Re: [linux-minidisc] Questions about converting MD library to Mac Audio

[Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>]

Hi Will,

On Wed, May 05, 2010 at 02:20:11PM -0400, William Boorstein wrote:
> I have some questions regarding how to convert MD audio to a Mac.
> 
> Problem:  I have about 60 minidisks of important recorded talks that I would
> like to convert to files on my mac for 1) archival purposes and 2) easy
> access via portable digital player.  Some of the MDs have labeled tracks
> names and I want to preserve this information.
> 
> What I have done:  I have imported the audio from a Sony MZ-M200 to sonic
> stage (running under Parallels on my mac) ... This created a series of wav
> files, plus imported all the MDs/tracks into SonicStage (OpenMG Audio). The
> WAV files for the tracks are all mixed together (not grouped by MD/album).
> 
> Questions: 
> 1. What it the best way to get these files into a format that I can use on
> my mac while preserving maximum audio info, preserving track name
> information, and keeping the tracks together as ?albums¹  (Going into iTunes
> would be fine ­ or???)

You can use ffmpeg which is a free software collection to encode,
decode and playback a vast majority of audio and video files. It can
be installed on MacOS with the help of Macports. You'll find a very
thorough installation guide in [1]. Directly after installing
Macports, you should issue the following command in a terminal:

echo "PATH=$PATH:/opt/local/bin" >> ~/.bashrc

Just copy and paste that line. It will make sure that all the software
installed by Macports can be invoked from any directory and not just
/opt/local/bin where it gets installed.

> 2. Is it best to use the WAV files (rather than the smaller OpenMG Audio
> files that are in the sonic stage library)?

That depends upon what format you originally used to record the
talks. If you recorded with a standard MiniDisc recorder, the format
will be ATRAC1 which is a lossy compressed format. This means that you
already made some quality loss during recording and you won't have any
advantages when using the lossless WAV format. If you, however,
recorded in PCM (which is lossless but only HiMD Walkman support
that), then you can stick to WAV to keep the quality. Since WAV takes
alot of disk storage, I either recommend to use a lossless audio
compression like ALAC (which will keep the full quality in any case)
or better use some lossy but high quality codec like AAC. Both are
supported for encoding by ffmpeg.

To cut a long story short:

If you used ATRAC1 during recording, encode the files into AAC. If you
used PCM (on a HiMD), just use ALAC.

> 3. I can tediously pull together the WAV files that comprise tracks of each
> MD, but then how do I get these into iTunes as ?albums¹ w/ title and track
> names? (All the files are very nicely arranged by ³artist² and ³album²
> within SonicStage ­ I wish I could export all that information!

Well, SonicStage stores all the files in a directory called "Packages"
which is somewhere located in the Windows directory C:\Documents and
Settings\.... Just open Spotlight search and search for the folder
"Packages". You will find that it contains all audio tracks in
separate folders for each album which you can easily import in iTunes.

> 4. Unfortunately, I annotated each MD after I imported it ? writing in the
> ³liner notes² section in SonicStage for each MD ? Is there anyway to
> preserve this info when I convert to mac readable files?

I'm not very sure. I have never used that feature. But it sounds like
that it is some ID field special to SonicStage and it seems likely
that this information gets lost when importing the tracks into iTunes.


Regards,

Adrian

[1] http://www.haykranen.nl/2007/11/21/howto-install-and-use-ffmpeg-on-mac-os-x-leopard/