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Re: [LUG] MiniDisc players...

 

Gordon Henderson wrote:
On Sat, 23 Jan 2010, Rob Beard wrote:

Gordon Henderson wrote:

Basically we want to get the recordings onto a medium which will make it future proof - as long as we re-copy to the future every 3 years or so...

You can get Minidisc recorders that connect via USB, the original USB models were called NetMD recorders and the idea was you could transfer audio to Minidisc but not the other way.

However Sony then released a range of recorders called HiMD which offered extra capacity and the option to upload audio back to the PC. I have both types of recorders myself. I gather as long as the recordings have been made originally using analogue connections then it can be transferred back to a PC in WAV format. However if the recordings were made digitally (for instance doing a digital copy from CD to Minidisc using an optical digital cable) then you can't copy the recordings back.

Thanks for this - and the others who've replied too.

It does seem rather bonkers if you ask me - here was a nice little concept, digital recordings, but no way to easilly get the digital data back off the device!

Yep, I gather it was an early form of DRM, you could make one digital copy of say a CD to Minidisc, or Minidisc to Minidisc, or even Minidisc to CD if you had the right equipment, but not say CD to Minidisc to Minidisc, at least not digitally.

The only way I've found around this was to get an expensive device to take off the copy protection from the digital signal or use professional kit such as the high end Minidisc recorders and CD recorders as used in recording studios/radio stations. I managed to backup a Minidisc to CD which was originally a CD to Minidisc backup. Sods law though these recorders aren't cheap, and I no longer have access to the ones I used.
If you want, I'd be happy to give it a go. If you could bring a couple of discs along to the next LUG meeting, I'll bring my Minidisc recorder along with the cables and we can give it a try.

I'll speak to my friend when she's back from her holidays in a week or so. I don't know what hardware she has yet - this was just something that came up in conversation with her. She used to use it to record interviews for the BBC and a local history project is intersted in it. (Although we'll be playing it back via a telephone, so quality won't be good, but it would still be nice to get the original data in as high a quality as possible to preserve for the future.

No problem, I don't mind transferring them for her if it does work. As much as it pains me to say it, Minidisc is now pretty much a dying format, even in the media industry everything is going over to Flash based recorders now.
If you could find out the model number of her Minidisc recorder I could probably give you a better idea of the format the discs are in, or if you can get hold of a couple of discs before the next LUG meet then we could try my Minidisc recorder to transfer them over in WAV format.

Will do, thanks.
No problem.

Rob



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