Help! Complex Problem Involving Md Deck And S/pdif

[nebben123]

this is a stumper.

the other night, i recorded a live show onto a disc in sp mode. somehow, i accidentally did an "erase disc" but immediately realised my mistake. so when i got home, i did the toc cloning procedure to recover the blank disc. now when i play the disc, i can hear the music i recorded once again.

however, for some reason this disc refuses to send a signal out over the s/pdif optical port of my deck. another disc that i used to record the first part of the same show (but that i didn't erase and re-toc) works fine over the s/pdif, as does the cd section of my md deck (it's a sony mxd-d400).

is there ANY technical reason why this fixed disc will not output over my s/pdif optical interface??? i can't figure out how to put it on my computer now, because the digital input on my ibook doesn't see a signal when i play this disc.

it makes no sense to me. anybody? help?

ben

[dex Otaku]

Hm. I have very little experience with copying MDs via the optical out, but perhaps - perhaps the TOC contains the SCMS info which the player sends out as part of the stream when playing.

Does your ibook tell you specific errors like "NO COPY" on an MD when you try to dupe what SCMS id's as a copy?

I suppose the important thing is - what was the source of the TOC you wrote onto it? A disc you filled yourself, with one track of full disc-length? Or something else that may be id'd as a copy already by SCMS?

For that matter, does your ibook's optical in even acknowledge SCMS?

This is grasping at straws, I know .. but that's about as far as my ideas go for this.

[nebben123]

Hm.  I have very little experience with copying MDs via the optical out, but perhaps - perhaps the TOC contains the SCMS info which the player sends out as part of the stream when playing.

Does your ibook tell you specific errors like "NO COPY" on an MD when you try to dupe what SCMS id's as a copy? 

I suppose the important thing is - what was the source of the TOC you wrote onto it?  A disc you filled yourself, with one track of full disc-length?  Or something else that may be id'd as a copy already by SCMS?

For that matter, does your ibook's optical in even acknowledge SCMS?

This is grasping at straws, I know .. but that's about as far as my ideas go for this.

←

I know... it's a puzzler. The disc I copied the TOC from was a blank disc of the same length, containing one track that filled the disc. As far as I know, it shouldn't have any SCMS on it.

I'm thinking the problem is not with my iBook but with my Sony deck. I don't think the deck is sending out a signal at all when playing this disc. I mean, there's a red light on the optical out, but it must be sending zero's or something, because all my iBook picks up is silence. The CD section, and all other MDs, work fine.

Right now my only hope is an old Sony deck that a friend of mine has. It's a pro model, the slim kind used at radio stations... I'm thinking if there is some weird SCMS going on, the pro deck will just ignore it and give me a digital output anyway. If that works, then at least I'll know what the problem is.

Thanks for your insight.

Ben

[dex Otaku]

No problem, sorry I couldn't suggest some more helpful..

Perhaps.. just perhaps.. your deck can somehow tell that the TOC has been copied, and refuses to play over optical because of this. Just a though, since I don't actually know if this would be possible.

[nebben123]

I think I figured it out.

When I created the disc with the "dummy" TOC on it, I didn't check to see what input mode my deck was in, since I was just recording silence. Turns out, I had it on "optical in" (digital) mode. So when I copied this TOC to the disc I wanted to recover and played it, the deck thought I was trying to play a disc that had been recorded digitally (there's obviously some flag for this in the TOC)... so it prevented me from grabbing the digital data off the disc again (thanks scms) by disabling the optical out.

So I just made another dummy TOC using analog input, copied that over to my disc, and it once again allowed me to copy the disc since analog to digital copies are allowed with scms.

How retarded is that?

Ben

[dex Otaku]

When I created the disc with the "dummy" TOC on it, I didn't check to see what input mode my deck was in, since I was just recording silence. Turns out, I had it on "optical in" (digital) mode. So when I copied this TOC to the disc I wanted to recover and played it, the deck thought I was trying to play a disc that had been recorded digitally (there's obviously some flag for this in the TOC)... so it prevented me from grabbing the digital data off the disc again (thanks scms) by disabling the optical out.

Ahhh. Interesting - so the SCMS info gets transferred with the TOC, not just audio data. I didn't know that.

[Guest tony wong]

I did remember this but I am not sure(I have found this info on net b4) :

it's a weird thing, that, some people point out on MD(many years ago when MD was not popular) is that, it include SCMS not only on audio stream

but also on the TOC

well on MD, SCMS is a double checking

well, anyway, SCMS only have to be inside of the audio stream

the inclusion of such data in something like TOC is not necessary