Yamaha CDR-HD1300

[Declanella]

I have a Yamaha CDR-HD1300 which I have had for many years. I would dearly love to download the contents of the hard drive to a computer or a memory stick. Could any body help me I am 80 and not very good with modern technology so any assistance would be very greatfully appreciated

John

 

[Gray]

I know you've had it for many years John, because I wanted one when it first came out - but it was far too expensive for me.

In fact, I wrote a letter about its price to Hi-fi Choice magazine. I compared it with the £300 price of DVD / HDD recorders, making the point that audio enthusiasts were being exploited.
They fully agreed and made it the letter of the month.
Certainly was / still is a unique product though.

How many hours of music have you got on its hard drive?
I'm guessing that it possibly used the special 'For Audio' recordable discs - as opposed to the cheap 'standard' CDRs.
If so, have you still got enough to temporarily take your full HDD content.
Answers to the above questions will determine your best option of......whether to copy to CDRs then rip CDRs to computer / USB stick....or remove the HDD from the Yamaha and clone its PCM audio, if possible.
...Or maybe even copy from one of its digital outputs.
Have you got a coaxial digital input on your computer?

 

[Fandango Andy]

I have a Yamaha CDR-HD1300 which I have had for many years. I would dearly love to download the contents of the hard drive to a computer or a memory stick. Could any body help me I am 80 and not very good with modern technology so any assistance would be very greatfully appreciated

John

Hi John

Have you looked on the Yamaha website? It looks like the device comes with some software. It is intended for editing but may well also work for backups.

They also have a customer support section:

ukfaq

faq.yamaha.com

Finally if the device fails, it looks like it stores information on a hard drive. As with an old computer, you can take the hard drive out and plug it into a USB using Adapter Connector (£5 or £10 from amazon). From there you can drag and drop files. A word of warning, this can be a slow process.

 

[Gray]

Finally if the device fails, it looks like it stores information on a hard drive.

The idea is that it works by storing to its internal hard drive Andy - which you can edit before copying to its own CDR drive.
It's the stuff on the HDD that he wants to copy off 👍
Depending on how Yamaha have stored the 'PCM audio', (and how much of it he has) dragging and dropping may indeed be his best option 🤔

 

[SallyB]

The idea is that it works by storing to its internal hard drive Andy - which you can edit before copying to its own CDR drive.
It's the stuff on the HDD that he wants to copy off 👍
Depending on how Yamaha have stored the 'PCM audio', (and how much of it he has) dragging and dropping may indeed be his best option 🤔

I have owned one of these excellent machines since they came out. I will be interested to hear if these suggestions work. Short of removing the hard drive I was not aware of a way that it’s contents can be examined whilst in-situ. Recordings on the hard drive are generally copied onto a CD-Audio disk with the usual time limit for recordings of 79mins. As far as I am aware recordings would need to be transferred this way one at a time and either played on a computer or copied to a computer hard drive if the file formats allow it.

 

[Gray]

I have owned one of these excellent machines since they came out.

Good for you Sally, a unique product - and it says a lot that both yours and John's are working perfectly after decades.

Depends how much John has got on his hard drive as to how he should proceed.
Obviously your edited recordings end up as CD 'redbook' (or orange book for CDR) standard before the transfer to permanent CD.....it's certainly PCM so maybe in a useable form on the hard drive - (but within the Yamaha there can only be a transfer once the 'For Audio' flag has been read from those special (specially expensive) discs.

(I've got a CD recorder designed to use only those 'For Audio' discs -which were £5 each.
But, fortunately, there's a trick to make my Philips recorder use CDR blanks costing around 13p each when bought by the hundred).

 

[SallyB]

In fact, I wrote a letter about its price to Hi-fi Choice magazine. I compared it with the £300 price of DVD / HDD recorders, making the point that audio enthusiasts were being exploited.
They fully agreed and made it the letter of the month.
Certainly was / still is a unique product though.

Yes, they were £750 as I recall, but I guess that at around 30 years use, that doesn’t sound as bad. In some ways it remains a unique product and still has a variety of uses,

 

[DREADZONE]

Yes, they were £750 as I recall, but I guess that at around 30 years use, that doesn’t sound as bad. In some ways it remains a unique product and still has a variety of uses,

I bought mine in Dec 2004, so surprisingly only 20 years old! It's a great, unique piece of kit, and gave me hours of techie recording and editing pleasure back in the day.

 

[DREADZONE]

I bought a Yamaha CDR-1300-II in Dec 2004, so surprisingly only 20 years old! It's a great, unique piece of kit, and gave me hours of techie recording and editing pleasure back in the day. It's still wired into my system, but I don't think I've touched it for 3 or 4 years! Originally, I built-up a collection of my favourite tracks transferred to CD for playing in the car . . . but alas, CD players in cars are rare these days! I have now transferred some of the tracks from these CDs to my own stored play lists in Amazon Unlimited and stream from there. But you've now made me want to re-visit what's on that Yamaha HDD!
But, back to your question, John: the CDR-1300 has both optical and coaxial digital outputs so an excellent potential means to transfer out from the HDD (if you do not want to copy CD by CD one at a time). My PC has a digital soundcard (Creative Soundblaster @£35) which provides for excellent streamed output of my Amazon Unlimited HD subscription to my HiFi system; I have not used it for digital input (and hence recording). But, I guess in theory, we could output from the CDR-1300 to PC via opt/coax digital, and record to the PC's hard drive? Perhaps someone on here can advise on feasibility of this, or a work-a-round? I'd be very interested, too.

 

[SallyB]

Sounds promising. Will this approach enable him to read the files on the hard disk and select the ones he wants to transfer?

 

[Gray]

Yes, they were £750 as I recall

They were.
At the same time my Panasonic DVD recorder was under £300.
It too had HDD (with editing/ titling) and a DVD burner. It had a TV tuner and processed video as well as audio.
In reality, DVD recorders should have been twice the price of that audio-only Yamaha.

You rich kids certainly paid a high price for the Yamaha - I'm glad it's lasted so well for the 3 of you (My Panasonic DVD recorder is still OK too though).

 

[Gray]

Sounds promising. Will this approach enable him to read the files on the hard disk and select the ones he wants to transfer?

Not 'read' the files in the same way that he might if he were to remove the hard drive - and look at its contents.

What you will get from one of the digital outputs of the Yamaha, are CD quality PCM streams - which could be recorded sequentially - via a soundcard (or interface) with digital inputs.

A programme such as Audacity would do the recording. It also does editing, but you may prefer to pre-do the editing on the Yamaha.

The original poster John (lets hope he's ok) wanted to be able to store the audio files on his PC / USB stick.
Depends on his playback method (how it displays) but he would need to check / amend metadata - and add album art in the form of a jpeg picture - something the Yamaha never needed to do back then.

It may seem like a chore to sequentially copy off the audio, but internal hard drives were never that large in those days....and the Yamaha can only store a maximum of 120 hours can't it?

 

[SallyB]

Let’s hope John is able to return and let us know how he gets on. I might want to do it myself one day!

 

[My2Cents]

As already suggested, you could buy a SATA 3.5" external drive docking station (they are pretty cheap... around £25).
Remove the HDD from the HD1300 and hook it up to your computer with USB (using the docking station) and take a look at what' s on the Yamaha's HDD drive.
Although the Yamaha stored the files as PCM files, you may have issues playing them due to possible copyright data that the Yamaha may have embedded into the PCM files as metadata when you recorded to the HDD from commercially purchased CD's.
As already stated, the only other option I can see is to record every single file/song separately using the Yamaha's digital outs to the digital in on a computer's audio interface input and then into some recording software.... possibly 40 hours or more of work!
If you already own the CD's that you saved onto the Yamaha's HDD why would you need to do this anyway?