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Dumping MiniDisc Media

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Re: Dumping MiniDisc Media

#51

Post by lxgr »

satysin wrote: post #16

This brings back some great memories from 2002. My daughter had just been born and when I was up doing the night feeds I used my PlayStation 2 with its optical out to transfer my CDs onto my MiniDisc player. It was a slow process (real time) but it was so great to have all the track details automatically included rather than having to manually name the tracks on the player. This was before Sony's NetMD software and I…

Are you saying that the PS2 actually sends the track names over the optical cable? I remember always having to painfully enter these via the player buttons later on.

Re: Dumping MiniDisc Media

#52

Post by cbmuser »

brnt wrote: post #34
cbmuser wrote: post #19

Edit: I have finally created a separate organization for the project now: https://github.com/linux-minidisc/linux-minidisc Original project creator and co-author of the linux-minidisc project here. Awesome to see my project on the frontpage of HN, maybe I can use this opportunity to find new contributors to move the project forward as it has been a little dormant due to lack of time. The upstream repository is curren…

Not sure how much the projects diverged, but I forked a fork of a fork, about 60 commits apart it seems. In any case, this fork worked for me, not your original one. I since sold the MD hardware, but in case you have some time, you could perhaps pull some stuff back in from [1] or any fork closer to you. I remember speaking at least to one of the other forkers saying upstream was unresponsive at the time (I guess tha…

Thanks. I'm already in contact with the owner of the fork with most of the fixes to figure out how we can merge all these changes into the upstream project. He has promised me to open PRs to get the changes merged upstream.

I'm happy to add new members to the Github organization.

Re: Dumping MiniDisc Media

#53

Post by cbmuser »

cybercase wrote: post #43
paines wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just downloaded a whole album, 1h:09m long via Youtube-Notube->m4a. Uploaded the m4a via https://stefano.brilli.me/webminidisc/ . Works perfectly... Thanks again

Happy everything worked well for you. Actually, building this app was a lot of fun :)

Out of curiosity. Did you use code from the linux-minidisc project? Would be great to see if our code was used in such innovative ways.

Re: Dumping MiniDisc Media

#54

Post by cbmuser »

lathiat wrote: post #28
cbmuser wrote: post #19

Edit: I have finally created a separate organization for the project now: https://github.com/linux-minidisc/linux-minidisc Original project creator and co-author of the linux-minidisc project here. Awesome to see my project on the frontpage of HN, maybe I can use this opportunity to find new contributors to move the project forward as it has been a little dormant due to lack of time. The upstream repository is curren…

For what it’s worth you can just rename the github repo into another project and it will setup a redirect. You can also add maintainers while it’s inside your namespace.

I created a new organization, transferred the repository now and invited members. Worked like a charm.

Re: Dumping MiniDisc Media

#55

Post by cybercase »

cbmuser wrote: post #53
cybercase wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happy everything worked well for you. Actually, building this app was a lot of fun :)

Out of curiosity. Did you use code from the linux-minidisc project? Would be great to see if our code was used in such innovative ways.

Of course I've used it!

And I've created a small npm package that contains all the code that I've ported from the linux-minidisc project to JS.

https://github.com/cybercase/netmd-js

Actually, not sure if you're the right person to ask, but how did you manage to reverse engineer the "uploading" part of the protocol?

I mean... I'm not new to reverse engineering of communication protocols. I've done that in the past, and I've always relied on some "trick", like disassembling binaries, flip a debug flag, and assemble them back into a new binary that printed logs that the original dev left there.

Did you use something similar? Of did you manage to put your hands on some part of the source code of Simple Burner/Sonic Stage?

by the way. I wouldn't be able to write my app without your hard work. so thanks!

Re: Dumping MiniDisc Media

#56

Post by philsnow »

paulmd wrote: post #49
cat199 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the equipment involved in recording to it was so expensive it was hard to get the labels on-board. Source or speculation? If b, then, to add: I don't think for a major (or even medium/minor) label this was the issue - at the time the labels had a real concern about mass high quality digital copying by consumers destroying their business

this is specifically the reason minidisc is built around a lossy compression codec so there would be at least some generational loss from copying. Sony themselves were/are a label and this led to deliberate worsening of their electronics at times.

Were disc->disc transfers not digital? I would expect to not have to decode/encode (and thus suffer loss, if the encoder weren't deterministic) if you're transferring disc to disc.

Re: Dumping MiniDisc Media

#57

Post by bashyal »

I still have a bunch of MiniDiscs but my player stopped working. Can anybody recommend a place to buy a new one ? I've looked at some of the usual places but haven't found any.

Re: Dumping MiniDisc Media

#58

Post by satysin »

lxgr wrote: post #51
satysin wrote: post #16

This brings back some great memories from 2002. My daughter had just been born and when I was up doing the night feeds I used my PlayStation 2 with its optical out to transfer my CDs onto my MiniDisc player. It was a slow process (real time) but it was so great to have all the track details automatically included rather than having to manually name the tracks on the player. This was before Sony's NetMD software and I…

Are you saying that the PS2 actually sends the track names over the optical cable? I remember always having to painfully enter these via the player buttons later on.

Not always. Shockingly (or I guess not shockingly by todays standards) some MiniDiscs have copy protection on the track listing! However a majority of CDs I owned with CD-TEXT would happily label everything correctly. This was the reason I used my PS2 rather than my regular CD player which also had optical out but did not do the CD-TEXT.

I have read that CD-TEXT data is not transferred over optical however it most certainly worked for me. I made at least 100 MiniDiscs this way. Perhaps it was something special with how the PS2 did things that was not to the standard? Who knows. I have searched for information but never found anything concrete except for a few others who agreed with me that it did work as they used to do it the same way. Nothing official sadly.

Re: Dumping MiniDisc Media

#59

Post by lxgr »

cybercase wrote: post #36

MiniDisc lover here. Great tutorial! For those of you who're still using MiniDiscs daily, I've just released a SonicStage replacement app that works in the browser thanks to WebUSB and WASM. Here's the link to the project: https://github.com/cybercase/webminidisc and here's a short demo of how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Frs8qhw0g9Y Hope you like it!

WHAT!?

Never, ever would I have thought I'd see the day that I can stop maintaining that old Windows laptop which is the only device (I did try VMs) capable of still running Sonic Stage.

And all in the browser! This is fascinating! Thank you!

Re: Dumping MiniDisc Media

#60

Post by lxgr »

satysin wrote: post #58
lxgr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that the PS2 actually sends the track names over the optical cable? I remember always having to painfully enter these via the player buttons later on.

Not always. Shockingly (or I guess not shockingly by todays standards) some MiniDiscs have copy protection on the track listing! However a majority of CDs I owned with CD-TEXT would happily label everything correctly. This was the reason I used my PS2 rather than my regular CD player which also had optical out but did not do the CD-TEXT. I have read that CD-TEXT data is not transferred over optical however it most ce…

Amazing bit of information, thanks! This would have saved 12 year old me quite some time. I think I never owned a CD that had CD-TEXT on it, or if I did, I had already given up on doing real-time transfers via my PS2 at the time.

A Sony-proprietary extension sounds plausible, given their track record of developing pleasant niche features like this, especially between devices in their ecosystem.

(Sonic Stage and Real Player were both horrible, but could transfer a full album in a few minutes over USB.)

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