A few years ago I was gifted recordings of quite a few shows by a very kind head. I received them on Ridata 16x DVD-R discs. They must be quite compressed because a disc holds about 15 or so shows. My hearing and unfortunately, my mind, are going so I want to enjoy these shows while I can. I have a good vintage stereo (Receiver, Cassette Deck, CD player, etc) that I would like to use to listen to them on. I understand it is counterintuitive to go backwards in technology, but how can I uncompress them and transfer them to a medium that I can use with my vintage system. I apologize if this is a stupid question, but I'm just not very technically savvy. Thanks in advance to anyone willing to take the time to help out.
The easiest route might be to find a drive that can read those cds and be plugged into your receiver. Happy to try and help you out in a chat if you want.
My impression is that they’re flac files which were burned onto the dvd. That’s what I used to do before external hard drives became more affordable for me. If your computer doesn’t have a disc drive, external disc drives aren’t very expensive. You may also have to spring for a USB hub if your computer doesn’t have enough USB ports. However, once you have that hardware, the rest of the process should go smoothly. Put the disc in the drive, the files (or more likely folders) will appear on the monitor then you can drag and drop them onto your computer and take it from there. I can’t comment on what it takes to listen to flac files (if they are in fact flac files) since I recode mine to MP3 with Traders Little Helper. My 73 year old ears are too shot to be able to discern the difference though of course ymmv.
Edit: I just reread the original post so I’ll add that TLH will also decode flac files to wav which can be burned onto cd-r. You’d probably need a slightly more expensive disc drive to accomplish this as well as software which will burn wav files onto a cd-r.
Please also note that I haven’t done any of this in at least 10 years and probably longer and I haven’t kept up with advances in technology, so what used to work when I had hair may be out of the question now.
A laptop or desktop computer with a disk drive? A DVD player may bring up a menu too.
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The headphones out jack should work fine, unless it's one of the newer-vintage laptops that only has a single jack for both headphones and microphone. If you can share the make and model of the laptop I can look it up for you. Chances are good it has a discrete headphone jack in which case you'll need a cable that has a stereo 3.5mm plug on one end and a pair of RCA plugs on the other, in order to connect the laptop to one of the unused input channels of your amp (or receiver). then you'll want to unzip those files onto your laptop's hard drive. If they take up more space than you have spare, you can get an offboard drive very cheap. Feel free to DM me for more detailed help.
Without knowing how the DVD was burned...
Try putting the DVD in a DVD player and see if you can play the music.
Obvious solution is to put the DVD in a PC and 'rip' the files to your PC hard drive. Then you decide how you want to play them, meaning you could stream to your network if you have that capability. Or you could 'burn' the files to CD and play via your CD player. Or you could hook up a tape deck to your computer and record the files on cassette tape and then play via your cassette deck.
Lots of options, and I've used them all, happy to help with software recommendations and such...
Before you go through too much trouble, check out the Grateful Dead collection on the Internet Archive. It's unlikely you have anything out of the ordinary if we're talking Grateful Dead and probably not worth your time to figure it out, but to each their own...
Also, as someone who cares about sound quality I'll tell you that if you have 15 complete shows on one 4.7GB DVR, the audio is compressed and you can find better quality elsewhere, for free...
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I recommend skipping the download and burn steps and just listen to the shows direct from the archive, streaming them. The audio quality is lower, but the ease and access to variety makes up for that, in my opinion. The key step is to connect the headphones jack of your laptop to your stereo, which can be easily done with the right sort of connecting cable.