Using a minidisc player to record musical performance

[Luca]

Yet another topic started by me :). I'm asking a question for my dad, who is taking fiddle lessons. He's having a hard time practicing and he thinks it would be a good idea to record himself or his lesson group playing the various parts of a song. What they do is have everyone play chords, and one person plays the melody, then they switch to another. He has a hard time following along with the CD of the music he's learning, so he asked me about minidisc recorders. I don't really know much about them other than that they're an excellent way to record audio. Then again, he'll still need a good microphone, right?

Anyway, we basically decided that he can either use his laptop (550 MHz TiBook) to record things in conjunction with a microphone and an iMic, or he could just get a minidisc recorder and a microphone. I don't have much knowledge of minidisc players but I assume you can get them fairly cheap from eBay, Amazon, something like that. I don't really know the differences between different models but they can't be that different, can they?

The real part I'm lost on is the microphone. I know nothing about them. Should he get a little one that clips onto his violin? A larger one that he can put in the middle of everyone? I don't know. And I don't know how much it'll cost either, but I do want to help him out.

[Dorian Gray]

I think this is the only MiniDisc thread on AppleNova, and we're probably wise to keep it that way considering the wild popularity of the format. ;)

Did your dad get a MiniDisc recorder in the end, Luca, or did he stick with his 550 MHz PowerBook? Can you remember? :D

Among the many portable recording options now available (many of which use flash memory), none stands out as a near-perfect product. They all fall short in one area or another, often related to sound quality, build quality, or operational flexibility. It's quite amazing that this market doesn't have a single outstanding choice with no serious drawbacks, even if you're willing to spend quite a bit of money.

The latest and probably last ever MiniDisc recorder made is the top-of-the-line Sony MZ-RH1, which continues to be available new for around 300 euros. That's a fair bit of dosh for something so dinky, but it offers significantly better sound quality than most flash recorders at twice the price, even though those are usually larger. It's also damn sexy:

http://img360.imageshack.us/img360/8347/sonymzrh1gx3.jpg

I'm considering it for recording ambient sounds (http://forums.applenova.com/showthread.php?t=30526). If I spend this kind of money I'd want to use the recorder for many years, so I'm worried about the proprietary lithium-ion battery (user replaceable, but how long will the battery model be kept around?). An AA cell or two would be far preferable. I also dislike OLED screens but I suspect that's not a big issue in practice.

Anyone here still use MiniDiscs? Miss them? :)

[turbulentfurball]

Anyone here still use MiniDiscs? Miss them? :)

*waves*

I've had 3 different MiniDisc players, and I loved all of them. Battery life was fantastic, the durability (and in later revisions, capacity) of the discs was great, they were relatively inexpensive, sound quality was fantastic (I'd just upgraded from a cassette WalkMan), they never skipped even after intentionally shaking the player for several seconds.

The only bad thing about MiniDisc was fucking SONY SONICSTAGE! Every track had to be converted into Sony's proprietary format, there were limits on how many times a track could be burned to a disc, and many other DRM nasties (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SonicStage#Copying_restriction)

A couple years ago, I put my last MiniDisc player up for sale on Ebay and it didn't sell with a starting price of £10. Sad day.

[TMT]

Anyone here still use MiniDiscs? Miss them? :)

I miss them....:(
Minidiscs were great.
I DON'T miss the terrible handling, real-time recording of CDs I bought, the manual splicing and naming of the tracks....
That's much more comfortable with an iPod. ;)

[Luca]

Holy crap, over four years ago?

Let's see... that 550 MHz PowerBook ended up going to ThunderPoit maybe two and a half years ago. I think my dad ended up just getting a mini tape recorder.

[Bryson]

Minidisc is still alive and well in theatre as a playback format. The text display is a good feature. (Yes, CD-text exists, but who the hell uses it?) As is the "on-machine" editing functions. (Which replicates the process we all learnt on Reevox reel-to-reel machines!)

I still buy them, quite often. The Tascam MD350 (http://www.tascam.com/products/md-350.html) is my machine of choice. Cheap enough, but still a solid machine with proper rackmounts.

The discs are hard to find these days, though.

[Dorian Gray]

SonicStage was woeful (http://forums.applenova.com//showpost.php?p=290865&postcount=15) and remains so. The good thing is that the MiniDisc format was released a couple of years ago from the horrific DRM that did much to kill the format's popularity before its natural life expectancy was up.

That said, only the latest model, the MZ-RH1 shown above, is fully freed from DRM nonsense, though that doesn't mean it supports drag-and-drop. An app called "Hi-MD Music Transfer for Mac" enables one to:

1. Read audio data from the MZ-RH1 in Linear PCM format and ATRAC3plus (in Hi-SP and Hi-LP variants), exporting a WAV file free of all restrictions. The recorder supports 16-bit Linear PCM at 44.1 kHz, so in combination with the low-noise mic preamp of the MZ-RH1, the quality is really only limited by the quality of your microphone.

2. Copy WAV or MP3 files from your Mac to the MZ-RH1.

3. Change a track or group title on a Hi-MD disc, and change the order of tracks or groups.

4. Delete tracks or groups on a Hi-MD disc.

The days of using your computer to record in real-time from the MiniDisc recorder's line-out are mercifully over!

Nice to hear that MiniDisc is still used in theatre, Bryson. In France the huge high-street retailer Fnac still stocks MiniDisc media. Perhaps the format was more popular in France than elsewhere? More likely the French are just a year or two behind everyone else when it comes to gadgets, as they always are. :p

[Unch]

I loved MiniDiscs - they looked so cool. Up until I got my Shuffle, I had a brilliant little Sony MD player that I took everywhere. Lasted forever on one AA battery, sound quality was great for a personal stereo. Shame they ballsed up the format so much with that stupid NET bollocks.

[Maciej]

I have a mini disc, somewhere. I got it over 4 years ago (I think) because I bought it when I still lived in california. It was certainly an impulse buy, a costly and regretful one at that. I haven't used it since, well, 4 years ago. I'm sure they're useful, I was just too stupid to put it to full use after I quit music.

EDIT: No wait, it was like 8 years ago, before high school... Yikes, thats a long long time

[Dorian Gray]

Yeah, the format has been around since 1992. Imagine what the digital world looked like in 1992. :eek:

It's pretty cool from a technology point of view. To record, a laser heats the disc to the Curie point (about 200 degrees Celsius), making it susceptible to a magnetic field, which is provided by a head on the other side of the disc. Reading is done by laser alone, employing the Faraday effect to sense the polarisation of reflected light. It's quite incredible that this write and read process can be done with any accuracy, much less speed. Equally impressive is that the discs can be recorded about a million times, and have a very long life and robustness to typical storage problems (high temps, sunlight, magnetic fields, moisture, etc.). In fact, magneto-optical discs are used by hospitals and the like to store important data, because of their reliability (far better than hard drives or optical media like DVDs). The long-term issue is whether anyone will still be producing MiniDisc readers in fifty years, and the answer is obviously no. Industrial-grade magneto-optical drives may be another thing.

A very interesting discussion with the MZ-RH1 designers is here (http://highfidelitydigital.blogspot.com/2006/05/sony-mz-rh1-design-team-interview-part.html), translated into English from the Japanese (which is still on the Sony Japan website).

The MiniDisc format is undoubtedly dead from a consumer audio player point of view, but I understand it is still used for quite a bit of field recording. Apparently MiniDisc recorders were used by many journalists at the Beijing Olympics, for example.

It's a seriously nifty format. Should I dive into it in 2008 is the question. :)

[Capella]

I know that several of the anthropologists here at Rutgers use them; in our transcription room, we have one transcription cassette machine and 2 MiniDisc players. I've never personally used one, but I bet for people doing various kinds of fieldwork, the format is still alive and well. (Fieldworkers don't often adopt brand new technology.)

[thegeriatric]

I had a portable playback only, and a mains powered home recorder, both Sony, if my memory serves me right.

Absolutely loved them. And yes i miss them.

[Maciej]

Yeah, the format has been around since 1992. Imagine what the digital world looked like in 1992. :eek:

It's pretty cool from a technology point of view. To record, a laser heats the disc to the Curie point (about 200 degrees Celsius), making it susceptible to a magnetic field, which is provided by a head on the other side of the disc. Reading is done by laser alone, employing the Faraday effect to sense the polarisation of reflected light. It's quite incredible that this write and read process can be done with any accuracy, much less speed. Equally impressive is that the discs can be recorded about a million times, and have a very long life and robustness to typical storage problems (high temps, sunlight, magnetic fields, moisture, etc.). In fact, magneto-optical discs are used by hospitals and the like to store important data, because of their reliability (far better than hard drives or optical media like DVDs). The long-term issue is whether anyone will still be producing MiniDisc readers in fifty years, and the answer is obviously no. Industrial-grade magneto-optical drives may be another thing.

A very interesting discussion with the MZ-RH1 designers is here (http://highfidelitydigital.blogspot.com/2006/05/sony-mz-rh1-design-team-interview-part.html), translated into English from the Japanese (which is still on the Sony Japan website).

The MiniDisc format is undoubtedly dead from a consumer audio player point of view, but I understand it is still used for quite a bit of field recording. Apparently MiniDisc recorders were used by many journalists at the Beijing Olympics, for example.

It's a seriously nifty format. Should I dive into it in 2008 is the question. :)

It certainly is a serious piece of machinery when you put it that way. Makes me wanna get it back out just for nostalgia's sake.

[nikstar101]

I loved my old minidisc recorder. In fact after reading this thread i dug out the old badboy and gave it a listening to. I forgot how good the sound quality is compared to mp3 (even 256kbps mp3). It sound how sounds crisper.

If there was a system where you could easily transfer and managed music from Macs and PCs to Minidisc i think the system would have been a lot more successful. Unlike the horrible Sonicstage rubbish.

[Maciej]

If there was a system where you could easily transfer and managed music from Macs and PCs to Minidisc i think the system would have been a lot more successful. Unlike the horrible Sonicstage rubbish.

I don't remember using Sonicstage, but I do remember that getting music onto the thing was impossible.. that's why it started to gather dust... and still does. But it did come with a neat optical cable that I still use for my airport express...

[drewprops]

I used to post minidisc threads on AppleInsider all the darned time.... have a Sony brand in-car minidisc player in my old hatchback, have a deck unit that hasn't been switched on in years, have a couple of portable players and a straight-from-Japan Sony remote control used only for easier titling of discs with the previously mentioned deck.

I can't remember where I found them now, but there are some sites out there that sell binaural mic rigs for minidisc recorders... just do a search for "binaural" and "minidisc" and "microphone"....

I still feel all futuristic when I play my magneto-optic discs in my old hatchback....

[Dorian Gray]

I wish I hadn't found this site (http://www.uwm.edu/~type/audio-art-tech-gallery). It drives home how truly impressive these little Sony MiniDisc recorders are in terms of clean gain from the mic preamps, making it all the more difficult to settle for a flash recorder.

Here's a quote from the site:

"We know that there are very slight, audible increases in noise when progressing from the $2400 Sound Devices 722 recorder ( rated at-128 dBu EIN at full gain) to the $800 Sound Devices MP-2 (rated at -126 dBu EIN) to the Rolls/HiMD mic pre [...] Noise performance of this caliber in a consumer grade recorder is quite remarkable. Unlike many of the hand-held flash recorders which are designed primarily for voice, music and loud effects, the mic preamp in the Hi-MD recorders pre can provide 75dB of gain-- about 5 dB more than a Sound Devices 722 recorder."

The relevance of these figures is driven home dramatically in the following sound samples of two clocks ticking about 4 ft from the mics:

Sony MZ-NH700 v Zoom H4 (http://www.uwm.edu/~type/audio-art-tech-gallery/mediafiles/NH900-ZoomH4onlyREF.mov) (and the ART Phantom II isn't the cleanest phantom-power supply out there either)

Sound Devices 722 v Sony MZ-NH700 v Zoom H4 (http://www.uwm.edu/~type/audio-art-tech-gallery/pages/SD722_Rolls%3EHiMD_SamsonH4.html)

Sound Devices 722 v Sony MZ-NH900 v M-Audio MicroTrack (http://www.uwm.edu/~type/audio-art-tech-gallery/mediafiles/MicroTrack_NH900_722Compare2.mov)

Sound Devices 722 v MZ-NH900 (http://www.uwm.edu/~type/audio-art-tech-gallery/mediafiles/SD722_Rolls%3EHiMD_MP2%3EHiMD_hint.mov)

Remarkable indeed.