Getting songs off mini discs

LowOdour

was going through some boxes this morning and found an old mini disc player with loads of minidiscs...which had albums that I dont have which I would like to. Is there any way of getting these albums of the disc for my mp player?
the model is Walkman Net MD MZ-N520 Type-S, if thats any use. Think I remember trying to get files of it years ago but couldnt....hopefully technology has moved on since then o that it can be done!

cnocbui

The only way I can think of is to connect the headphone output of the minidisc player to the inputs of a sound card and record the contents of the disks, track by track, saving them as AAC, MP3 or whatever you use.

Hours and hours of fun there for you.

robinph

Did it via the headphone jack and audio in for some albums I had on minidisc's myself years ago, was a pain to do though. I think I just left it to record the whole album and then went and split it into the tracks afterwards, but was so long ago I can't really remember now.

LowOdour

What kind of cable do you use to do that? From the headphone jack to the audio in?

lickarse2

LowOdour wrote: »

What kind of cable do you use to do that? From the headphone jack to the audio in?

Standard jack to jack cable used for it.

I believe there's some software that you can use that will effectively convert the input into Wav files and split the tracks for you.

brightspark

Its probably not worth your while buying but this minidisc player can upload via usb

http://www.minidisc.org/part_Sony_MZ-RH1.html


It would be cheaper to record them in real time using a jack-jack lead from your existing player

Audacity

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

is your best bet for recording and then editing your tracks as required (It's FREE)

Wertz

Net MDs used to use OpenMG software suite for transfer of mp3 and wav (which was then converted to atrac format)...the idea being that you could upload from your PC to the player, but you couldn't transfer those tracks on to another PC. It was to stop file sharing :rolleyes:

Your netMD should have a mini usb socket someplace. I would go and d/l a copy of sonicstage (which has openMG support and backward compataiblity), install it (you can uninstall later), hook up your player and then try and transfer tracks using the back up to "My library" feature. This will definitely work for wavs...not sure on mp3s.
This is obviously a more complex method than the line-out/recording method but if the SQ of the files is important to you then recovering the purest form of the files is worth the extra effort IMO.

LowOdour

Think i tried to do it via sonicstage before but will have another go at it. Was in maplin at the weekend and found the jack cable I need to hook player up to sound card so if i cant transfer them via usb then will do it via the hack.

Thanks for the help fellas!