First, you need an MD with a digital output. So far as I know, there are no portables
with digital out, only digital in, therefore
you will have to use a home MD deck. Then you need a sound card with a digital INPUT,
many have only digital output. The
setup I use is a Sony MDS-PC2 deck with an Maudio DIO2448 sound card. (I have great
reservations recommending the
DIO2448, because it has severe timing problems that make its digital output useless,
however the digital input works OK;
perhaps the DIO2496 works better.) I use CoolEdit 2000 to record to a WAV file while
the MD plays. This approach does
NOT transfer track marks (in the form of separate WAV files for each track) or titling
information, nor does it control the MD
deck during the transfer; you must do that manually.
FLAME ON:
Sony (or other MD manufacturer) could address all of these problems by introducing a
recorder with NATIVE USB support
(not a computer connection add-on adapter). This would give us the all-important
missing item: data flow control. Right
now the flow of data to/from the MD must be absolutely continuous with no
interruption. This conflicts with the inherently
bursty nature of data flow in a PC (caused in large part by the process scheduling and
virtual memory algorithms in
Windows). Soundcards (and other peripherals) try to smooth out this bursty behavior
with on-board buffers, but often they
are too small to deal with the latency imposed by Windows, so buffer underruns
(generally heard as popping or stuttering)
result. On top of that, there's the growing trend in multimedia programs (Windows
Media Player, for instance) to use the
Windows media timer API to duplicate/delete samples with the intention of
synchronizing MPEG video/audio being played
back on a PC (which has no common clock source); this happens even when playing audio
only, resulting in a "gurgling"
sound. Luckily, CoolEdit does not use the multimedia timer for record or playback,
instead recording/playing every sample
in the file at whatever frequency the soundcard's clock is running. To really make
real-time digital audio transfer work right,
I suggest using a program like CoolEdit, have *lots* of RAM (>256 MB) and disable
Windows Virtual Memory (disabling VM
is a topic which requires a lenthly explanation, due to bugs in Windows).
FLAME OFF:
Sorry for the excessively technical nature of this post, but I've come to the
conclusion that using a PC and an MD
connected digitally is like "swimming upstream" at the current time. Maybe Sony or
other MD manufacturers will address
these problems!
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