Mini-Disc or MP3?

My sister is looking at getting a portable music player /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/rolleye11.gif. Would you go the Sony Mini disc route, or some kind of MP3 player? Whats the advantage of MP3? Mini Discs are relatively cheap & have good sound quality. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/popcorn.gif /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/popcorn.gif /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/popcorn.gif

I have a Sony MiniDisk player/recorder and I highly recommend it. Using the software Sony supplies, each disk will hold up to I believe 4 hours of music. The software will also allow you to copy CD's at the touch of a button. The MiniDisks are inexpensive, re-recordable, and enclosed in their own cassette - you never touch the disk. One AA battery powers the MiniDisk player for 40 hours. The software will of course copy MP3 files as well. I'd check it out if I were you.

MiniDisc!

Get the Sony E10 or Qualia 017

One day (next year) I will get myself an E10.

Al

dead technology. go for an iPod. to me minidisk has its place but not in the protable music player market. They are cool but MP3s are much better.

due get a sony minidisc the sound quality is simply amazeing at least go and give one a listen.and now they have em with 1 gig disk

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EchoSierraTwo said:
dead technology. go for an iPod. to me minidisk has its place but not in the protable music player market. They are cool but MP3s are much better.

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I hear iPods are pretty neat but can be expensive. IMO they are over kill. I hear an iPod can store over 50,000 songs - man, I don't think I know that many! I must own at least 200+ CD's; I bet it would take forever to transfer all those CD's to the iPod. Just my luck after I transferred everything, I'd lose it, break it, or the hard drive would crash. Maybe I'm just getting old... /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

MiniDisk is one of the few formats that lets you use a mic to record your own music, such as live bands. The new MiniDisk will hold 1 Gig of Music they also can be used to record other data, photos etc. A MiniDisk disk can be reused thousands of times without degrading the disk.

One big advantage of MiniDisk is you can erase only one or two, etc tracks and it will not affect the other tracks, it puts the blank space at the end of the disk. MiniDisk is more like a hard drive, than a tape or CDs.

Ask most Pro's in the music business and you will find them very popular by bands to make demo disks.

A good site for information is minidsco.com

A few other advantages of MiniDisk is you do not need a PC to record your music, (or worry about software unless you want to use the PC to transfer your MP'S) also unlike a hard drive or burned CD MiniDisk is very very durable.

I love my Sony minidisc player, I think I have the same one Rags has. It records live music great, takes an optical line, has a slim profile. And my wife offered to get me the new 1gig minidisc player as an anniversary present, but we settled on a Sebenza instead. (it's a knife) Why?

Well, for me, I'd have to migrate to 1Gb discs, since it's not backwards compatible and cost more money. More importantly, I want to use it as a portable hard drive, which the MD isn't. I want to download files at work, or pictures, or songs, and I can't do all that with MD.

Sure, I have a key drive or flash drive, but at half a gb or even a gig, that's not so much space. I like to shoot digital pictures in RAW format, and a gig is only 100 pictures.

I've been looking at the Archos, which has a built in compact flash slot, so I can download photos to it. It's not perfect, but then I don't need to carry a laptop around, and I can listen to music and watch tiny little videos on it, too.

I think that's the most versatile gadget for me, but YMMV. Inluxication got an iriver recently, and it's pretty cool. Can't look at jpgs on it, but does more things and holds more songs than my MD. Since MD didn't catch on with consumers here, in comparison to Europe and Japan, there's also less support for it in stores. Many places, you can't even find discs for it, others have only one choice. Still, love my Sony, tho!

daloosh

Daloosh:

It's worth another look! The Hi-MD is FULLY compatible with the original 74 and 80 minute MD media in Mono, SP, LP2 and LP4 formats. My NH-900 portable reads and writes them no problem!
Additionally you can reformat 74 and 80 min MD's in the Hi-MD format and record up to 600+ minutes on an 80 minute MD if you like.
The 1 GB MD's are NOT needed at all to use a Hi-MD recorder in all modes, it just gives you (a lot!) more room. Good thing, too, since they've been in somewhat short supply and are, as you note, expensive.

The NH900 also functions fine as a data drive. If I plug the USB cable into any PC it shows up as a drive and lets you read and write data up to the capacity of the particular MD (about 290 MB for an 80 minute MD, 960-something for a 1GB MD).
Note this works exactly like the iPod. When you're looking at it as a data drive, you can't see any playable music files on the MD, they just reduce the space available.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,
Bob

darn ya lucky man bob thats a cool himd unit.i thought about the 600 mdel but it cant record and has no line in but the 900 is super cool. how is the output compared to the older units? my old reg style md sounded amazeing

Very, very good in "Hi-SP" format, which puts almost 8 hours on a 1GB disc. I've got three Hi-MD's that will see me through about any trip.

I haven't tried "Hi-LP" yet, but it will put almost a week's worth of music (35 hours) on a single 1 GB disc, but I expect that's gonna put an "ow-eee" on the sound.

One really great new feature is that you can UPLOAD recordings directly to the PC and then convert them to standalone .WAV files

I think if I had it to do over, I'd go with the 800. It pulls so little power I'd just as soon carry spare AA's than the charger on a trip.

Cheers,
Bob

cool i love sony.i prefare atrac over most any other codec. i dont like sonys software though.

Here's another vote for MD. Tons of tracks on a disc, low power consumption, I can change tunes without visiting a PC.

iPod. You rip your music to the computer (Just like minidisc) and then transfer it over. You can go cheap ($249 iPod Mini) to expensive ($600 iPod photo 60 gig). If you do, heaven forbid, lose it, all the music is already on your computer so it only takes a few moments to transfer everything back over. You can choose to encode your music MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless, whatever suits your needs. With Minidisc you're stuck with ATRAC3.

While I see the plus's with MD players, I must say I love my iPod. 3rd Generation for me, got it cheap as a open item at Best Buy. 15GBer for $225. I felt happy that I found it for that cheap. Now they have color LCDs on some that cost $500. EEkk. Incredible. I vote iPod whether it be overkill or not /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

Cameron

I own an Aiwa MD and a Sony MD recorder as well as a Nomad Zen (or whatever it's called).
I find that I prefer usingthe Nomad since it doesn't require that I change discs every so often.
I jumped onto the MD bandwagon when Sony brought them out in the late 90s and back then they were a nice improvement over CD and cassettes. Sure you had to record the stuff onto MD which was slower than burning a CD but the small formfactor made it more easy to transport and it was much better than cassette.
Today. I've got 7 GB of music on my zen and I can listen to anything I want w/o the need to dig out a pile of MDs. MP3, imho, is the only way to go.
What you need to decide is whether you want to spend that much money on one.

Cool BobVA, thanks for the info, it makes the Hi-MD more palatable. I read a pre-release review that said it wasn't backwards compatible, and wrote it off then. Still, the compact flash slot on the Archos is a big draw for me to use with my digicam.
daloosh

I've owned tons of Minidisc units. It's dead technology. The capacity is very limited (only 1gb), so you'll be swapping 20+ discs to carry around your music collection. And forget about cross-disc playlists.

But the biggest problem is the crappy PC software. You have to convert everything to a SonicStage "protected" format (yay DRM!!!) so you end up with two copies of your music. Assuming of course, Sonic Stage can convert them at all. It's rather finicky.

Or you could say... to heck with that. Get a real hard drive player for about the same price, and load all your music onto one device without SonicStage hassling you.

I still use Minidisc, because I made the dumb mistake of buying a minidisc car stereo, but the technology is dead and not competitive with hard drive players.

I have a 15GB Dell DJ and it's worlds above the MD.

SonicStage - just say no!

but ya have to admit md sounds amazeing. i do hate the software but i like atrac.it is one of my fav codecs for small bitrates

Mini-disc

I have both a Aiwa portable and a Sony bookshelf MD/CD player/recorder.