Sony hacking-project: MD to Copmactflash

[Wilma]

Hi all,

I'm searching for interested "teammates" to share / develop details of a project with me. The project is in an early stage: It's an idea / there have been recent projects with similarly content.

Motivation thoughts:
I'm not very happy with the future of the Minidisc. The Medium is getting more and more rare and expensive. In times of mp3 / wav (HDD & flash) I'm not very happy to have no seperate data medium for a music style / album of an artist. With the MD I was able to have a small data medium to carry my favourites. USB-Datasticks or an Ipod are either to small or don't give a good overview of what's inside.
Another reason to build something like I think of, and beside the other arguments is: I have a couple of motivated students every year to learn new things in technologies and this seems to me is a project with many basics and lots of insteresting things to learn.

The idea is to emulate / replace the whole optical unit in Sony MD-Decks and implant a microcontroller that emulates the optical unit. Then, instead of recording the atrac-signal from the AD-Section it should record the uncompressed PCM : 44,1kHz, 16Bit. Since the MD-Decks needed a high quality AD/DA Section, because of the following data reduction, it is still interesting to take "older" decks for low budget projects. The optical units are starving more & more these days and so there are plenty models for "prototyping".

Anyone interested / any questions (please be constructive and don't discuss to much about the sense / nonsense of this - mainly it should be fun to do this!)

Greetings,

wilma

[Mooly]

Surprised you have had no replies, sadly this is way outside my area of expertise. I agree with you about MiniDisc unfortunately. Now what I what I would like (anyone) is a digital recorder to take input such as S.P.D.I.F. and record onto removable flash memory. A solid state recorder for the 21st century. Would have thought some manufacturer might have done this, perhaps incorporating into say a DAB tuner. The very best of luck with this project.
Regards Karl