using a "Y" rca miniplug cable into the MD and have recorded one LP, which worked fine (haven't tried the Mic as I don't yet have one), and it sounds great on the MD, but I am stuck at the burn-to-cd stage, and I guess I'll have to bite the bullet and download "HIMDRender".  But BoyOBoy there's a lot of information to digest at once!  It would be great if I could just run my stereo right into the computer but it's logistically so impractical; hence the quest for MD transfer; why does sony have to make it so difficult!

I only hope that HIMDRender is not too complicated!

←

vsander, take a look at this:

http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=7436

[dex Otaku]

I first record from my turntable to MD via my stereo amp in one a continuous file and worry about breaking it up later. This is the easy part. That is, I run a digital out (or RCA) from my amp into my MD recorder (an old and large component style unit), set the levels on the MD recorder and simply record.

I then connect the minidisc to my PC via an audio capture card 'Edirol UA-20' and save the file to 'Music Maker 7' (a cheap version of Cubase or such) and from there I can delicately break the file up, remove much of the noise and alter volume levels and so on. I have not done vinyl to CD or MD since getting my Hi-MD recorder so am not sure about USB connections as yet.

←

Once again - you're adding an entire extra step that need not even be there, and is actually passing the audio through a generation of lossy compression.

Why not just run a cable from your phono preamp to your computer, and skip the MD step entirely, saving you a completely unnecessary repetition of virtually the same task [which is also incurring a loss on the signal]?

On the other hand - if your goal is to have a true-SP recording on MD, then stick with this method. Otherwise, you're just wasting your time and degrading the signal more than you probably intend to by passing it through the MD stage first.

[And yes - I do realise that people don't always or even often have their turntable within reach of their computer. If your reasoning for probably adding another 30% to the time it takes to do this is that your stereo system is in another room.. well, I'd probably consider moving the 'puter to the stereo to dump a bunch of LPs. The 5 minutes it takes to move the 'puter once is probably a lot less than the extra several hours you'll be sitting there waiting for an extraneous realtime pass of each recording.]

edit:

I do note that you're going digital from the MD to the computer. The above is said assuming that your computer has quality enough A/D to make the difference worth it.

Edited January 18, 2005 by dex Otaku

[Slooterdog]

Yeah, you are right, it is time consuming and does indeed mean another transfer. But it is easy enuff for me to just leave the vinyl recording to MD while I watch a movie or somesuch and, as you rightly point out, it saves me the bother of moving the computer or the stereo.

With regards to the transfer, I am not bothered by the minimal loss incurred, it is not noticable (to my ears anyway!).

It is food for thought though, a large scale LP dump direct to the PC....hmmm

Cheers Slooter.

[nhcbybik]

I have the same question. I like the quality my old-style minidisc deck gives and so wanted to get my vinyl onto PC in the least-compressed current ATRAC format, so I could use the PC as a music library. I intended to download the (relatively) large ATRAC files to a net walkman and possibly to wirelessly stream it to the hi-fi.

After nagging Sony a lot I was told that Sound Forge won't convert analog signal to ATRAC and the only streamer that supports ATRAC is Sony's own, which will only run with a VAIO PC. It seems that Sony barely make ATRAC available for people to use except as firmware in their own kit (which I suppose made sense until the net walkman came along).

My question now is whether I can get equivalent quality from a different codec - perhaps WAV?

Alternatively can I use some other conversion software to convert analog to a full size CD file (is this PCM?) and then Sonic Stage (as supplied with the net walkman) to compress in ATRAC (against the day when I get a VAIO or someone produces a streamer that will support it and to download to a net walkman in the meantime?

I would like to hear my vinyl on a net walkman, but I don't want to spend forever doing it or create a library that I cannot use for anything else. Any help with this would be appreciated - it's difficult to find much out from Sony.....

Once again - you're adding an entire extra step that need not even be there, and is actually passing the audio through a generation of lossy compression. 

Why not just run a cable from your phono preamp to your computer, and skip the MD step entirely, saving you a completely unnecessary repetition of virtually the same task [which is also incurring a loss on the signal]?

On the other hand - if your goal is to have a true-SP recording on MD, then stick with this method.  Otherwise, you're just wasting your time and degrading the signal more than you probably intend to by passing it through the MD stage first.

[And yes - I do realise that people don't always or even often have their turntable within reach of their computer.   If you're reasoning for probably adding another 30% to the time it takes to do this is that your stereo system is in another room.. wel, I'd probably consider moving the 'puter to the stereo to dump a bunch of LPs.  The 5 minutes it takes to move the 'puter once is probably a lot less than the extra several hours you'll be sitting there waiting for an extraneous realtime pass of each recording.]

edit:

I do note that you're going digital from the MD to the computer.  The above is said assuming that your computer has quality enough A/D to make the difference worth it.

←

[dex Otaku]

After nagging Sony a lot I was told that Sound Forge won't convert analog signal to ATRAC and the only streamer that supports ATRAC is Sony's own, which will only run with a VAIO PC. It seems that Sony barely make ATRAC available for people to use except as firmware in their own kit (which I suppose made sense until the net walkman came along).

There actually is an ATRAC codec to be used with SF7 and above, if I'm not mistaken. It might be ATRAC3 [the LP modes]. Of course, you have to buy it.

My question now is whether I can get equivalent quality from a different codec - perhaps WAV?

WAV is not a codec. WAV is a file container format that can be used to store audio in virtually any audio format, as well as metadata such as track tags, though these are not often used on WAV files and at best are poorly-supported by most software.

What people normally refer to as WAV is in fact PCM audio - uncompressed linear PCM. CD audio uses PCM, as do DAT, HiMD [in PCM mode], DVD, Laserdisc, &c.

PCM is not lossily-compressed, and therefore if you are looking to colour the sound to your liking - which is what preferring to record to MD first rather than directly onto your computer [which records in PCM] is - is not the format you're looking for.

Alternatively can I use some other conversion software to convert analog to a full size CD file (is this PCM?) and then Sonic Stage (as supplied with the net walkman) to compress in ATRAC (against the day when I get a VAIO or someone produces a streamer that will support it and to download to a net walkman in the meantime?

I'm not exactly clear on why you want to do this, but yes, you can. Just record directly on your computer from whatever source you're using, burn the resulting PCM WAV file to a CD or CD image, then rip it with SonicStage. You could also simply import the WAV files into SonicStage and run the conversion manually.

SS, however, does not support ATRAC [sP] encoding. The best you could do there is HiSP, which is in its first generation and actually lags slightly behind SP in terms of quality.

Of course, you can't play HiSP tracks on netMDs. The best encoding you can do with SS that is netMD compatible is LP2, and SS's LP2 encoder is not nearly as good as the current-generation hardware codec in MD and netMD players.

I would like to hear my vinyl on a net walkman, but I don't want to spend forever doing it or create a library that I cannot use for anything else. Any help with this would be appreciated - it's difficult to find much out from Sony.....

Creating a library that you can't use for anything else is exactly what SonicStage is about.

Sony has good reason to keep their codecs proprietary and closed.

Money.

First, they patent their algorithms. Then with the help of laws that make it illegal to reverse-engineer such things regardless of whether it's for commercial purposes or not, they basically have a total stranglehold over who gets to use it.

Everyone who makes equipment for ATRAC playback has to pay Sony for the privelege to do so. This is the first place they make money from it [or at least recover development costs in the early stages].

The second place, and this is what companies like Sony set their sights on, is from consumers. If the format take off, and people start buying the equipment and the software, then Sony stands to make a -lot- of money from it. They even make money from the equipment that other manufacturers make using the liscensed codec [and probably hardware components as well].

If they release the codec freely, they lose control over who gets the money for it.

Furthermore, now that DRM is built into it, releasing the codec publicly would wildly encourage the cracking of their DRM schemes.

It's all about control and who gets the money in the end.

Sony [and most other corporations on earth, really] could care less about having a versatile, open, usable format with a large user base if they're not going to make money from it.

Instead they work with the attitude that maintaining that stranglehold is good, with the hope that their product will just magically be chosen by everyone, become embedded, and then become ubiquitous.

Sony fail to realise that consumers are not all stupid. Furthermore, they fail to realise the point of even greater importance: that stupid consumers will not put up with the kind of crap they're trying to pull with things like DRM for long.

Or at least, that's my opinion.

[mimichris]

I record some *.wav my old vinyls while passing by the PC, with the tape recorder of my sound card " Sound Blaster ", that I connect to my ampli, then while transforming these files *.wav in Atrac3+ (or other by choice) with SonicStage on my MD, I also transform these files *.wav in CD with my software of engraving Easy CD Creator.

I use " Sound Forge " to suppress noises of streaks of the vinyl.

The gotten quality is excellent.