MD love

By anders pearson 22 Nov 2002

last time i went down to DC, my diskman broke and i had to spend four hours on a greyhound with no music. that was a nightmare that i don’t want to repeat anytime soon. so i started thinking about a replacement.

i quickly decided that i would finally make the move to minidisc and ordered a <a href=”http://www.minidisco.com/minispecs/sonymzn707-hd.html”>sony MZ-N707</a>, which arrived in the mail today.

so far i’m pretty impressed with it. minidisc’s are just so sexy that it’s a real shame the technology never escaped its niche market. 1/4 the size of CDs, more rugged (you can toss a disk in your pocket without worrying about it scratching), rewritable, and you can use different quality encodings to record either 80 minutes of CD quality audio, 160 minutes of audio roughly equivalent to 168kb mp3s, or 320 minutes of lower quality on a single disk.

the question i keep getting asked is why i didn’t get an mp3 player like an iPod instead. there are a few reasons: 1) the ability to record from a microphone was a big selling point on minidiscs for me. 2) i haven’t found any really compelling mp3 players yet. the iPod is getting there but not quite (not to mention that i’d have to get a new computer to use an iPod since my current machine doesn’t have firewire support and i don’t have any more free PCI slots so i couldn’t add it). 3) i really like removable media. 4) iPods are still really expensive. 5) did i mention that minidiscs are <em>sexy</em>?

anyway, so far i’m pretty happy with the 707. it got some pretty good reviews and i can see why. the only thing i’ve encountered so far that i don’t like is that the display isn’t backlit. luckily you really only need that when you’re recording or titling tracks; everything else you can pretty much do by feel. the remote that comes with it is particularly well layed out and easy to operate by feel.

sony’s been pushing this <a href=”http://www.minidisco.com/minipages/netmdinfo.html”>NetMD</a>

technology. it basically gives you the ability to download audio to a MD player directly over USB very quickly (16-32x) rather than the usual realtime dubbing over an optical cable. unfortunately, sony’s been very closed about the whole thing and you can only use one or two proprietary applications to do it (sony’s openMG, and a few others) which reportedly are a pain to use and only run on windows. luckily some linux folk are busy <a href=”http://opennmd.monochromatic.net/“>reverse engineering it</a>. so far they just have some of the editting functions like track titling and reordering working and not downloading. but i’m hopeful that they’ll get that figured out someday. in the meantime i’ll just have to keep using the optical link.