Sony MZR900 Minidisc Recorder

[pelesl]

Geez! Okay, so I just got a Sony MZR900 Portable Minidisc Recorder. It's one of the higher up models. Of course had I known the new N1S existed, I would have waited for that, but nevertheless, here's my problem.

The recorder comes with the pc interface (a USB to optical that installs itself as a sound card). To record MP3s to minidisc, then, you just press record on your recorder and play the MP3's from your favorite player and the recorder will start recording as soon as it receives signal.

Of course my favorite player is Winamp. But here's the problem. Under normal recording, the recorder auto-syncs, as I mentioned (this, mind you, is with sync mode OFF). The problem is that when winamp goes to the next song on the playlist, the minidisc momentarily receives no signal, so it stops recording. Then as soon as the next song starts playing, it realizes it and starts recording again. So then what happens is, that since it can't react fast enough, it chops off a fraction of a second from the beginning of the song.

Now I'm sorry if this sounds picky, but I absolutely hate that. The only solution, as far as I can tell, is to insert 1 second of silence (at least) at the front of each file WITHIN THE MP3 ITSELF. Just putting a silent mp3 in the playlist creates an empty track between songs and the problem doesn't really get fixed. Delay plugins, like WinCue, don't fix the problem, since the problem arises when the minidisc starts recording again, so no amount of waiting will fix it. The only way is to make the recorder think that sound is playing - by adding silence to the beginning of every song on my hard drive.

Now I'm definitely not going to sit there and do it by hand. As far as I can tell, it doesn't look too hard to add some silent frames into the beginning of an mp3. But the problem is that I'm home for the holidays and all I can do is write a macro in Word to do this, and it ain't really working.

Does anyone know of a program that already does this? Maybe a program that merges two mp3s together?

Thanks.

Emilio