thinkbrown / netmd-tocmanip

A library that lets you parse and edit Minidiscs' table of contents with ease

NetMD Tocmanip

What is it?

NetMD Tocmanip is a library created to parse and edit the ToC (Table of Contents) sections of Sony's Minidiscs. It is not meant to be used as a standalone program. Note that this library can only work on raw bytes - it itself cannot fetch the ToC from a NetMD device. (See netmd-js for that.)

Which TOC sectors are currently supported?

• Sector 0 - Position and address sector. Stores the positions of tracks on the disc
• Sector 1 - Half-width title sector. Stores ASCII and katakana titles.
• Sector 2 - Timestamp sector. Stores tracks' date and time of recording and recorder timestamp.
• Sector 3 - Full-width title sector. Stores kanji, hiragana, full-width katakana and full-width ascii titles. (Not supported yet.)

How to use it?

The two most basic functions for interacting with netmd-tocmanip are parseTOC() and reconstructTOC().

parseTOC()

Below is an example of how to use parseTOC() to load the table of contents from a minidisc using a supported NetMD device.

// Assuming `netmdInteface` is an instance of netmd-js's NetMDInterface
const factoryInterface = await netmdInterface.factory();
const sector0 = await readUTOCSector(factoryInterface, 0);
const sector1 = await readUTOCSector(factoryInterface, 1);

// As sectors are independent of each other, it's possible to skip a sector when using parseTOC()
const sector2 = null; //await readUTOCSector(factoryInterface, 2);

const toc = parseTOC(sector0, sector1, sector2);

reconstructTOC()

Below is an example of how to use reconstructTOC() to recreate the binary representation of the ToC, and write it back to disc.

// Assuming `netmdInterface` is an instance of netmd-js's NetMDInterface and `toc` is an instance of this library's ToC
const factoryInterface = await netmdInterface.factory();
const sectors = reconstructTOC(toc);
for(let sector = 0; sector<sectors.length; sector++){
    if(sector !== null){
        await writeUTOCSector(factoryInterface, sector, sectors[sector]);
    }
}
// WARNING:
// The `writeUTOCSector` calls don't force a ToC Edit. If the ToC becomes 'dirty' by, f. ex. changing a track's name
// the player will first flush its copy of sector 0 from SRAM back to the TOC caching peripheral, overwriting the data written via NetMD.
// To prevent that from happening, it's necessary to trigger a non-flushing ToC Edit with the help of netmd-exploits.
// (https://github.com/asivery/netmd-exploits)

Contributions

Every contribution is welcome, but please stick to the TOC's specification. This library isn't the place to implement custom features used only by new NetMD software.

Credits

Writing this library would be much harder without the excellent article about the TOC on minidisc.org: https://www.minidisc.org/md_toc.html