IRIX and Software

So a while ago, I was given a Yamaha MDK-585 minidisc player/recorder, and having previously owned a MZ-R91 I gleefully tried to listen to some of my old discs. Unfortunately they'd pretty much all bitrotted into unusability, but some were ok if formatted and re-recorded.

This got me to thinking, could I somehow record stuff off my octane via the optical link? Yes, this works, but it doesn't seem to be able to separate out the tracks when just played from mxaudio (yes yes, so mp3s to ATRAC would be like hammering nails in your ears, fine)

Then I recalled, the Sony gear used to be able to "sync" record from CD or another MD player, and this somehow got the track marks as well as the title and all the song names transferred too. A little digging around on the intarwebs seems to indicate that this might well be the "user" field in an S/PDIF (inherited from AES) stream.

Now, it seems that (Open)AL has some bit fields for this, would I have to write a custom program to transfer song names and track marks or is there some way that say dmplay (or whatever) could manage this?

Thoughts?

I've never had any reason to bother with AL_SUBCODE_FORMAT, or any other non-audio data. The biggest problem I'd expect is that this may be rather frustrating to test, if you don't have any method to monitor/record/display this stuff. I'd recommend mpg123 or xmms to test this.

Well, I'd expect the audio library to pad the experience slightly, and I know I got it right if the MD gets recorded with a title. Not sure what you mean by using mpg123 or xmms though, neither of those likely support any of the low-level stuff, after all.

mpg123 and xmms don't support such low level tricks yet, but both have AL drivers that should be easy to hack. Actually, xmms has two AL drivers to choose from. I have no Idea if either of them pass any indication of a track change down to the audio drivers. Do you have any documentation how track delimiters, track length, number title etc. are to be encoded?

A-ha! That sounds promising. The encoding thing is a good point, I haven't a clue, but perhaps there are some standards documents out there (or intrepid hackers). Too busy to quite sit down and do something about this yet, so we'll see if something materializes.

In that case, start with audacity or xanalyser from nekoware and patch them torecord/monitor the user channel data in the output of your CD player.