Mini Disc To G5; Di To G5 Options

[mpnow]

Two related questions;

1) I have sketches of rough songs I recorded with the aid of a tiny little stereo microphone on a sony minidisc player. I would like to put them onto the hard drive of my G5. How do I do this?

2) I have been trying to start recording these sketches straight onto the mac (into Garageband) using exactly the same little microphone that I used to record onto the sony mini disc, but without any success. I do not understand why not.

I have checked that
(a) the mike still works by using it on the mini disk player again five minutes ago;
(b) in my 'system preferences' I have made sure that the 'input' is on 'audio line-in', that the volume control is up as high as it will go (though it seems to refuse to stay there and become the default volume setting);
© that the tiny little jack of the mike is plugged into the audio input jack on the back of the G5; and
(d) in Garageband, the new track is a 'real instrument' (voice).

Do not see what else I can do (I have not yet tried plugging the mike into the headphones socket on the front as I do not want to damage anything). Anyone any suggestions that will do the trick with the tools I have before me?

[mortalengines]

Your mini disc player probably has a built in preamp and therefore automatically boosts an incoming signal to an acceptable level. Have you tried the outputs of the mini disc player into the input of the mac (I don't know anything about the mini disc outputs but you may just have to find the proper adapter cables)? I don't know if that will work or not (I've never tried). However if that doesn't work you will need some kind of interface that will accept the output of your mini disc player (I am assuming RCA jacks) and possibly one that will have a microphone preamp. As cheap as some mixers are, you may want to just go the route of buying a small mixer that has a microphone preamp and then using its output to go into the mac's. There are some microphones with a built in preamp but, most have a very low output and therefore need to be amplified prior to going into your computer. Another possibility is buying a USB microphone....those are fairly inexpensive (around 100 dollars, US).

Good Luck!

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