Russ, I had presumed that the USB bit would work both ways, but the blurb seems to assume that the data is going FROM the computer. There is also the matter that the blurb about the device talks about some sort of 'looping' of the optical ports in and out. To my mind, there should be some mechanism in there to convert light to electrical signals and vice versa, but looping sounds suspicious, and I don't know what it means. Mirror?.

I contacted the retailer but they asked for more details, like what unit was I talking about, but then New Year's Eve intervened. I await developments.

I have quite a few (deteriorating) tapes to digitise, and the MD deck was the way I wanted to do it. But it isn't the only way. Just the best way for Minidiscs.