Hi Minidisc
Posted by: Phil Sparks on 08 August 2005
Has anyone any experience of these new-ish 1GB minidisc machines. I've been looking for an easy way to copy some of my vinyl onto CD for the car, kids walkmans etc. Doing a bit of surfing these 1GB minidisks seem to be reasonably well rated for recording quality, and can record at the full 44k CD rate. I'm guessing that it would then be pretty easy to dump the file into the PC, trim, split into tracks and burn a CD.
I know it's no Ipod in terms of capacity and ease of use, but they seem to be going for £100 or so now. Also would mean I don't have to have another hi-fi box (if I went the CD recorder route), and I wouldn't have to snake cables all over the house if I linked the hifi directly to the pc.
thoughts?
Phil
ps - does anyone else think that Sony could have cleaned up with minidisk if they hadn't been so paranoid about copying. It's a small, robust format, 140MB on the old ones, 1GB on the new ones. If we'd all replaced our 1.4MB floppy drives with a minidisc 10 years ago it would have bevome the de-facto external storage medium
I know it's no Ipod in terms of capacity and ease of use, but they seem to be going for £100 or so now. Also would mean I don't have to have another hi-fi box (if I went the CD recorder route), and I wouldn't have to snake cables all over the house if I linked the hifi directly to the pc.
thoughts?
Phil
ps - does anyone else think that Sony could have cleaned up with minidisk if they hadn't been so paranoid about copying. It's a small, robust format, 140MB on the old ones, 1GB on the new ones. If we'd all replaced our 1.4MB floppy drives with a minidisc 10 years ago it would have bevome the de-facto external storage medium
Posted on: 10 August 2005 by ChrisG
Phil
I have no personal experience of the Hi Minidisc, but last week I met a friend at a gig and he was using one to record it from the audience. This is man who has recorded gigs for years on a portable DAT machine with a pair of £200 stereo mics . He uses the same mics on the Minidisc. I queried the use of this and he just said that it was now uncompressed and sounded just as good as his DAT and was much smaller. I'm sorely tempted. Not to record gigs of course, that would be very naughty! I'd be interested to hear how you get on if you purchase one?
Chris
I have no personal experience of the Hi Minidisc, but last week I met a friend at a gig and he was using one to record it from the audience. This is man who has recorded gigs for years on a portable DAT machine with a pair of £200 stereo mics . He uses the same mics on the Minidisc. I queried the use of this and he just said that it was now uncompressed and sounded just as good as his DAT and was much smaller. I'm sorely tempted. Not to record gigs of course, that would be very naughty! I'd be interested to hear how you get on if you purchase one?
Chris
Posted on: 10 August 2005 by Phil Sparks
Chris
thanks for that info, trawling the internet the impression I had was that Minidisk has pretty much died as a consumer alternative to iPods etc, but that it still had life as a high quality portable recording medium. The persuasive thing at the mo is how cheap they are - a little more than £100 gets you the best machines around.
As an alternative does anyone know if any of the iPod-alikes has a half decent analogue in?
Phil
thanks for that info, trawling the internet the impression I had was that Minidisk has pretty much died as a consumer alternative to iPods etc, but that it still had life as a high quality portable recording medium. The persuasive thing at the mo is how cheap they are - a little more than £100 gets you the best machines around.
As an alternative does anyone know if any of the iPod-alikes has a half decent analogue in?
Phil
Posted on: 10 August 2005 by Two-Sheds
I believe the iRiver mp3 player (hard disk based ones anyway) have an analogue input and can record and convert into mp3 (not sure about other formats) on the fly. I've no idea about quality, but I may well replace my iPod over the next year and will probably look at one when the time comes.
Posted on: 10 August 2005 by Martin Payne
The H320 / H340 can record on it's line-in, although only to MP3 format (max 320kbps).
It has a few other neat features, too.
In the future, it is possible that the "Rockbox" project may deliver a third party firmware which will give WAV recording.
cheers, Martin
It has a few other neat features, too.
In the future, it is possible that the "Rockbox" project may deliver a third party firmware which will give WAV recording.
cheers, Martin
Posted on: 11 August 2005 by Nick_S
The iRiver H140 (still available new in some places) will record and playback WAV format and has TOSLINK digital inputs and outputs so you can use an external DAC for improved playback, e.g., into a domestic system. The WAV files can be burned to CDs for your car or you can run the player directly into the car's stereo with an adapter.
The recent iRiver units have dropped the digital input and output sockets as well as the WAV format support --- what a shame.
Nick
The recent iRiver units have dropped the digital input and output sockets as well as the WAV format support --- what a shame.
Nick
Posted on: 14 August 2005 by Martin Payne
quote:Originally posted by Nick_S:
The iRiver H140 (still available new in some places) will record and playback WAV format and has TOSLINK digital inputs and outputs so you can use an external DAC for improved playback, e.g., into a domestic system. The WAV files can be burned to CDs for your car or you can run the player directly into the car's stereo with an adapter.
The recent iRiver units have dropped the digital input and output sockets as well as the WAV format support --- what a shame.
Nick
Nick,
agree with all of that (although the H3xx players do have some other facilities not available in the older player).
I believe the H120/H140 can also accept TSOLINK input from an external ADC. Recording this to WAV should give a much better performance overall.
cheers, Martin
Posted on: 15 August 2005 by David C
Phil,
I got a HI-MD when they were launched last year. If you are happy with the relatively small capacity compared to HD based systems it is a really good medium. I am very pleased with mine. several friends and colleagues have had disasters with ipod's and other hard disk based systems. At least with the sony, you can replace the battery and get blank disks. It is quite robust, I travel a lot and it has not let me down yet.
David
I got a HI-MD when they were launched last year. If you are happy with the relatively small capacity compared to HD based systems it is a really good medium. I am very pleased with mine. several friends and colleagues have had disasters with ipod's and other hard disk based systems. At least with the sony, you can replace the battery and get blank disks. It is quite robust, I travel a lot and it has not let me down yet.
David
Posted on: 15 August 2005 by Phil Sparks
david, thanx for the info. I guess at the moment the appealing thing is the relatively low price, they seem to go for £80 to about £150 depending on model, and the supposedly quite decent A to D included. I'd probably end up transfering quite a lot of my vinyl to CD, via the MD for use in the car and so I can run off a copy for the kids. Then if I did eventually for for an ipod or other HD portable (there is after all something very appealing about having all your collection on one little box) it would be pretty easy to spend a few evenings feeding the pc with the CDs I'd burnt.
Do you find it easy to get hold of the Hi-MD blanks? Also which model did you get and what do you think of it?
cheers
Phil
Do you find it easy to get hold of the Hi-MD blanks? Also which model did you get and what do you think of it?
cheers
Phil
Posted on: 16 August 2005 by Nick_S
MD uses ATRAC compression to hold the music --- do you want all your vinyl stored using a lossy perceptual coding algorithm? Converting back to CD will not put back in the lost information. On the other hand, storing to WAV files (either via a PC or a suitable HD player) at 16bit 44.1KHz will at least obtain the same amount of musical information as the final CD. Apparently, the extended HI-MD format also offers uncompressed encoding, but I don't know about the cost of disks, players etc.
Nick
Nick
Posted on: 16 August 2005 by Phil Sparks
My strategy was to get one of the HiMD machines and use it to take copies of my vinyl at full uncompressed .WAV rate. The advantage here being that it's a small machine that I can plug into the back of my NAC82, so I don't have to have cables snaking around the house from hifi to PC. Also I'm guessing that as the MD recorders get fairly good press for their ADCs it would probably sound better than the sound card in my PC. I'd then copy the file into my pc, trim and split into tracks before burning to CD as WAV files.
I'd then have a decent CD copy of the LP for the car, kids, etc. I could also then downsample the file using ATRAC for portable use. I know it sounds a bit convoluted but for £100 or so I'm guessing it the easiest and best quality way of getting a decent CD copy of my vinyl.
Phil
I'd then have a decent CD copy of the LP for the car, kids, etc. I could also then downsample the file using ATRAC for portable use. I know it sounds a bit convoluted but for £100 or so I'm guessing it the easiest and best quality way of getting a decent CD copy of my vinyl.
Phil
Posted on: 16 August 2005 by Nick_S
It sounds like a good strategy, if the Hi-MD media are reasonably priced.
Nick
Nick
Posted on: 16 August 2005 by Phil Sparks
Looks like they're about £5 per 1GB disk, poss a bit less if you buy in 10s or buy from US.
Shame that Sony didn't push MiniDisks as the new floppy disks 7 or 8 years ago, then every pc would have one, the blanks would be dirt cheap and we'd prob now have developed 10GB minidisks. However they went down the copy protection route and effectively scuppered MD's chances of being the de-facto consumer standard. It looks like it's now become the alternative to DAT in pro circles so blanks should be available for quite a while, but will prob be quite expensive.
Phil
Shame that Sony didn't push MiniDisks as the new floppy disks 7 or 8 years ago, then every pc would have one, the blanks would be dirt cheap and we'd prob now have developed 10GB minidisks. However they went down the copy protection route and effectively scuppered MD's chances of being the de-facto consumer standard. It looks like it's now become the alternative to DAT in pro circles so blanks should be available for quite a while, but will prob be quite expensive.
Phil
Posted on: 16 August 2005 by David C
Phil,
HI-MD media is easy to get now, when it first came out your could not buy it in the uk for 6 months after release, although it was relatively easy to get in the staets and HK on the web.
I can't remember which unit I have of the top of my head, but it was the mid range model with record and re-chargeable battery. I am quite pleased with it. I regrey not buying the top of the range slim model now, I could not get one at launch and really wanted to get a new mobile player as my much used discman had passed away a week or to before.
David
HI-MD media is easy to get now, when it first came out your could not buy it in the uk for 6 months after release, although it was relatively easy to get in the staets and HK on the web.
I can't remember which unit I have of the top of my head, but it was the mid range model with record and re-chargeable battery. I am quite pleased with it. I regrey not buying the top of the range slim model now, I could not get one at launch and really wanted to get a new mobile player as my much used discman had passed away a week or to before.
David
Posted on: 17 August 2005 by Mr Mitch
If you can stand the complete lack of motivation by their employees (Carrott rightly said they failed their Woolworths exam) then go to Argos.
If you check on their website they have HiMD very cheap - I think typing Clearance in the search will bring it up. Its a sony for £80.
If you check on their website they have HiMD very cheap - I think typing Clearance in the search will bring it up. Its a sony for £80.