Newbie Question

[Guest Anonymous]

Hi: could someone give me advice on how to move recorded minidisc material from my Sony MZ-R900 onto my PC. The unit came with USB cables but no directions on how to use it. I suspect there is an additional kit I need to buy.

Thanks for any advice you can send my way.

Matt

[me]

There is no way to upload with minidisc. However, you can record onto the computer by:

1. Take R900. Stick an analogue minijack to minijack cable into it's headphone out socket.

2. Take other end of minijack cable and stick it in line in of soundcard.

3. Open Cooledit (or any other music recording software, many demoes on the internet).

4. Set R900 to line out mode, and then press record on the computer. Press play on the unit.

Now you hopefully have some .wav on your computer.. Either keep as they are (requires a large hard drive or use LAME to encode them into .mp3's.

[Bazirker]

Your MZ-R900 came with a USB cable? What for? It doesn't have NetMD capabilities...

Another way to get the audio off your minidisc player and onto your comp is if you have a stereo cd burner unit. I have a cd burner that is part of my stereo, not my computer. Whenever I want to get a track off my md player and onto my computer, I just record them on a cd-rw and let my computer rip them off of that. I find that easier than just using my computer because my soundcard sucks and I sometimes lose a lot of audio quality. But then again, I also have a stereo cd burner.

[Mystyler]

Was your R900 the MZ-R900DPC model? If so, then the USB cable is for recording (real-time only) music from your PC-->MD.

[Lozza]

can someone help me i just brought a mzr-909s an i wonder if i could get like a USB converter so i can record from my pc?

Cheers 4 n e response

[Bazirker]

Maybe you can get Matt Conners (see above) to sell you his. Either that, or get on a site like Minidisco.com and buy one there. Personally, I'd recommend using a normal analog mini stereo cable...

[Mystyler]

I'd even recommend a cheap sound card with optical out - it would be cheaper than a USB--->optical converter. And there is nothing wrong with soundcard analog out--->MD either. The cheapest way, and you can still get great results.

[me]

I'm not sure about great results out of a cheap soundcards analogue out..

Cheap soundcards with optical out are pretty cheap, too.

Mystyler, you're turning american. "analog"

hehe. Sorry.. (at least I don't go around stealing my avatar :roll: )

[Mystyler]

They don't know what "analogue" is.

[Andy]

I'm not sure about great results out of a cheap soundcards analogue out..  

Cheap soundcards with optical out are pretty cheap, too.  

That is what intuition would say, but a cheap digital anything will sound as good as an expensive one. With digital, each sample is converted to a number which is transferred. So the sound card sends a list of numbers like: 100, 50, 101, 50. The MD gets those numbers, encodes them as ATRAC and stores them. With a high end professional card, it also sends a list of numbers: 100, 50, 101, 50 which are identical to what the cheap one would send.

With analogue, it is a lot simpler, the soundcard sends a continuously varying voltage to the MD. The voltage which it is sending directly corresponds to the sound. For the analogue, the equipment must be very sensitive and precise. The MD needs to be able to tell the difference between 0.0051 volts and 0.0052 volts or it won't "hear" certain parts of the sound. With digital, the MD just has to be able to tell the difference between a light being on and a light being off. There is no light which is 0.0051% on or anything like that.

With that said, there are a couple of things which *can* make certain digital sources better than others:

* When there are lots of digital devices running at once, they all have their own "clocks" going (which tells them how often to send out the numbers they are sending). These clocks all need to be syncronised or there is an effect called jitter. In professional stuff, there is usually a word clock input, which allows all the equipment to be controlled by a single clock. There is no such input on most consumer gear.

* some devices have different sample rates to others, meaning that one might put out a number 44100 times a second, while another might put out a number 48000 times a second. Without sample rate conversion, recording at the wrong sample rate will sound really bad (probably just static). Sample rate conversion is built into my MD (MZ-R70) and most (all?) other Sony's at least, but it is quite a difficult thing to do. Imagine this:

List A: 5, 10, 5, 10, 5, 10

List B: A, B, C, D, E

Work out values of A, B, C, D and E so that list B is equivalent to list A. Now, especially if you know a bit about how sounds are stored, then you will know that this is a pretty difficult task and one which can be done a lot of ways. Basically, the sample rate converter has a bit of an artistic license here, and usually it is the professional units whose artistic abilities are better than the consumer units.

Finally, here is something I just found when searching for info on SPDIF (which is basically the same as the optical TOSLINK for your MD, except instead of using light, it uses electricity):

From http://www.epanorama.net/documents/audio/spdif.html

What can make difference in the sound of digital signal ?

There are two things which can cause differences between the sound of digital interfaces:  

1. Jitter (clock phase noise)

This really only affects sound of the signal going directly to a DAC. If you're running into a computer, the computer is effectively going to be reclocking everything. Same applies also to CD-recoders, DAT tape decs and similar devices. Even modern DACs have typically a small buffer and reclocking circuitry, so the jitter is not so big problem nowadays that it used to be.  

2. Errors

This usually causes very significant changes in the sound, often loud popping noises but occasionally less offensive effects. Any data loss or errors in either are a sign of a very broken link which is probably intermittently dropping out altogether.