From MiniDisc to MAC with External Sound Card?

[jwpanama]

I just bought a minidisc and i use both pc and mac, it seems that i cannot transfer my files to the mac, what external sound card can I get to take care of this problem? or is there a solution?

[1kyle]

I just bought a minidisc and i use both pc and mac, it seems that i cannot transfer my files to the mac, what external sound card can I get to take care of this problem? or is there a solution?

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If you can convert / store your music files on the PC as WAV then these should be copyable to the Mac --just copy as data via an external USB / CD / DVD etc.

Otherwise an analog recording in real time to your mac with whatever recording software that platform has is one way to do it.

Another possibility is if both computers have decent sound cards in them is to connect the Optical Out of the PC's sound card to the Optical In of the Mac and record that way. (Real time again I'm afraid).

If you don't have the Optical connections on both sound cards then connect the LINE OUT to LINE IN / AUX . I'd avoid using the headphone and microphone connectors on the computers.

Another method (better in my view) and certainly much quicker as well is to burn your files to a CD-RW (re-useable so you don't have to waste a lot of CD's for this purpose) on the PC --then rip the sound from the CD using the Mac --this will be a lot quicker than real time and avoids hassles due to poor quality sound cards.

If you are a bit more computer savy you can mount the CD on the PC as a "Virtual Drive" using Nero --burn to that CD.

To do this use DRIVE IMAGE which is included in the Nero package. It uses part of your Hard Disk like a CD and Windows is "Poodle-Faked" into thinking it has another CD drive attached.

Connect the Mac and PC together via network cards like a Home LAN and then you can "Share" the virtual CD with the mac and rip without even having to use a "physical CD".

Note that after you've "burned" 1 CD this way you'll have to demount the drive and re-mount it again to create your 2nd / 3rd etc depending on how many files you have to transfer. The instructions in the DRIVE IMAGE software are quite good.

You won't get ATRAC3 files to the Mac -- and even if you could there's no way to play them.

I don't know anything about MP3's or other various codecs such as OGG etc either as I don't use them so I can't help there.

Note that there just might be some basic MD support in future for the Mac -- you'll have to check the latest news and Google.

PCM / WAV should be OK as it's "Non DRM'ed" and non encrypted. I'm sure codecs for playing WAV files exist for the Mac platform.

Cheers

-K

Edited July 27, 2005 by 1kyle

[RKHambridge]

I just bought a minidisc and i use both pc and mac, it seems that i cannot transfer my files to the mac, what external sound card can I get to take care of this problem? or is there a solution?

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I do my transfers in real time (ie analogue), using Audio Recorder (available FREE thru VersionTracker).

Richard

(Mac G4; OSX 10.2.8)