gmdrec is a USB interface circuit between your late 90's Sony portable MiniDisc recorder and your PC.

Early portable MiniDisc recorders (despite all their retro charm) lack some modern conveniences such as a USB port. These only started to appear in devices featuring NetMD. For anything made before 2001 your primary interface with the device was pressing buttons on a remote. This included things such as labeling tracks which made it a very tedious endeavor.

This simple circuit pretends to be a remote and pushes buttons programmatically, driven by a Python script available on GitHub.

With gmdrec recording and labeling MDs is a one-click operation. You just create a playlist in a supported media player (currently Foobar2000 on Windows and DeaDBeeF on Linux, please note MacOS is not supported) and click Start. gmdrec will grab the tracks on the playlist, break them down into a sequence of button presses and label each track as it is being recorded in real time. You can also use it to label discs which have already been recorded but lack the titles.

Currently supported recorders include: MZ-R55, MZ-R37, MZ-R70, MZ-R90, MZ-R91, MZ-R700, MZ-R701, MZ-N707, MZ-R900! Also supported: MZ-R909, MZ-R910, MZ-N1