USB > MD recording options in 2013? (any SP w/o DRM?)

[snoutmeat]

Greetings!

My 4 year-old son found my big box of MD stuff (an MZ-R2, MZ-R50, MZ-N505, and a whole bunch of discs). He loves the format, and now that I've had the chance to re-listen to many of my old recordings, I have rediscovered the great sound quality that the format provides. It's such a shame that Sony chose to have such restrictive Digital Rights Management on its software; people today might be saying "I have 10,000 ATRAC songs on my PC" and "What's MP3?" instead of vice versa...but that's for another thread.

So, here's the deal: my son wants to make some new "mix discs". We're making one right now as I type this, 3-5 minutes at a time, on the home stereo, in real time (vinyl > MD). But this is 2013, and much of my music is now on my computer. I would love to be able to quickly make MD mixes on my PC. As far as I can tell, these are my two options:

--Simple Burner (along with Nero) -- make a disc image in Nero, mount the image, and then use Simple Burner. Works well and quickly, and no DRM issues, but...it only works in LP2, and that mode is not supported by the MZ-R2 or MZ-R50

--Sonic Stage -- works, but has DRM (file "check out" and a limited number of copies), and also apparently puts a lot of transcoded files on the PC's hard drive.

Am I missing anything? I've read about the Sony plugin for Real Player, but whenever I try installing the plugin into Real Player, the Real Player software tells me that it's already using the latest version of the software, implying that Real Player already has the plugin built in? Real Player won't see my MZ-N505 when it's plugged in to the computer, so I haven't been able to explore this option.

I'd really love a solution that lets me record from my PC to my MD via USB in SP mode for compatibility with all of my players and without DRM. Does this exist?

Thanks,

Shane

[THIS SUCKS]

you can use sonic stage 4.3 downloaded from here and transfer "fake sp" through usb and it will play on all your old units but the sound quality will be downgraded to lp2 quality. the tranfer is slow. it takes about 35 min to transfer an 80 min disk but its still faster than real tiem and it does transfer the track names too. there are no longer any restrictions on how many transfers you can make and you can set sonic stage to delete the tanscoded files after they are sone being transered so you dont use lost of hard disk space.

[snoutmeat]

Thank you for the reply! This sounds like a great solution. I'm mostly interested in making "mix tapes" from 128kbps mp3 files on my computer with my son, so the "fake sp" quality is fine. I used Sonic Stage with my son for a test run last week, but was worried about the "check-out" restrictions -- glad to hear that this is no longer an issue. I'll have to poke around next time I'm in the app to figure out how to delete the transcoded files after they are transferred.

--Shane

[Another MD fanatic]

Hi. If the files on your PC are already in MP3 format convert them to WAV files first and go from there. Sonic Stage doesn't appear to make a very good job of converting directly from MP3 to ATRAC.

Also I'm thinking if your MP3's are only 128kbs there will already have been noticeable losses from the originals. To then convert to LP2 (either with or without converting to WAV) may be a bit too much. The only thing to do is to try it out and decide for yourself if the sound is good enough.

If the time issue is a major consideration fair enough, carry on, but you may wish to consider the following:

I have a little external box that plugs into a USB port and gives an Optical output. Then I connect the Toslink cable and record just like I would from a CD player. Dead simple. Obviously it limits you to doing it in real time and you've also got to do the titling manually but I'm willing to bet the sound quality is superior to using any other method.

Be interesting to hear how you get on.

Steve

[PhilippeC]

Hi. If the files on your PC are already in MP3 format convert them to WAV files first and go from there. Sonic Stage doesn't appear to make a very good job of converting directly from MP3 to ATRAC.

Also I'm thinking if your MP3's are only 128kbs there will already have been noticeable losses from the originals. To then convert to LP2 (either with or without converting to WAV) may be a bit too much. The only thing to do is to try it out and decide for yourself if the sound is good enough.

If the time issue is a major consideration fair enough, carry on, but you may wish to consider the following:

I have a little external box that plugs into a USB port and gives an Optical output. Then I connect the Toslink cable and record just like I would from a CD player. Dead simple. Obviously it limits you to doing it in real time and you've also got to do the titling manually but I'm willing to bet the sound quality is superior to using any other method.

Be interesting to hear how you get on.

Steve

DFX audio enhancer will be very useful in that case