How to record MP3's to a Minidisc recorder?

[Philly C]

I have a SB Live Value and a Sony MZ-R50. My SB Live has digital out for some reason. What cable does that use? Is it the same thing as opitical out? How would I go about recording MP3's to a minidisc wihtout buying another card? Also, all those USB adapters things are supposedly not compatible my minidisc model.

 

[loogie]

just hook the speaker out to the line in of the minidisc. Play the mp3 and press record on the player.

 

[Killbat]

No no no, don't ever use analog, hold on let me find the link...

[edit] Here: Super Cheap TOSlink
If you decide to try this, Email me, I've had nothing but the best of luck with it.

 

[Zucchini]

analog or not, your mini discplayer will be recompressing compressed music=double quality loss

 

[NaughtyusMaximus]

If you don't want to build your own, Hoontech has some good optical out addons for SBLive's.

 

[loogie]

The digital out on his sblive uses a minijack though. That webpage doesn't detail how to build a minijack->toslink cable.

 

[eakers]

optical out is not the same as digital out
you need to buy cables with the one prong on the side that goes to your sound card and the two prongs that go to your md
they give you an optical cable with the new sonys but many soundcards dont have and optical out

*kat. <-- her boy has an md

 

[GoSharks]

well actually, optical out is digital out, but the kind on the sb live that philly is talking aobut is the coax digital out. same digital signal, but different ways of getting it from one point to the other. they (optical and coax) are both know as spdif

 

[dethman]

just use your analog out. sound difference between optical and analog is negligible. it's nice to have though, if you're into it.

digital out on the sblive will not help you in this case, it's not fiberoptic digital, which MD uses.

 

[luv2chill]

Unless you really care, just use analogue. I use the optical out because I have a Live Platinum 5.1, but I've also recorded analogue and it doesn't make much difference.

MD really does sound awesome (so long as your souce material is good). ATRAC compression has really come a long way. It's a shame that MD hasn't taken off here like it has in Japan.

l2c

 

[pillage2001]

Long live the MD!

Go with the Hoontech, it's your cheapest bet to optical recording.

 

[Philly C]

Hey, there's a picture of the minidisc model I have connected to the I/O card! I'm ordering it. Thanks to Maximus and phillage. One more thing though, which program should I use to play the mp3's?

 

[luv2chill]

Just use your favorite mp3 player. You may want to record a 4-second blank wav file so that your recorder splits up the tracks properly. The MD player needs to detect a certain amount of silence in order to detect the end of one track and the beginning of the next.

l2c

 

[Philly C]

So I use the SB Live recorder, record a 4 second blank .wav track and then add that after every song in the playlist I want to record?

 

[Killbat]

There are Winamp plugins to insert that silence.

 

[luv2chill]

Yeah you can use the Winamp plugin (if you use winamp as your mp3 player). Oh, forgot you have an SBLive. Creative includes a program called &quot;MiniDisc Center&quot; in with LiveWare. This automatically inserts silence before each track.

You should be able to d/l it from Creative's site. I think it works pretty well... just used it a few days ago. Another nice thing about it is that it mutes all of your other sound sources so you don't have things like the ICQ &quot;Uh Oh!&quot; playing in the middle of your songs.

l2c

 

[pillage2001]

Hei, where do I get that plug in for winamp?

Does anyone have any problem recording for a Mz-R90? I get an extra track each time the tracks change. I use synchro recording.

 

[Beowulf]

you can also get wincue for your md recordings can be found at this place..I myself use an MZR-R70 and love it

 

[LXi]

Even after compressing, MD quality didnt sound much different from MP3.

 

[pillage2001]

Does it have the 2 second interval thingy?

 

[Beowulf]

wincue lets you specify the amount of seconds to wait before each song.

 

[pillage2001]

Cool, I'll try that.

Thanks for the find man.

 

Im using the live drive 2 with my sb live value and my sony mz-r70.
Its noy fully supported, but it still outputs through optical.
Works great.
Minidisk players have low output though.
So record it loud. Unless you have a slamming car system or something

 

[pillage2001]

SammySon.....you've got a Live Drive 2 to work on the value you had already?

 

[Beowulf]

make sure you try wincue its actually good way to do md recording on winamp havent used other methods myself though.