Mini Disc To Mac, Transfering audio Options

[titania100]

Newbie here, please forgive if my question does not belong.

Does anyone have suggestions on how to transfer mini disc audio onto my G4?
USB2, firewire 400, 800, Mac OS X(10.3.4), 1 gig ram, 1.25 ghz, infinite hard drive space.

It looks like I need a USB on one end and an RCA mini on the other. There is also a port on the mini recorder labelled "optical."

Thank you!

[midiwife]

Hi there, yes this digital transfer is my main aim as well.

I've been eagerly awaiting the new HiMD recorders from Sony so I can transfer my field recordings straight to my mac without the need for an intermediate analogue transfer. My old Sharp MD has no optical out so the 410 option is no good in this respect.
My solution was to buy an iRiver i-HP 120 MP3 player and recorder. It can record at CD quality, is a 20Gb HD, an FM tuner and has an internal mic. It also has optical in and out and connects to a computer via USB. Sounds incredible right?

Sadly though, the recordings aren't great. There are dropouts every so often, very small but they sound as clicks. Plus, recording from the inbuilt mic is useless as the drive makes a racket. Plus, the mic input is for the supplied (pretty crap) mic. Using my Sony ECM Z90 (I think - the recommended stereo mic for walkmans etc) the level is very low. Plus, there are no record level meters. So, all in all, it's pretty poor for the use I bought it.

Also, although it connects via USB, the software for cataloguing MP3s etc on it is PC only! This is a real pain.

BUT... If you connect it to a Mac, it just appears as a separate external HD (I've only done this under OSX.2.8). That way, you can just open the disk icon and drag your files across to the mac. It's not a sophisticated method but it works just fine. In fact, I use it extensively now as a portable 20Gb HD to swap files from work (on a pc) to my mac at home.

So, my feeling is that if the Sony HiMD machines conform to the Mass USB storage protocol, we mac users should be able to just connect them to our machines and drag files back and forth. As far as I understand it, Sony have said they will work as removable HDs as well so we should be ok.

If anyone knows different, I'd be glad to know before I get my hopes up too much. I love MDs for their sheer reliability and ease of use. Plus, they're discrete!

Regards to all.