yeah i'm familair with atrac, i have an old minidisc walkman... so is there no way tohook the drive to my pc? if you plug it into a laptop, surely it can't be hard to wire it in to a desktop?
Sony may be using an on motherboard controller for the minidisc drive. Then again it may be like a laptop DVD drive taht has indrive decoder and drivers. Probably the only way to find out is to find someone that has that drive.
heh, i know about atrac - just forgotten to note it down...there are also different types of atrac too and wot i actually meant about storing the mp3s as data is they are =] just not on an MD - but maybe with a little tweaking i wonder..... neway, Im still gonna do the mod...
I've had loads of thoughts on this recently. Atrac is a lossy compression format like MP3, but it must work to an algorythm. Also, in order not to sound bad, it must remove sounds above and below inaudiable frequencies. How about writing some software that converts data to sound (very very easy), but doesn't convert it to frequencies that are then removed by compression to Atrac (perhaps just a matter of finding out how Atrac compression works). If the sounds are played back through a digital connection like an MD hi-fi unit (not NetMD) then in theory, since there is no compression, software should be able to convert the sound back to data. It could be similar to good old tape deck days!
If you are to buy that replacement drive, you'd better off buying a NetMD Walkman, remove enclosure and than mod it to a 3.5" bay! Can function wall as a standalone music jukebox without using CPU cycle too...
