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Xitel's MD-Port AN1 in the Box

Xitel is better known for its Platinum Sound Vortex2 cards, but has since moved onto a market that better targets their customers: digital music recording. What they came up with is the MD-Port AN1, an intriguing product for analogue MP3 to MD recording, so that you can easily record your MP3s into your MiniDiscs using a high fidelity hardware solution.

The biggest contender in the market are the myriad of sound cards out there, and with digital recording at an all time high, it brings to question why Xitel chose to come out with an analogue product. In fact, Xitel is working on a digital MD-Port, the DG1 (soon to be released), but for now, the AN1 is their toy of choice, and Xitel feels it has some advantages to offer over a sound card. For one, it is an external solution, it isn’t installed INSIDE the system, and audio purists have been arguing for a while that the electromagnetic interference inside a computer case affects the quality of the audio decoding. Second, thanks to its USB interface, the AN1 can be taken anywhere, and used on any computer, without complicated software installs. You literally plug and play (provided you have the proper USB support on your windows install). The USB interface also guarantees that only digital signals are passed to the AN1 device, where all the D-A conversions can take place. Thirdly, Xitel packages the full version of MusicMatch Jukebox Plus with the AN1, and MusicMatch has a few benefits that other media players don’t have, the chief of which is the track marking feature for MD recording.

I remember publishing an article a while ago about MD recording from MP3s, and the most common question out there is always “how do I get auto track marking?” Normally when you record from CD’s using analogue cables, the tracks are auto marked because the CD’s have 3-4 second delay between tracks, and MD recorders in analogue mode use play volume to determine when tracks are turning over. In digital recording a CD player shuts off its digital output when a track finished playing, and this signals the MD recorder to mark tracks. The problem with recording from MP3s in digital AND analogue mode is that some computer media players, including Sonique, and WinAmp, do NOT have any functions to facilitate track marking in MD recordings. This could be a problem on some recorders which cannot otherwise distinguish between separate tracks. The included MusicMatch Jukebox Plus software DOES have a feature to enable 3-4 second silence spacers to signal track marking in analogue recordings, and that saves you a LOT of trouble. Several people I spoke to actually create empty 4 second long MP3s and put those between tracks to force track marking, but using the Analogue Track marking feature is so much more convenient. In our tests, we used a Sharp MD-MT20 portable recorder, and it did not require any special track marking when recording through an analogue connection… which made the whole MusicMatch software feature extraneous. If you also have a device without such problems, already one of the significant benefits of the AN1 is rendered useless.

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