Md Onto Mac Options

[GeoffG]

I'm a novice at this and hope my quesiton hasn't already been answered.

My wife has tons of dance stuff on minidisc and now wants to get it onto the Mac (running 10.4.3) so she can burn CDs. The problem is that her MD player doesn't have a line out. I have a Griffin iMic and was wondering whether it is possible to use the MD player headphones socket with a 2 x 3.5mm cable. If so, which socket on the iMic would I use? One has a microphone symbol, the other a loudspeaker.

For capture and editing I have previously used Peak LE3 with LPs and tapes and that seemed to work fine. Will this work with MD as source? I think I will have to get a new version (LE5 is advertised) to run with OSX.

Thanks for help.

Geoff.

[arvidtp]

yes, the headphone out is the same as a lineout - goes into the jack with the microhpone. The loudspeaker wwill be an output.

You can buy peak, or you can use free software - you can check it out on this site or on my list of free mac music software http://arvidtp.net/guide.html . Audacity would work fine... but the problem is it will only record from the built-in sound input of your mac (no idea why - at least it does not work with my external soundcard), but u can record with another free simple recording program and then like soundrecorder ( http://macmusic.org/softs/view.php/lang/EN/id/493/ ) and then import into audacity for editing. Audacity will do multi-channel mixing too!

But with an iMic, griffin's software may be all u need: http://macmusic.org/softs/version.php/lang/EN/id/316/

best of luck.

As far as i am aware there is no way to transfer MD to mac using a digital connection. But i think there was an opensource project somewhere to enable it for sony MD players with USB...

[cascabel]

Hi Geoff, don't give up on trying - because MD ist the best way to get your LPs and Singles into a digital form.
My Way to get the full sound:
- recording LPs on a SONY MDS JE510 (in Ebay about 30 bucks)
(The Sony digital modifier does real great work - you never heard your LPs sounding like that!)
- then connecting the Sony via Optical Cable into the G5 to get a copy without loss of quality (If you don't have a G5 you shall plug in via Line In)
- for editing I use Toasts "Spin Doctor"
Cascabel

[hahaworld]

Actually, the new MD players from Sony have Mac software that allows you to download the audio straight to your computer through USB (Hi-MD Wav Importer is the name of the software that comes with it). However, it's not backwards-compatible. You can't use the new software with the old MD players.

[MrModern]

If one purchased one of these newer Sony MD players with the included software, can one then transfer the contents of MDs recorded on an older Sharp machine?

[hahaworld]

Unfortunately, you can't bring old MiniDiscs into the new player and use the software to transfer your recordings over via USB. You have to record in the highest quality Linear PCM format in order for the transfer to work.