how much faster was usb than optical or analogue anyway?
there is a mechanical process that requires time - the laser heating a spot of material to the curie temp and then the magnetic head transferring the data the spin of the motor etc
half way thru archiving to hd before my last machine gave up the ghost a few years ago but never had a usb model so dunno - does it transfer both ways? disc to usb would be more useful to me and maybe even worth an ebay if it works surely reading from is faster than writing to?
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artifus is doing it all wrong, Sat 20 Feb 2021, 20:22,
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boo
cheers - saved me a google. had enough trouble trying to rescue dodgy discs in the past so glad to avoid another md rabbit hole
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artifus is doing it all wrong, Sat 20 Feb 2021, 21:07,
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You used USB for putting ATRAC files on the MD.
You used optical for recording in real time.
At the time you could get MD drives to hook up to a computer like a Zip drive, but hardly anyone bought them outside Japan.
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jonbob loves you, Sat 20 Feb 2021, 22:10,
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but analogue or optical real time recordings being transcoded to atrac
is a function of processor time not mechanical was my point i think - usb transfer is only shaving a few cycles from the process?
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artifus is doing it all wrong, Sat 20 Feb 2021, 22:18,
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We're getting wires crossed.
ATRAC3 was used to fit vastly more audio on an MD than recording lossless PCM or original ATRAC. This effectively turned a Minidisc player into an MP3 player with removable storage.
If you wanted to do this you had to connect USB (before USB 2.0, mark you), and you had to use Sony's ATRAC3 format as well as their slow, shitty and generally unpleasant software.*
If you were hooked up to the optical in, you could only record in realtime but the quality was much better.
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jonbob loves you, Sun 21 Feb 2021, 1:00,
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