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Old advice, but still worth reading

Minidisc was developed by Sony in the 1990s as a new form of music delivery for portable devices, and perhaps as a successor to the cassette. Though some albums were released on Minidisc (MD) even Sony’s own label stopped that before long.

Never really hitting the big time, Sony looked for alternative uses for the format and came up with recorders. MD has been used pretty successfully for recording music on to from other sources like CDs, and some included microphone sockets to use as effective field recorders.

There’s no doubt that MDs can make very nice recordings indeed, high quality with a good tonal range. They record digitally using the proprietary ATRAC compression regime, but the problems start when trying to transfer the audio from the MD to other media for storage, editing or transmission. Because Sony guard the complex ATRAC maths there is no way to get the audio from MD to computer without playing it out in “real time” - ie for a 60 minute recording the MD must play, and the PC must record for all of those 60 minutes, one-by-one. If you are only doing small numbers this may be acceptable, but if the MD recordings are part of a workflow this real time transfer soon starts to become tiresome. It’s no easier than digitising all those LPs or cassettes on your shelves.

If you have a full-size MD deck with digital output (as well as your portable recorder) and a digital input on your computer, then this real-time transfer can be done entirely digitally. But if you don’t have both of those, you also will be having to convert the digital audio on the MD back into analogue to send it down the wires into the computer, where it will again be converted back into digital bits for the PC to understand - this is the so-called D/A and A/D conversion you may have read about. This extra conversion is undesirable, though not disastrous, and of course it is still slow, slow, slow.

Add to this that the recorders tend to be small and fiddly to operate, and the range is reducing as manufacturers leave the platform (Sharp stopped making MD in 2004) and you may start to think that MD has had its day.

But ...

... Sony have developed a new sub-format called Hi-MD which offers quick transfers from recorder to PC, full uncompressed WAV capability and bigger 1GB MDs to record on to. The specification sounds attractive but it may be too late as the playback market has moved quickly to solid state MP3 with no moving parts, so reintroducing motors and physical discs may be seen as a backward step. People who need to record may be too small a group of consumers to keep the format healthy. But the spec looks good and it’s worth trying, especially as the price is less than half the entry-level Marantz digital.

To avoid trouble with your files, I suggest you record as uncompressed (WAV) as nothing understands Sony’s ATRAC compression and your file will be unreadable by any other application. Sony calls its uncompressed files .oma which might be recognised by applications, but you may have to convert them to .wav by renaming or using the conversion tool they helpfully give you. Sony do not make it easy. And finally, as a parting shot, even though you have made the recording, and there are no copyright issues with the material, earlier versions of the SonicStage software (<v3.4) would only allow transfer of the file once from the MD to the PC. Version 3.4 of SonicStage was released recently and now allows unlimited transfers of your own files! Sony. Sheesh!!

If you’re thinking about a Minidisc recorder ensure:

• if you go for Hi-MD, go for models from the NH700 upwards which have external microphone sockets. File transfer isn’t as simple as drag and drop, but must be done within the SonicStage application supplied with the equipment.
• that it does record voice, many only record through the line in socket and are only good for music transfers from other media
• that it has an external microphone socket (not just a Line In)
• triple-check that it has a Mic In socket
• you can press the buttons and navigate the menus easily
• and don’t confuse the older Net-MD with the new Hi-MD or with anything more useful for voice recording than ordinary MD;Net-MD’s high-speed transfers are ONLY from PC to the Net-MD, and NOT the other way round.

New digital recorders now cost less than £300 and offer easier recording as well as true drag & drop file transfers, and files themselves are generic not proprietary.

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