Today. at Circuit City, I bought the cutiest little Sony Walkman I have ever seen. It is a little blue box that fits in the palm of your hand. It records on a Mini Disk and
holds 80+ minutes on each disk. It also
will record and play-back IN TUNE, so we can
record a show and then play it back and be able to play along. It also came with
tons of wires to connect to your car, and your stereo and your C.D. diskman, etc. none of what I have been able to figure out yet.
Does anyone else have experience with this
little goodie??
lolly
check out http://www.minidisco.com It’s like “The Whistle Shop” for minidisc nuts… Also, the C&F for minidisc afficionados is: http://www.minidisc.org
Blayne
Yeah, I’ve got one. Very nifty. I splurged on my new computer’s sound card and my computer now has optical in/out and my MD recorder has optical in, so I am busy making many minidiscs of music for my Great Potato Voyage (Aka “Spud Trek”) west.
Another link for MD people is http://www.t-station.net/md_codes.html which lists discount codes for various MD sites.
I’m currently looking for a CD/MD home deck with optical in AND out, if anyone sees one please let me know.
Edit - there is also http://www.minidiscussion.com/
[ This Message was edited by: avanutria on 2002-04-28 22:14 ]
Thanks for replying…but what are you
trying to do with this little thing???
Are you just “down-loading” other’s things
or your own playing to listen to on your great Potato trip
to Idaho?
I’ve been wondering about minidiscs lately, since they seem to be getting so popular. What exactly are the advantages they offer?
I would recommend a minidisc unreservedly.
For learning tunes, you can copy them onto the MD, then insert (inaudible) edit marks which allow you to play the tune in a continuous loop till you get every detail into your ear. Then you can play along with it and note the variations, differences of ornamentation etc. which are not at first apparent when you’re concentrating on getting the basic tune.
You can do this even with a tune which is part of a set of tunes played together on a CD. Using the same device you can also label each customised track so that you can remember which name belongs to which tune in the set.
Using a mike, you can also record an entire lesson or performance, then edit out all the background noise, pauses for tuning, applause etc. and keep just the tunes.
Also, minidiscs don’t suffer from the “spaghetti machine” problem which occurs when the takeup spool in a cassette slows down and the tape gets spewed all over the place and wrapped around various spindles in the player. Just keep the MDs away from magnets!
On 2002-04-28 23:23, lollycross wrote:
Thanks for replying…but what are you
trying to do with this little thing???
Are you just “down-loading” other’s things
or your own playing to listen to on your great Potato trip
to Idaho?
I have recorded from liveireland.com to listen to at work. I have recorded one local session. I have recorded a conference at school to refer to for an assignment. I have transferred “books on tape” to minidisc to reduce the number of times I have to change tapes. I have copied my cds to minidisc so that I can carry more music at school. I have recorded my boyfriend playing his guitar.
On 2002-04-28 23:32, TrevorC wrote:
I’ve been wondering about minidiscs lately, since they seem to be getting so popular. What exactly are the advantages they offer?
Blank discs are $2 at walmart (and often $1.50 online and $1 on ebay) and they can be rerecorded as many times as you want. Tracks can be rearranged, deleted, split into two, combined into one. Several recording modes with minimal loss of quality allow anywhere from 74 minutes (normal mode) to 148 minutes (MDLP2 mode) to nearly 300 minutes (MDLP4 mode) on a single disc, as opposed to about 60 minutes on a CD. The discs are smaller than CD and harder to break. damage, or scratch.
Downside? In the states it is tough to find supplies for MD. You will get overcharged anywhere you find the players carried in a brick-and-mortar store. You’re better off buying stuff online. Exception is that walmart carries blank disks for about $2 each in packs of threes, and I think Best Buy has begun to carry cases and blanks.
Lolly,
I’ve been using one for the last 18 months, and I have used it daily. Mine has the x4 record facility, so I can get 320 minutes of recording on one disc, and I can’t detect any loss of quality using this facility. It also has an FM/AM radio built into the remote, so I can listen to the radio too.
I initially got it for recording my mandolin and singing lessons, but then also used it to dump lots of tape recordings and CDs onto MD, so it’s a great travelling buddy - the discs are so tiny.
The recording is of CD quality, with no loss of quality from repeat playings (unlike tapes, that wear away), the discs are very cheap and often come in colours for fun. The unit only requires on AA battery to run, which is rechargeable.
All in all, though I’ve often spent money on gadgets that don’t get used, I can honestly say if I lost mine today I’d immediately go out and replace it - it is the tidyest piece of kit I’ve ever seen!
Thanks everyone, know I’m REALLY glad I bought this little guy. I hate it when a
salesman tells you he has exactly what you
are looking for and you buy it and when you get it home, it isn’t what you want at all.
This sure sounds like it will do everything I need it to do, if I can get thru the thick instruction manual.
lolly
Just holler if you need any assistance.
the MiniDisk sounds great…by comparison, has anyone heard if they make recorders that use the CompactFlash and SmartMedia cards used in digital cameras? If so, I wonder how these cmpare? Ive heard they make these for storing music, but I dont know if they also make a version that records. Seems one advantage is you could store and send sound files easily by recording then emailing.
I don;t know if they make any that use compact flash or smart media. The thing that sets minidiscs apart from those is that a minidisc’s memory is in units of time, whereas CFlash and SMedia (and CDROMs, and CDRs, and floppy disks, and computer hard drives…) save in units of storage space, a certain number of kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, etc.
When you record an MP3 to your computer the file size could be 300 KB (an example). But when you record that same file to your minidisc it will tell you how many minutes and seconds the song is. It doesn’t know any other way to consider it.
It all end up being the same anyway. A minidisc contains a stream of bytes, and you can display minutes and/or kbytes. The minidisc displays the size in minutes, as it is what we really want to see, but you could also display size in minutes with a memory card… Same thing with a CD…
I don’t think it’s quite the same thing but I don’t have the expertise to articulate the difference, so I’ll bow out…
If you go to a site like musiciansfriend.com,
you also note that there are minidisk recorders that are multitrack. These however, are made for 4 or 8 track music recording.
Actually, being a computer geek by trade, I’d have to say Azalin’s right.
A MP3 file is saved to your disc as 1’s and 0’s. Vinyl is “analog”…the music is saved as little hills and valleys in the grooves that cause vibrations in the record needle which, when amplified, sounds like the original recording. CD’s and Minidiscs are “digital”..they’re sampled, and turned into 1’s and 0’s. CD’s have a sample rate (44.1 KHz), same as any MP3 (though mp3s can have varying sample rates). This represents how often the sound is sampled to create our bits. When you stick a CD or Minidisc in a player, a laser reads the 1s and 0s and translates it digitally to music. The only difference between a data cd your computer can read, and an audio cd your car can play is the FORMAT of the data..much like macs and pcs can use the same type of floppy disc, but that doesn’t mean that you can put a mac-formatted disc in a pc and it’ll work.
The only reason they show units of time on a minidisc is for convenience. They could easily show bytes instead. When i open an mp3 in winamp, I see it as an mp3 that takes up X minutes and seconds, as well.
On 2002-04-29 22:00, avanutria wrote:
I don’t think it’s quite the same thing but I don’t have the expertise to articulate the difference, so I’ll bow out… >
[ This Message was edited by: Wandering_Whistler on 2002-04-29 23:01 ]
On 2002-04-29 23:00, Wandering_Whistler wrote (among other things):
The only difference between a data cd your computer can read, and an audio cd your car can play is the FORMAT of the data..much like macs and pcs can use the same type of floppy disc, but that doesn’t mean that you can put a mac-formatted disc in a pc and it’ll work.
That’s what I was trying to articulate, since the original question was:
On 2002-04-29 13:26, DazedinLA wrote:
has anyone heard if they make recorders that use the CompactFlash and SmartMedia cards used in digital cameras? If so, I wonder how these cmpare? Ive heard they make these for storing music, but I dont know if they also make a version that records.
The guy at http://www.soundprofessinals.com is very helpful and informative about MiniDisk players and recording microphones.
Based on his comments, Im going to wait for the new Sharp, which will be cheaper than the current model. The main advantage of the Sharps is that they allow input level control while recording…Sony’s apparently force you to stop recording to adjust levels.
Re microphones, they have something really cool called the “OtterBox”, which is a waterproof box that holds your MiniDisk player and has built in omnidirectional microphones…and at $69.00 its the same price as a standard set of omni mics…spilling Guinness is bad enough, but spilling it on your recorder during a session, whell, that just won dooo.
I’ve got an otterbox, very tough. No worries about my schoolbag with that thing.
But note that the one with the mic is NOT waterproof - they have to put holes in it for the mic, after all. That one is only crush proof.
(Glass reinforced ABS resin, if anyone is wondering grin)