Mini Disc to Computer...How?

[Big Vern]

Hi All,

Wondering if I could ask for your advice, please...a friend of mine at work is wanting to go down the streaming route for his music - he has in excess of 1000 CDs and a similar number of mainly home brew mini discs. He was looking at something like the Olive music storage device, which is fine for CDs (it rips them to an internal hard drive and finds the artwork etc.), but it would appear that mini disc is a harder nut to crack...

Basically, it would seem that a streaming device is the better bet - i.e. he rips his CDs to a hard drive and tries to do the same with his mini discs. This is where I could do with the advice...

1) Is there any software available for those ripping CDs to their personal hard drive, which 'recognises' the CD and finds the artwork etc. (just about all of the CDs are bought albums)?

2) How does he go about tranferring the mini discs to his hard drive? - just about all of these are compilations...he just needs to know how to work the transfer here

Thanks in advance...am happy with black plastic, but am a tad lost when it comes to 0s and 1s :)

Paul.

[Ali Tait]

There are lots of programs that will do what you are asking. I use dbpoweramp, which costs about 40 quid, though there is a free demo version you can download. I find it very user friendly. EAC is very good also, and is free, but it is not very user friendly and takes some headscratching to set up. Both of these will look up artwork etc for you.

As for the minidiscs, what player does he have for them? It may have a digital optical or coax out that could be used to transfer the music to a computer hard drive.

[Ali Tait]

BTW, I'd recommend a Squeezebox Touch as a very good, cost effective streamer, especially with a good dac.

[Stratmangler]

Minidisc is an interesting one - and one I have no experience of.
IIRC it used a lossy psychoacoustically developed encoding method called ATRAC.

Now if the player outputs this as CD spec 16/44.1 data I can't envision any problems, however I suspect that it might output some non standard format, which might be a problem.
Anyone else have any direct Minidisc experience ?

I'm with Ali on the Touch - it's a great piece of kit.

[WAD62]

+1

For both Ali's comments...

Edit; Good point Chris, I wonder if it's 16/44.1 or 16/48, either way it should be ok if one can get a digital out...

[Ali Tait]

Found this, it may be of some help-

http://www.minidisc.org/very_faq.html

[Stratmangler]

I found this too http://www.superfi.co.uk/extras/Sony/Sony_MZ-RH1_manual.pdf

[Big Vern]

Brilliant - thanks for the responses - I'll ask this afternoon what sort of player he has, and what sort of digital output is fitted.

He was thinking of going down the Naim route, with their 'Unitiqute' (sp), 'cause he needs an amplifier as well...however...there is clearly more to consider!

I'll report back with the machine, but really appreciate the info.

Thanks...

[dave2010]

Sony had/have a software tool called Sonicstage. There were lots of issues re DRM, and some users even got really annoyed that they couldn't even upload their own recordings. However I believe they gave up on this, so that uploading should work. Depending on the player model the files may be compressed or PCM. I think it was possible to use MP3s, but Sony's own lossy compression was called ATRAC. As with iPods etc., it was possible to download rapidly to the minidisc with the later players (NetMD or even better Hi-MD) and hi speed uploads might now also be possible if the restrictions are now removed. If the files uploaded are PCM or lossless encoded, then there should be relatively little problem. If they are MP3 then any MP3 to PCM converter should do, though you might find you can stream them directly as MP3s. If the files are lossy ATRAC, then you might have to convert them to PCM or MP3 (for example ...) and probably you'll have to use the Sony software for that.

There are two disc formats - regular MiniDiscs and the newer Hi-MD discs which support lossless recording.

Doing things this way has to be a better option than trying to do the conversions in real time. Otherwise the players can output via optical or analogue outputs.

Hope this helps.

[WAD62]

Doing things this way has to be a better option than trying to do the conversions in real time.


Good point, well made...

[Beechwoods]

When I used to do MD to PC transfers I went from the MD optical out to my PC's soundcard via optical. The PC respected the track markers on the MD and the results were good, slow though!

[lovejoy]

To transfer your Minidiscs, then the optical digital output route from the MD player is really the only way to go. No matter what format the audio was in when it was transferred to the MD player, the output will be in standard PCM format so not an issue.

SonicStage is a whole bag of hurt and I would advise avoiding it at all costs. You'll only be able to use it if your MD player has a USB connection anyway (many don't) and even if you do, you'll only be allowed to upload your MD tracks to a PC if they were originally recorded via the analog line in or mic inputs. Any digital transfer will write a protection flag to the disc which will disallow uploading.

[dave2010]

Rich

I agree that for a long while SonicStage was a pain, but I did get it working, and my understanding is that virtually all of the constraints were eventually removed. I don't know that it was really any worse than iTunes - which can also be a pain even now. My earlier point was that it should be possible to do the uploads significantly faster than real time using a NetMD or Hi-MD player. As you pointed out, the earlier players did not allow this, not having the USB ports.

The Net MD players can still be obtained rather cheaply on eBay - though quite a lot of them are rubbish! The Hi MD players (recorders) are still available new at much higher prices (£00s!). They can sometimes be found on eBay for around £50ish. If there are only a few mini discs to transfer, then doing it in real time is not such a big deal, but if there are a lot, then I'd suggest that it could be worth checking out some of these devices.

I believe that the ADC/DACs used in the more expensive models are quite good, and some people now use these simply for the A-D/D-A capability.

If the DRM does still get in the way, then that won't work - but I believe it's not an issue. Is it worth it? Depends how much time and maybe dosh Paul wants to spend, and whether it really is worth recovering the music.

[nat8808]

I'm sure any Naim streamer will have some kind of analogue input that it can record from..

Especially if they are just home-made compilations then ultimate sound quality isn't going to be the be all and end all - he probably just wants them on there to enable him to get rid of the MDs.

I'd just go from line out and see what happens or digital out if the MD has one. As far as I know, only the hifi minidisk units have digital outputs whist the portable ones (which is what this sounds like, else why would you make compilations?) only ever had optical inputs to rip CDs.

Don't worry about it yet till he actually buys the thing! There'll be a way no matter what but speculating about it now without knowing what streamer he'll buy is probably a waste of time...

[dave2010]

Are those Olive people telling porkies? Firstly, suggesting that a mere 500Gbyte is enough to store your whole collection is, for some of us, just not on.

Perhaps more interesting is the comment about HD quality - giving more than 250x the sound quality of CDs. My guess is that this means they use 8 bits extra for each data sample, since 256 is 2^8 as we all know. Where the extra bits come from when a CD is inserted is an interesting question to ask, though Apple are proposing to do something a bit like that with their new music store developments. Essentially there are remote servers with, perhaps (??) high quality versions of many CDs, and by doing a match of your CD against their database they can supply a higher quality version across the net - if they can get one, and license it, which may well be questionable. This avoids the need for massive storage on the server site, and no uploads are needed.

Quality could still be limited by streaming restrictions.

Is this what Olive are doing? Otherwise their advertising is misleading.

http://www.olive.us/products/music_servers/olive3hd/features/quality.html

PS: note that if Olive are using a remote server, then it's possible that the time taken to handle each CD could be minimised, as there might not be any uploads, as with Apple's system. This could be very effective, if you trust those companies. If Paul's friend really wants to try this it may save him a lot of time and effort, but I'd rcommend that he keeps the CDs even if only in the loft.

[lovejoy]

Hi Dave,
Thanks for the update on SonicStage. I have to admit that I finally gave up on it, after much perseverence around version 3.4, and I see that they're now up to version 4, although I find it somewhat hard to believe that they're even still calling it SonicStage considering what a bad name it gained for itself.

I hopefully still have my old HiMD portable stashed away in a drawer somewhere so I'll dig it out and give it a go, although I'm quite sure it's going to be a case of far too little, far too late for me to start using it again, but it would be good to get some old radio sessions I recorded stored somewhere I can listen to them again.

Can't say I agree about iTunes being as bad as SonicStage though. I've had my niggles with iTunes but it's never entirely hosed my music library, or made it unwriteable, or unreadable by any other software, or had my database destroyed, or unable to connect to my portable player without a complete re-install of the OS, or just plain been unable to load the software. The more I remember what it did, the more I wonder is it worth the risk sullying my computer with this software again... Eek!

[dave2010]

Rich

If you've had pain the past with SS then I wouldn't recommend you revisit it.

I didn't realise what a pain iTunes was until a few years back, and then subsequently. I have iPods, iPads etc., and they all seem to be synchronised with different machines. I don't believe that Apple are as bad as Microsoft, but they're not blameless either. it doesn't take a genius to realise that synchronising a 160Gbyte iPod with a small laptop with 40 Gbyte partitions may not work out well, but making it difficult to upload data back from the iPods etc. to a computer with a larger storage capacity is made needlessly difficult. One can get into difficulty due to trying out Christmas presents, and using the machines at hand. Fixing the problems later may not be possible, but Apple doesn't warn about this.

I bought a couple of cheap MP3 players a few years ago for going on holiday, rather than take my expensive iPod. They can be a bit of a pain re getting the items in the right sequence, but moving data in and out as data files is fairly simple.

I also experienced a drive failure a year or two back, and I'm not sure whether the only copies of some tracks I have are on iPods. All that iTunes does for me is threaten to wipe these possibly last remaing copies because it refuses to sync with my other kit. I have been reluctant to wipe these clean in the hope of getting everything sorted. I know that Apple thinks it has to preserve the rights of copyright holders, but the material I have has all been paid for - I just want get it back. Do I trust Apple to get things right? Only sometimes!

[lovejoy]

Supersync is a great piece of software for getting your music off an iPod/iPad/iPhone. This is only one of its functions though. I use it to synchronise my iTunes library across 3 different computers - both Macs and PCs and generally it does a great job. There is a free trial available but it's worth the £20 asking price IMO.

[nat8808]

There's a linux application that handles Minidisc players around somewhere...

[dave2010]

Rich

Thanks for mentioning Supersync. I looked at the web pages, and I may well download it later on - unless anyone spots a better product.

One thing has occurred to me today, relating to Apple's iCloud and the tune matching feature which Apple is introducing soon - assuming that it actually works. If Paul's colleague is happy enough with 256 kbps aac files (???) - may be he would be as it could be that the MiniDisc files are already compressed - then if the tracks are imported into iTunes (possibly via SonicStage) and the tune matching feature invoked, it should be possible to access them on other machines in 256 kbps aac downloaded from Apple.


If you want all the benefits of iTunes in the Cloud for music you haven’t purchased from iTunes, iTunes Match is the perfect solution. It lets you store your entire collection, including music you’ve ripped from CDs or purchased somewhere other than iTunes. For just $24.99 a year.

Here’s how it works: iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to your iCloud library for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. And all the music iTunes matches plays back at 256-Kbps iTunes Plus quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.Taken from http://www.apple.com/icloud/features/

Whether this is really going to be a good solution is uncertain at this stage. I don't know whether Apple is proposing to allow downloads back at 256kbps aac, or only to provide a streaming service to keep control of the files.

Perhaps it would be easiest to let the MiniDiscs go - unless they've got irreplaceable and valuable tracks recorded. Otherwise a prune and preserve approach might be best.