I’m here at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Sony has announced a new audio Minidisc HD format that puts 1 GB of data on a disc (nearly 3X the current). The new portable recorders allow USB upload of recordings made with the microphone! This is huge!
Cool, but I hope it’s not going to be like SuperBeta. They really need to market their stuff better in North America.
Sony has a knack for championing great technologies . . . and then watching them die. 
Stuart
hey Michael, I’m out here in Vegas for six months or so, I saw specs on the new recorder as hubby is at CES. Very cool. Hey, in all the times you’ve been out to Vegas, ever find any place to play around here? I’m not having much luck. LeeAnn
I’m not concerned about the SuperBeta effect, as long as I can get one of the recorders and a pile of media… I don’t use MD as a collection mechanism, just as conduit to getting recordings into my PC…
Can’t wait to try this out!
Michael
I’ll be curious to see if these MDs even have a mic input. When I checked the models out on Sony’s site on the day of the announcement, it looked like they might only be able to record via USB transfer from your computer, like many of the lower-priced models that Sony now offers.
I think it’ll be good if they use the HD format to allow a more unprocessed signal to be recorded. For fidelity purposes, the portable gold standard would probably be DAT. Although I’m a big fan of MD as a portable format (I even have a MD/Radio in my car . . . how’s that for geeky) but it doesn’t have the best sound quality.
I mean, take the sampling rate of regular CDs, which is kinda low anyway (and much lower than newer formats, like SACD and DVD-A), and then add in a compression algorithm. I’d think if they tripled the capacity of the MD, they could actually back off on the compression and get CD-quality.
But I shouldn’t be such a Negative Nancy.
Of course, this is coming from someone with a tube amplifier. Heh.
Stuart
I did see them at the show in the Sony booth. They do have a mic jack on all but the lowest end model.
This is great, just fantastic, if is does in fact deliver what they claim. I specifically confirmed with the Sony rep that it would be able to upload recordings made viathe mic jack to my PC via the USB jack.
Here’s a photo of the next to the top of the line unit:
http://www.pbase.com/image/25016063
They are actually touting it as a generic data exchange mechanism.
Wow, that is cool! There was some discussion of a built-in DRM system…did Sony tell you anything about that? Would that affect our ability to transfer live recordings to our computer and burn CDs? If not, then this is the product I’ve been waiting for and I can stop holding out for a recordable iPod.
This is great news if I understand it correctly. Does it mean that you can just upload a file into your PC? You won’t have to play your MD in real time into some conversion software?
If this is true, please pick me up one of these units. Thanks Michael!
tk
Knowing how Sony does things, though, one may not be able to do anything worthwhile with this recorder (recording live sessions especially) uploading on the Mac(?)
Here’s some more info:
Eskin,
Do you know whether the proprietary codec that these things record sound files in - ATRAC3plus codec (insert copyright emoticon w/Hitler moustache here) - allows one to upload these files to your PC AND convert them to a format useful for playback on another device (such as WAV, MP3, etc)? The music management software they provide with it, SonicStage 2.0 jukebox, “supports many Internet audio formats, including MP3, WMA, WAV files,” but support doesn’t necessarily mean convertability.
Thanking you,
Mark
If I understand it correctly, they will allow uploading and conversion of recordings made in the field from the mike input to other formats, but will impose some kind of DRM on music being downloaded for playback, similar to their current NetMD scheme.
I presently have a Sony MD player/recorder. I have had it for about 18 months I think. It records via digital microphone (not all of them do), and sounds absolutely fantastic. The device cost about US$225 and the digital microphone cost about US$75. The discs hold up to about 6 hours and you can put on track marks. I only use it for UPing: lessons, workshops, recitals and seisiuns. It can upload onto the computer and comes with cd-rom software to manage it. It appears to me that the only difference with this new device is that the storage space is larger on the new device. The discs are already not very expensive and can store much already though. Also, there isn’t even enough room to write whats on the disc as it is without cramming even more! Are there any added benefits?
Neil
Yes, the benefit is that you can directly upload that recording via a high-speed USB (hopefully USB-2, can’t tell from the press releases, but most likely) interface to the PC without having to play it into your sound card which takes as long as the recording.
For example, if you currently want to record a one hour lesson and then make an audio CD of the lesson for archive, that will take you one hour to transfer the recording plus the setup time to get the levels right. With Hi-MD, you should be able to plug in the USB cable, pull the file directly to the PC while doing transcode to a standard format like .WAV or .MP3, then write the file to the audio CD, probably in a small fraction of the time.
I’ve been trying to do this with various MP3 recorders with some level of sucess, but they don’t have the sound quality, level controls, or compatibility with standard CE mikes that the Sony MD recorders support. I’ll buy one the day they come out.
M
Ah, but there’s the rub. Does this new wonder beast in fact upload in a usable file format like WAV or MP3? The article says you can download these formats to the recorder, but isn’t clear about uploads. It would be very much like Sony to upload in their proprietary ATTRAC format so that the uploaded files are useless for any other application.
djm