File Converter Advice

[Novice Racer]

Problem: Recorded a concert where a friend was performing using a sony minidisc player. Records in a format known as hma.

Downloaded this onto laptop. Tried to play - not recognised by any sony software (sonic stage, connect etc) regardless of version.

Unable to locate any software conversion tool that will recognise hma files as these are specific to sony MD players and cannot therefore burn a CD or even play the data.

Any thoughts or advice on hma to other (ie mp3, wma) file conversion much appreciated.

Novice

[MacK]

"All recorded audio is placed in a collection of ".hma" files (of unknown format) in a single directory on the MD. One large .hma file contains all the audio-data, the other files are for index-data & titles. These ".hma" files can be freely copied back to the PC hard drive, but no subsequent playback of them is possible. (They present fertile ground for further investigation however). "


From http://www.minidisc.org/himd_mdcenter_news.html

Info is from March 04. May be a different story now..

Edit to add, see this message board. http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=7070

[Sanjøy]

Would think that Shug might know about this too.

[robin]

Problem: Recorded a concert where a friend was performing using a sony minidisc player. Records in a format known as hma.

Downloaded this onto laptop. Tried to play - not recognised by any sony software (sonic stage, connect etc) regardless of version.

Unable to locate any software conversion tool that will recognise hma files as these are specific to sony MD players and cannot therefore burn a CD or even play the data.

Any thoughts or advice on hma to other (ie mp3, wma) file conversion much appreciated.

Novice

Nice; Sony has encrypted/authenticated your personal recording of your friend's concert. It's locked into planet Sony never to emerge.

The MD cryptographically signs and encrypts the data in this file as it records it. To play it back you must insert MD into MD player. If you originally authored and transcoded music on a PC running Sony's s/w you could regain access to it there, but stuff recorded onto the MD directly is destined to stay in MD land.

There are two ways around this (1) crack encryption, publish to internet and be hounded by Sony and the music (recording) industry, (2) play it back from MD and recapture using "real time" method - i.e. using a sound card, line in cable and some audio capture s/w on a PC or Mac.

Personally I would love to do (1) but I am sure braver folk than I have been there and failed. So I think you're left with (2). Need a hand doing that, give me a shout.

Robin

[Shug]

Couldn't have put it better myself. Jack - jack cable into the line in on the PC and you can even use the windows sound recorder, if you don't mind a big .wav file. After you get the piece in, there's a myriad of programs out there to convert to mp3 or wma.

I tend to use a recording suite called Adobe Audition (formerly Cool Edit Pro) for the whole process. If it's good enough for 90% of ILR stations, it's good enough for me