Currently, .mp3 players are all the hype. Everyone has one, and if you don’t, you’re old-fashioned. I do not have an .mp3 player. I tried to have one, but for various reasons it did not please me. I’m a MiniDisc guy. I’ve always been. MiniDisc has some serious advantages over .mp3 players, whether they be flash or HDD based. Note: Sunday Eve Column.
First of all, MiniDisc players are much more sturdy than HDD players. You have to treat HDD players with a lot of care, because dropping one kills the harddrive easily. MiniDisc players, on the other hand, can be dropped down stairs, or while riding your bike, and they still work mighty fine (I know this out of experience). They will even survive a bath of Coca Cola (don’t ask, but I have experience with that as well). Try bathing your EUR 330 iPod in some Coca Cola.
This durability of course extends to the discs themselves. They are completely enclosed in a hard, extremely durable plastic cover. They are also quite small, measuring only 5x72x68mm. You can play tennis with them, throw them around, yes, even run a bike over them: they’ll survive.
Secondly, MiniDisc offers unlimited storage space. The new Hi-MD format offers 1GB per disc (which can add up to 45 hours of music on one disc)– and a disc only costs a few Euros. This in essence gives you unlimited storage space, but of course it does come at a certain cost, because you have to carry those MDs around. But seeing many just use their music players to commute or during some running through the park, 1GB should be enough. Now, compare that to say, flash players which have limited storage space, and storage space you need to update every time you want to listen to different music. And even though HDD-based players offer a lot more space, this space is, in the end, limited too. And as mentioned above, they are much more fragile.
An interesting plus to Sony’s new Hi-MD format is that it’s completely backwards compatible with the previous MD standards (MD, MDLP, and NetMD). In fact– formatting an ordinary MD using the Hi-MD filesystem actually doubles its original capacity from 170MB to 305 MB!
Another huge advantage over .mp3 players is MD’s recording capability. Portable MD recorders aren’t called recorders for nothing: you can record at any time, any place, any way you wish. Digitally via optic cables or USB, or analog via a microphone (whether built-in or external) or analog cables connected to i.e. an old tape deck. This is a major advantage, and one of the reasons why MD is often associated with field recording.
Lastly, portable recorders have an extremely good battery life. My lower-end recorder, for instance, plays back for 30 hours using only one AA battery.
Now, a common and valid complaint about MiniDisc was that they were tied to Sony in that you were forced to use Sony’s ATRAC format and SonicStage software. And I am putting it mildly when I say that SonicStage is a complete pile of steaming crap. But, an update to Sony’s Hi-MD line-up last year added .mp3 support for Hi-MD: 2nd and 3rd generation Hi-MD recorders you buy have support for .mp3 files. However, a major malfunction remains: SonicStage. Even though each Hi-MD player can be used as a mass storage device under windows, Linux, OSX, and even BeOS, you cannot just drag/drop .mp3s onto it. You are forced to use SonicStage. Apple may force one to use iTunes to transfer songs to iPod, but at least iTunes is not a steaming pile of crap. And of course SonicStage is only available on Windows, not on OSX or Linux (Sony did announce Mac support for its upcoming high-end Hi-MD recorder, I can’t wait for prices on that thing).
Another complaint that often reared its head was MD’s lack of capabilities for storing non-music data. Besides the utterly failed MD-Data experiment Sony conducted in the ’90s, MDs could never store data, like flash/HDD .mp3 players could. This has been fixed too: Hi-MD allows you to store any type of data on both Hi-MD discs as well as old MDs (with the mentioned storage capacities). As said, Hi-MD recorders act as ordinary mass storage devices, so any OS with drivers for that will work fine with Hi-MD recorders.
And now the ever important aspect of price. Before the .mp3 player revolution, MDs only competitors were CDs and before that, tapes. Technologically, they both do not stand a chance. However, they of course were much more popular because they were a hell of a lot cheaper: my first portable MD recorder cost a staggering Fl. 499,-, which is EUR 225. Portable CD players at that time only cost about Fl. 100,- to Fl. 200,- so you can understand how expensive MD recorders were.
Today, this has changed. My Hi-MD recorder (the MZ-NH600 model, so with the input jacks) only cost me EUR 150,-, which is not a lot of money when compared to higher-quality .mp3 players (yes, MiniDisc has always been and always will be a high-quality device. MD users expect that quality).
Given the above advantages, it is a complete mystery why Sony is not putting its full weight behind the MiniDisc format. No, instead of just using an existing, proven technology to power its highly successful PSP, they created a whole new standard altogether, which probably cost them a serious amount of research and thus money. Using Hi-MD in the PSP would have meant a serious push for MD. Sony has even made digital cameras which use the Hi-MD format, but none were ever released to the public. Recently they did release a portable Hi-MD recorder with an integrated 1.3MP camera, but I’ve never ever seen one in the wild (I’d kill for one).
My take on Sony’s refusal to market Hi-MD properly is that Sony somehow seems to think it needs to create a HDD-based .mp3 player to compete with Apple’s iPod. Now, I think that that is a pointless battle: you won’t beat Apple in its current winning mood. Forget it. It ain’t gonna happen. And, Sony’s success with this competition kind of supports that claim. If you can’t win from Apple on Apple’s turf– then try to beat them on your own turf.
So, what should Sony have done? They shouldn’t have made any attempts at making flash or HDD based .mp3 players. They have a very strong technology with Hi-MD and they should’ve been using it whenever they could. They should’ve made the lower-end Hi-MD recorders a bit more stylish (historically, only the high-end MD recorders look sleek), should’ve created a good marketing campaign emphasizing MD’s strong points, and they should have increased availability, and most of all: they should’ve ditched SonicStage, and they should’ve allowed people to just drag/drop songs onto their recorders.
Now, it’s all too late. I’m afraid MiniDisc will slowly but surely die out– and that will leave me and all of MD’s die-hard fans who supported the platform since day one without portable music.
–Thom Holwerda
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
i used to have a mini disc player, but the lack of usb support on it and mac support forced me to get rid of it. now that there is mac support i will probably get one if my ipod breaks.
When I read:
—————–
However, a major malfunction remains: SonicStage. Even though each Hi-MD player can be used as a mass storage device under windows, Linux, OSX, and even BeOS, you cannot just drag/drop .mp3s onto it. You are forced to use SonicStage. Apple may force one to use iTunes to transfer songs to iPod, but at least iTunes is not a steaming pile of crap. And of course SonicStage is only available on Windows, not on OSX or Linux
—————–
I had to stop reading the article at that point. The problem with MP3 alternatives is that MP3 is universal. MiniDisc, OGG, and other potentially better formats, not so much.
The problem with MP3 alternatives is that MP3 is universal. MiniDisc, OGG, and other potentially better formats, not so much.
Let this be a lesson: never stop halfway an article and then comment. Sony has added .mp3 support to Hi-MD last year– you would’ve known if you read the entire article.
Even though each Hi-MD player can be used as a mass storage device under windows, Linux, OSX, and even BeOS, you cannot just drag/drop .mp3s onto it. You are forced to use SonicStage.
The snippet that I quoted said(/implied) that it had MP3 support. But the snippet that I quoted also said that you have to use SonicStage still, which is only available for Windows.
But the snippet that I quoted also said that you have to use SonicStage still, which is only available for Windows.
True, but iPods require iTunes, which only runs on Windows and Macs. The fact that you can use your iPod on Linux is because open source developers have ‘hacked’ up software which works with iPods.
In essence, there is nothing stopping an open-source developer from doing the same for MiniDisc.
In essence, there is nothing stopping an open-source developer from doing the same for MiniDisc.
True. On one hand, MiniDisc has been around for longer than iPod, and yet iPods are (from what I’ve seen) developed for more actively in Linux than MiniDisc is. But on the other hand maybe that’s just because MiniDisc has kinda fallen by the wayside because of bad first impressions with it. Hopefully your article will bring attention to it and it’s improvements again, and Linux developers will hack away at support for it.
Well, its obvious though; the iPod is just a standard storage disk with a iTunesDB in which all music is registed against; hardly rocket science material vs the proprietary at all costs which Sony takes.
To be honest, the only people I see using mini-discs, are the Japanese, but thats more of a ‘screw you’ to the west than anything to do with using a superior technology – its the equivilant immature clap trap which French do when they refuse to speak English.
To be honest, the only people I see using mini-discs, are the Japanese, but thats more of a ‘screw you’ to the west than anything to do with using a superior technology – its the equivilant immature clap trap which French do when they refuse to speak English.
Man you just have no f–king idea whatsoever. I have been living and working in Japan for 10 fricking years, I speak and read Japanese fluently, but never ever have I met any Japanese who were using an MD for that reason. Actually these days I find less and less people using MDs in the first place. Most people I know have either an iPod or one of those ultracheap MP3 players you can get at any chainstore selling anything electical/electronical.
MDs are a dying species here as well, they’ve just been able to hang around a bit longer.
Edited 2006-04-03 04:58
<lonely slow clap>
And for a person who apparently has lived in Japan for 10 years, you know little about their culture, and how confucism plays a roll in their every day life. Just look at how Japanese firms operate, the out of control protectionism and paranoia when it comes to foreigners.
Like I said, for someone who has lived their supposidly for 10 years, and speaks fluent Japanese, you seem to know little about their culture and their background, let along their ethnic make up (which is even more of a laugh, given their stance that they scream, “I’m Japanese not Asian!”).
“Just look at how the American government operates, the out of control protectionism and paranoia when it comes to foreigners.”
Y’know, my copy-and-paste system seems to have got stuck in ‘Freudian slip’ mode today. Don’t know how that happened.
> hardly rocket science material vs the proprietary at all costs which Sony takes
> the only people I see using mini-discs, are the Japanese
> equivilant
Gee, great english! Maybe you should go to France and teach’em some.
kaiwai:
Well, its obvious though; the iPod is just a standard storage disk with a iTunesDB in which all music is registed against; hardly rocket science material vs the proprietary at all costs which Sony takes.
After reading a lot of the comments here, I can’t say that I’m *rooting* for MDs being resurrected and supported under Linux, but should someone else have that desire, the new Hi-MD stuff sounds the same as iPod, basically.
Article:
Even though each Hi-MD player can be used as a mass storage device under windows, Linux, OSX, and even BeOS, you cannot just drag/drop .mp3s onto it.
So it sounds like it is just a standard storage disk, with a MD DB instead of an iTunes DB. The only real difference is the format, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the MD DB format was indeed more proprietary than iTunes’, but I’m not really sure.
See, if they would have added MP3 and Mac Support 3 years ago I wouldn’t have replaced my minidisc with an iPod.
The reason i dumped it (besides the hardware which eventually died) was because the ONLY way to get software on it was through the buggy Windows-only Sony Software that came with it.
Sorry Sony, even if you do fix the problems with it, you’re way too late. I got a taste of the high capacity iPod with the extremely easy to use iTunes software and i’m never going back. Good luck with the whole rootkit things though.
This is one of the problems with Sony, they’re in too many businesses. Their Music division has longed forced them to cripple their electronics division, or be exclusive to their record label. When one arm of your company is installing rootkits on your computer to prevent you from ripping CDs to mp3, would you really trust that same company with your mp3 device? I don’t.
My $0.02CAD.
The biggest disadvantage to me with any Sony media devices, as mentioned, is that they won’t work on OS X or Linux systems. Even the Windows software sucks ass.
Essentially I like the idea of using big Minidiscs over HDD based devices, but until I can easily use it under Linux with my existing media in 320 kbps mp3 format, like I can with iPods or Creative devices, I’m not touching one.
I’m assuming that it still requires you to convert your music to ATRAC, lowering the quality, leaving a duplicate copy of it on your hard drive and preventing you from writing it to more than one minidisc. Just because I’m writing it to all the different players in the house doesn’t mean I’m a mass pirate, it just means that the people in our house share the same music (usually listening to it at different times too).
The few people I know who bought a Sony media device became extremely frustrated at the restrictions it placed on them and the general crapness of Sonicstage. Many of them ditched their Sony devices and got iPods.
Minidiscs are useful, we use minidiscs in our school a lot for transferring recordings around, since there’s quite a lot of rack-mountable equipment that will use a minidisc.
Edited 2006-04-02 22:06
and preventing you from writing it to more than one minidisc.
Not that I know of? I’ve never encountered this limitation, to be honest. It would be quite pointless as well, as you could just use an optical cable to copy it, and then your computer has no say at all.
Oh, and btw, ATRAC has improved a lot in the past 15 years. It is in no way inferior to .mp3.
Hmm last time I used Sonicstage on my Windows partition (about two months ago) the transfer arrow went grey after I copied it across once. And yeah, you could still use the optical cable but it’s just harder…
ATRAC isn’t a bad format as such, but all my music is already in MP3 (some FLAC or OGG/Vorbis but currently I don’t expect players to play them), and any time you re-encode music you will lose quality. It is noticable because you get the MP3 artifacts as well as the ATRAC artifacts unless you set the ATRAC bitrate to be higher than the source MP3.
Oh, and btw, ATRAC has improved a lot in the past 15 years. It is in no way inferior to .mp3.<p />
I would have to agree. I have owned two minidisc players in the past 8 years and they are excellent devices. The sound quality has always been superior to me, even with those little earbuds.
>>Oh, and btw, ATRAC has improved a lot in the past 15 years. It is in no way inferior to .mp3.
>I would have to agree. I have owned two minidisc players in the past 8 years and they are excellent devices. The sound quality has always been superior to me, even with those little earbuds.
—–
MP3 has improved a lot too. In the double-blind listening tests that I’ve seen (see Hydrogenaudio.org), modern MP3 encoders easily beat up-to-date ATRAC, as do AAC and most other encoders.
Personally I’m more inclined to trust the findings of that kind of blind test than subjective comments from individuals. After all, I still know people who swear that the sound quality of analogue audio cassettes has never been beaten.
Of course if you’re comparing them using poor quality earbuds the difference between codecs would probably be too subtle to hear any real difference. The people carrying out listening tests are generally using much higher quality equipment than that.
MP3 has improved a lot too. In the double-blind listening tests that I’ve seen (see Hydrogenaudio.org), modern MP3 encoders easily beat up-to-date ATRAC, as do AAC and most other encoders.
Personally I’m more inclined to trust the findings of that kind of blind test than subjective comments from individuals. After all, I still know people who swear that the sound quality of analogue audio cassettes has never been beaten.
Of course if you’re comparing them using poor quality earbuds the difference between codecs would probably be too subtle to hear any real difference. The people carrying out listening tests are generally using much higher quality equipment than that.
Actually I listen to my minidisc player with more than just my earbuds. The biggest difference I find between ATRAC and mp3 is that the bass always sounds distorted with mp3s. It gets very fuzzy and noisy sounding. ATRAC seems to do a much better job pumping out clear bass. You can actually hear the difference even with earbuds because the bass is usually pretty crappy on those things no matter what but my MiniDisc player still sounds good even with the earbuds.
sonicstage 3.4 removed the limitation on the number of uploads and downloads you can do pr song.
in many ways, sonicstage 3.4 in combo with the upcoming hi-md player is a interestng beast. ok so it takes a bit of time to det the data onto the media (1 second pr MB or there about) but when its made it onto it, its damn safe.
rember, hi-md uses magnetoptical storage, basicly the same as in some backup solutions. and in a very small package…
I hate carying around media of any size. I hated it back when they were tapes, I hated it when it were cd’s and I would hate it if I had a MD player.
You do a nice job explaining the advantages, and I’m sure you’re right about them but for me having my entire music collection right there at any given time trumps them all.
Edited 2006-04-02 22:07
I have a Hi-MD player…the RH1 or whatever it is called…well the one with the OLED display anyway. Cost me over 300 I think but I bought it around June of last year for the trip to India. I like it a lot despite the fact that it has huge problems…for example, fast forwarding and rewinding through long sets of music is extremely slow. Secondly, when I got it it didnt support mp3 formats and thus music had to be uploaded or downloaded from the discs using Sonicstage. Also when I got it, there were absoltely no Hi-MD discs available at that time! But if Sony addresses these issues with faster USB 2.0 support, removal of sonicstage and faster performance I would get another one of these players….way cooler than Ipods IMHO. I mean you can store hours and hours of music on a single hi-md disc but then you can swap discs, which virtually becomes limitless storage capacity and the discs are so very trasportable.
I like Hi-MD too. I’ve got an older model (NZ-505?) The thing gets obscenely long battery life. Unfortunately, its tied to Windows, so I no longer use it.
I had a friend who went to Japan for a year, and came back with an Hi-MD player. I guess over there they are much more popular, which is probably why you’ve never seen a camera one, even though they are manufactured: Sony sells them for profit in Japan, but probably can’t make nearly enough in Europe/US. I have to admit, it was a pretty cool device, and he could either put a CD’s worth of CD quality music on a disk, or a bunch of .mp3’s. However, the storage of the 2(inches)x2x1/4 disks was kind of a pain. I could definitely see having one for more strenuous activities than I’d want my iPod around for (or simply to plug into a stereo in a kitchen at work).
As to the PSP and why it is not Minidisc compatable, I’d hazzard the guess that it has something to do with the fact that UMD’s are not writeable, and Sony and other movie companies do not want them to be, whereas minidiscs are by definition writeable.
whereas minidiscs are by definition writeable.
No, not true. In the ’90s, when Sony sold pre-rcorded MDs, they made them non0writable, just like CD-Rs compared to normal CDs. They could do the same with Hi-MD.
PS: MiniDisc was HUGELY popular here in The Netherlands too. That popularity just didn’t survive the .mp3 revolution (because Sony up until March last year refused to introduce .mp3 support).
But one is still able to get ahold of a blank MD and record media onto it. I suppose that if the PSP could only read pre-recorded MD’s that would solve the problem of movie privacy that they were trying to stem, but more likely than not patches could be applied to allow the PSP to still read self-recorded media. Since no one can write to a UMD, movie piracy by way of UMD is not a problem for the movie studios right now.
This isn’t to say that it wouldn’t have been nice if they’d used MDs instead, as it is a much more open technology, and would have allowed self-recorded movies and music without the purchase of expensive flash media.
Great article by the way.
PS: MiniDisc was HUGELY popular here in The Netherlands too.
Hugely popular and hugely marketed are quite different things
Me and my friends never could take the Minidisc seriously. It came off to me as something Sony wanted to push onto the masses in order to gain a monopoly. Even back then I felt that it was too restrictive, and didn’t have a future since it wasn’t ‘an open standard’.
Now you’ve shown the benefits, I’m almost contemplating getting one post-facto however.
They were quite succesful in belgium too, I few ( say 3-5) years back most of my friends had one. It was “the” music player to have, only those who didn’t have the money went for a (portable) cd-player
Looking at this sony player, I wonder, how easy is it to for example search for songs of an artist like you can with an ipod in seconds. Does it have an internal database to make those query’s possible?
Another thing, md looks to me and i’m sure many others as a passed station, something from the mp2 period. It’s from the 90’s.
You write ” I tried to have one, but for various reasons it did not please me”
Which player did you try?
For me is the itunes+ipod combo is best and there’s nothing yet which can beat that in my opinion.
A fairly poor attempt at justifying having bet on the wrong technology. MD did not take off for the simple reason that it sucked when it emerged and it continues to suck.
Poor navigation in the device, sucky software, non-existent cross-platform supoort, media that you need to carry with you. Yeah, great, line me up. This will take off right after Be-OS takes over the world.
This site has an uncanny ability to care to the most meaningless technologies and to disregard those that can change the future.
Wake up and smell the coffee and stop prodding your respective pet projects.
Poor navigation in the device
Oh? Care to elaborate? I never have any problems with finding my music, you see. My model even has a wheel.
sucky software
I’ll give you that. Luckily Sony released ‘SimpleBurner’, which negates the need for SonicStage, but does have less features.
non-existent cross-platform supoort
No, iTunes+iPod are cross platform. Get real. The only reason it is is because open-source devevelopers hacked it. One change by Apple and *poof* there goes your cross-platform-ity.
media that you need to carry with you
I’d much rather carry some small media with me than a heavy, cludgy, expensive, and fragile iPod.
I’d much rather carry some small media with me than a heavy, cludgy, expensive, and fragile iPod
You really haven’t owned a HDD mp3 player have you 🙂 ? Expensive maybe, heavy they really aren’t – especially when compared to lugging player + disc collection around, as to cludgy – lugging discs + player around as opposed to one all-in-one package is MY definition of cludgy. Fragile, I don’t know I’ve owned 2 HDD mp3 players now and neither has failed one me (although it took about 5 seconds for me to drop my new one – D’oh! )
I’d much rather carry some small media with me than a heavy, cludgy, expensive, and fragile iPod.
Not to rain on your parade or whatever, but that is some pretty lame FUD to describe iPods. My nano was pretty cheap, incredibly light, not cludgy at all, and very durable (I drop it constantly, it has outlived probably two cell phones by now (one died in a toilet, the other got a busted screen).
And think about it, carrying a bunch of media PLUS a heavy, cludgy, and fragile MiniDisc player. So much worse than carrying a tiny flash drive in your pocket.
You make good points, but they do not stack up to the obvious advantages of mp3 players (primarily flashed based imo)
Edited 2006-04-03 00:12
(I drop it constantly, it has outlived probably two cell phones by now)
This tells me that people are very different when it comes to handheld consumer electronics like players, phones and so on. My phone, which I’ve dropped a thousand times, is far, far older than the iPod Nano model
How the parent post was mod 5 is beyond belief.
It’s simple really. If you don’t like the articles then don’t read them. Geez.
I keep getting spell-corrected articles in my RSS feed from OSNews. Is that a problem with my RSS application or a problem with the OSNews feed?
Problem with your RSS app. It thinks the updated RSS item is a new item.
I don’t know what people are doing with Sonic Stage as the only problem I have is that if I format my PC I lose access all my atrac coded rips even if I save the files. Which isn’t a problem because I own the cd’s and can rip again if I want to. Not to mention their already on a minidisk for me. In my opinion if Sonic Stage is a peice of Steaming Shit then so is iTunes. At least the playlist function in Sonic Stage makes sense.
I have a Gen 1 Hi-MD and the only problem I have is it seems to skip with some discs. Its an unusual skip where i will jump to another section of the disk and play that setion only to return to the right spot. It’s a bit odd hearing sections of other songs spliced into the song I’m listening to but it doesn’t happen often. I love my MD
Classic story. First, Sony Electronics division designed MiniDisc — very advanced technology which definitely could have been a success. Next, Sony Entertaiment totally killed its market potential with the idiotic marketing strategy: no initial mp3 support (then artificially worsening mp3 playback quality, see http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=10621) no drag-n-drop support, crappy SonicStage software, no car hi-md deck, etc. Sony Entertaiment business as usual.
its not entirely sure if the strange mp3 behavior your pointing to was a deliberate flaw in the device or not.
in any case, its been reported on the same forum that the new hi-md player do not have the mp3 flaw. so most likely it was a oops, not a deliberate attack on mp3 quality…
If you want to use a disc, just get a cd/mp3 player.
700 MB of storage,compatable with cds, and you can make yor own.
If you want to use a disc, just get a cd/mp3 player.
That’s a bad argument.
http://www.twentysix.net/minidisc/top.jpg
No, it’s just more bulky.
Use a mini-dvd or mini blu-ray.
I cant belive someone actually wants sony to creat more products, all their products they create are crap, and is full of drm. Why dont people go buy from a company that supports ogg or lets you actualy use and store your music in the way you want.
I have an iriver, they let me put anything I want on it(including if i want, backup my hard drive), it can play mp3, ogg, and many more, without forcing me to use some piece of shit software like apple’s itunes to put stuff on it(it reads as an external usb hard drive, and will work with any os).
Edited 2006-04-02 22:43
I just looked up the newer irivers, I have ihp-120, and the newer ones do not support linux/mac. If you read my earlier post dont pick one up period. If you can find an ihp-120/140 for cheap, I would go for it, but most of there new ones sound like they are crap.
There’s a very obvious reason Sony didn’t use MD for the PSP – piracy. Look at the history of games consoles: every consoles which uses some kind of mass-produced media of which recordable versions are easily available to the public has been vulnerable to piracy, no matter what security the manufacturer attempted to build into the console (PSX, PS2, Xbox – not Xbox 360 yet but I’m sure it’s coming). Sony *hates* the piracy that the PS2 is subject to. For Hi-MD to work at all it obviously has to be a standard format that is recordable by design, and after their experience with the PSX and PS2, Sony were never going to use such a design for the PSP. So they did a Nintendo and built a new, proprietary disc format which is intentionally not available to the public as writable discs. Simple.
And Thom, how many times are you going to recycle this little opinion piece? I’m sure I’ve seen it twice before on this site. Get a new hobby horse, you’re not going to convert the world to minidiscs.
I’m sure I’ve seen it twice before on this site.
?
Sorry, I just checked with Google and I was remembering past comment threads, it seems you never posted it as an article before – mea culpa.
I agree with the recent poster about ATRAC3, though. Every properly conducted blind test I’ve seen doesn’t score it very highly. Well-encoded MP3 is much better than many people think; most people are familiar with crappy CBR MP3 encodes with nasty high-end distortion, but a good encode with lame is pretty competitive with Vorbis, AAC, WMA and the like.
You should compare it to mp3 players with builtin memory or where you can exchange some flash memory. As these contain no mechanical parts they should be even more robust as your minidisc and should also consume less power provide longer battery life for that… (Yes it depends very much on the player)
where you can exchange some flash memory
Yes, and we all know how cheap flash cards are. 1GB Hi-MD: a few Euros. 1GB Flash: 80+ Euros.
> 1GB Flash: 80+ Euros.
Actually E35, but still far from 4 euro per HiMD.
Ok as far as hdd mp3 players being fragile goes … well they really are not that fragile. I have a 60gb Creative ( and yes it is of a poor quality and has cheap asian crap written all over it). Anyway I have dropped this thing on the pavement while playing music and nothing happened to the hdd. No the cheaply made aluminum covers still have scratches but other than that it’s been perfectly fine for well over an year now. So all that hdd mp3 players are fragile crap is much of a myth. Also the hdd is turned off most of the time to conserve power. In that state it can take a considerable amount of shock.
The problem with mini disks was the 1gb max storage capacity, high price at the time and really crappy codec. You had to reencode all of your media and most people really don’t like to do that. At the same time you have Apple with their format that rivals the best mp3s arround. Also you can actually by songs already encoded in that format that sound really close to a 24bit encoded CD. And at the end of the day people are really lazy when it comes to entertainment.
> And really crappy codec
ATRAC (especially ATRAC3) is a very advanced codec, far superior to mpeg1 layer3.
http://www.minidisc.org/atrac_vs_mp3.html
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/6/ubb.x?q=Y&a=tpc&s=50009562&f=6790…
>ATRAC (especially ATRAC3) is a very advanced codec, far superior to mpeg1 layer3.
Yet in listening tests ATRAC3 comes out worse than just about any other modern codec.
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=21904
that test is 2 years old. only recently did sony release a lossless version of atrac. check the minidisc.org forum that the parent post linked to, there is a lot of into on that place…
>that test is 2 years old. only recently did sony release a lossless version of atrac. check the minidisc.org forum that the parent post linked to, there is a lot of into on that place.
Obviously any lossless audio is going to sound great, if it didn’t sound exactly the same as the source audio then it wouldn’t be lossless. But that gives you a lot less music per disc, and in my opinion lossless is unnecessary for portable audio with in-ear headphones.
Compare lossy atrac with MP3 and MP3 easily beats it at the same bitrate.
there have allso been some new developments in the area of lossy atrac…
i just want to use the existence of the lossless variant as a illustration that development in the world of atrac is still happening, and that a 2 year old test may no longer be relevant given those developments…
I find it hard to believe that any revisions in the last couple of years have brought atrac up to the standard of MP3 and other codecs. As the worst codec around atrac had a very long way to go, and other encoders such as LAME MP3 have also been actively developed and improved since then.
With all the evidence I’ve seen showing the inferiority of atrac, I think if you want to argue that it’s competitive then the burden of proof is on you. Do you have any evidence that massive improvements have been made to lossy atrac since that test?
check the forum at minidisc.org…
the people there are not fanatics. if anything they are highly critical about what quality their music have…
>check the forum at minidisc.org…
the people there are not fanatics. if anything they are highly critical about what quality their music have…
I’ve had a look at that forum, I haven’t been able to find any double blind listening tests that show the superiority of atrac, just subjective comments.
They may not be fanatics, but I remember people on minidisc forums proclaiming the superiority of atrac a couple of years back, even when the listening test showed its inferiority.
I see no reason to take them seriously today, not when so many of their claims are utterly ridiculous, such as the claim that minidisc players and media are virtually indestructible, or at least far more durable than “fragile” MP3 players. My experience has shown that the opposite is true, especially when dealing with minidisc media that becomes totally unplayable when exposed to even a small amount of dust.
As minidisc owners/fans it’s not surprising that they would be biased towards the products that they own. The placebo effect can heavily influence the impression of sound quality due to bias and expectation.
I’ve seen this in a test of various audio cables. When the people taking part in the test were told which cables were being used, the more expensive cables almost invariably sounded better to them. There was a very different result when a blind ABX test was carried out. Apart from when listening to a poorly shielded cable that picked up interference, they could hear very little difference between different cables. That’s why double blind listening tests are necessary to remove the subjectivity from the results.
I’ve seen no compelling evidence that atrac has improved significantly in the last couple of years, so I see no reason to believe that its sound quality now matches MP3 or other alternatives.
A lossless format is hardly relevant to a discussion of the quality of their lossy compression. Given that all lossless formats by definition sound identical, the only sensible way to compare them is to compare the support for each one, the file size and encoding / decoding times, and (if you care about such things) the openness of the format.
i was not realy talking about comparing it. i just wanted to illustrate that there have been developments in the world of atrac, and that a 2 year old comparison may no longer be that accurate…
very good sites to demonstrate the superiority
Sorry but where are ABX results, what mp3 encoder was used, which setting. I doubt atrac has a chance against latest lame (>3.97beta2)
Advice to Sony: sell off the entertainment division for big bucks to some stupid American company while you still can; adopt open standards and let people copy whatever they want onto their devices; make the real money – hey, it’s a dot-com business plan with step 2 filled in!
There was a Wired article about Samsung being the new Sony because they don’t have a movies/music division screwing up the corporate strategy, and whilst I don’t think Samsung make great products, there’s something to be said for abandoning outposts in doomed markets whose main dubious attraction is the unethically high margins you get (or once got) for being the middleman.
Seek professional help now!
I had a very different experience with the durability of minidisc players and media. I went through 3 minidisc players in under 5 years, and I found that the media could take very little punishment. In my opinion the Sony players were generally quite badly made. I had problems with intermittent stereo on one, the hinge on another broke, and it was very easy to get dust and sand inside the player if you weren’t careful.
I used a few different brands of minidisc media, including more expensive brands like Sharp. I find it mind-bogging to still see someone repeating the hype about them being practically indestructible. I found that just carrying around minidiscs in my pocket seemed almost guaranteed to kill them. Even if they didn’t split open and the sliding cover didn’t get damaged (causing them to jam in the player), dust would get inside them sooner or later and even a tiny amount of dust stopped them playing consistently.
On average I’d say that my minidiscs lasted for around 3-6 months of regular use before they failed. In comparison I’ve owned a HDD MP3 player for a couple of years and despite dropping it a few times it still works perfectly. I can take it to the beach without worrying about it getting filled with sand (that’s how I killed my first minidisc player) and it’s happy enough rolling around in my coat pocket.
There are also quite a few MP3 players that allow recording, this isn’t a unique advantage of minidiscs. Obviously it isn’t a feature that most people are interested in or it would be featured on more hardware.
As for storage, I think most people would rather have a HDD player that holds 20Gb than pack their pockets with 20 minidiscs. With an MP3 player’s easy to use software and a fast USB2 connection, changing the music on your player isn’t much hassle. Especially when compared with real-time recording or using Sony’s crappy software to write minidiscs.
Overall I think the minidisc format was badly flawed from the start and is now simply out of date, good riddance to a mediocre technology.
My experience with MD vs HDD reliability (and usability is very different.
My Sony MZ-N1 (top of the range NetMD player at the time it was released) mini-disc player fell from my belt to the pavement and had to be sent back to Sony for repair (who scratched it and didn’t replace one of the screws!). I then didn’t use it for ages (no Mac or Linux support) and just left it lying on a shelf for 6 monthes then when I come back to it it doesn’t work! I drop my 5G iPod all the time and it isn’t even suffering cosmetic damage yet.
Using MP3’s on the NetMD players was a real pain, OpenMG Jukebox (the precursor to Sonic Stage – there was nothing open aobut it) was just as buggy and slow with an appauling UI and huge memory usage (And people say iTunes on Windows is bad). It also insisted on you converting all of your MP3’s to ARTRAC and then only letting you check them out to a device 3 times before checking them back in (This was very easy to get around by deleting the Sony folder under Application Settings and waiting the age it took to re-scan the directory where all of the converted ARTRAC sopngs are placed). Even copying converted songs to the device over the “fast” USB connection was painfully slow with a single disc taking hours or even having to be left overnight in which time the machine (Athlon 2000+, good for the time) was completly unusable!
Navagating through songs was a nightmare with the jog wheel and the small screen, its only saving grace was the longer screen on the inline remote.
I don’t have an mp3 player and don’t want one. I dislike the way speakers stuck in your ear dull reality and interfere with the pleasure of being here now. Mobile phones can be just as tiresome.
I did once have a MiniDisc player that came with a hifi but I never used it. Just one format too many that Sony and not the whole industry was pushing. Most of my music is on my hdds in mp3 format and it was a no-brainer to run an audio lead from a PC to the hifi amp and play it that way. Where I live Sony products always come with an unjustified price premium so I guess I won’t be getting a Sony anything again.
I found using removable media a big hassle, especially when on the move. Fishing out a particular minidisc from my pocket, removing it from its little case, then fitting it into the player without dropping anything could be a real pain. A MP3 player with built in storage is much more convenient.
Nobody use The Creative player? Zen
http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=3025
better than the ipod, more features and more cheap
In my place Zens ale much more popular than ipods.
Nobody use The Creative player? Zen
I have a 5 GB Creative Zen Micro, but the lack of drag n drop support, lack of OGG support, and slowly running out of batteries while turned off (because of settings retention?) makes me regret not getting an iRiver.
EDIT: although it seems their newer models completely lack OGG support
Edited 2006-04-03 12:06
I love MD I’ve owned many of the models even the second gen. models. The problem then was unless you used optical lines you would not get great quality… now it’s software… Yes sonicstage is the worst example of programming I’ve seen, and comming from sony it’s a shame.
The nice thing about MD is the ability to have almost limitless storage.
However, I’ve spotted something much better than MD for this;
http://www.legendmemory.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=a…
In short, it’s an MP3 player that takes generic SD cards, and a single AAA battery for 10 hours of playback. Costs about USD$30. Drag’n’drop mp3s onto it, and you’re done. Automagical support under any OS that handles generic USB mass storage devices.
and how much does a 1GB SD card cost vs a 1GB hi-md disc?
Wow I thought I was visiting OSNews.com, not MP3PlayerComparison.com
While much of the article I can’t comment on, I have only ever seen one MD player, and I didn’t even know they were still made, so I will stay away from that. But the talk of the HD bothered me.
HDs are not that fragile, and they pose no issue if looked at in proper context. This is no different then any other media war.
Some people claim floppies are horrible un-reliable. Others note how indestructible they are. I’ve never had one fail, and have trashed them to heck and drove over them, and no failure, I know others who touch them and they die. And people will say CDs are more durable then floppies, for me, CDs are about the least durable media ever. They failed on me so much I have burn anything to cd for personal use In years. I burned a cd to transfer some photos to work the other day, that was the first time I ever burned a CD on my mac after owning it for heading towards 2 years. And again the same debates rage over Zip disk. Which seam rather similar to MDs, smaller and more durable then CDs, more room then floppies.
To HDs, when was the last time you heard of anyones whos iPod died because of the HD, I’ve never heard of one, but battery death is very common. On a flat out extreme test, a MD may be more durable then a HD. But for use in a portable player, a HD is fine. Its not subjected to loads that will kill it. If they were, they wouldn’t even put them in there.
On Compact flash its very similar. So many people have this fear of Microdrives like they are so fragile, those of us who actually own them know they are perfectly fine and can be bounced of concrete with no issue. In usage you can’t subject them to loads that would kill them. Maybe if you take one and whip it at a brick wall as hard as you can.
So at anyrate, You need to let go of the HD fear. Millions of people are carrying them around with zero issue. At the very least no higher a failure rate then MDs
and if you don’t, you’re old-fashioned.
I don’t have one. Go ahead, stuff me in my pigeonhole.
For those don’t bother with media but just stick with the radio, check out the 11 free all-music online stations at http://sky.fm and the 16 at http://di.fm . They offer music in every category, in three audio formats, and speeds from 24K to 128K.
I have to agree with this. Except for archival purposed (in ogg) I’ve more or less given up on ripping down “my” music. Instead, I tend to stream music from one of three sources: XM, Dish Network music channels (which includes some Sirius programming), and Net radio. This has several advantages in my estimation, the least of which isn’t merely being delightfully surprised by a song I didn’t know I’d like. True, this is off-topic, because we’re not talking portable audio here. However, a previous poster noted that staying jacked into a player every waking hour is a niche behavior, and I tend to agree. I had a friend who bought some mass-storage mp3 player, just had to have it. Three days later, he took it back. It was just too much work, and something else expensive that could be dropped, stolen, or washed.
Look at the math, as well. I spend 14/mo. US on XM, get 150+ channels of really clear music and more, and unless something really goes wrong, it’ll always be there. Net radio’s similar. Meanwhile, my good little mp3 player still has the first “load” of songs I put on it, and it sits on my desk, waiting to justify its very low price. When I’m walking about outside, I’d rather hear the rocks and trees and birdies.
I don’t know if someone already covered this, but Winamp now comes with iPod support. Earlier version have a plugin which gives similar support. This is all done through the media library. Also, Foobar has a plugin for the same thing, though I haven’t used it yet.
I think Thom’s point was that you need some app to put tracks on you iPod. I own an iPod and I have to put the uber crappy iTunes on it in case I go to a friend to give him some of my shit. Why can’t I just copy/paste the damn tracks as is the case with every other mp3 player out there?
Also, iTunes seems crappier with every release and now it even installs the cream of the crap – QuickTime. Did we really deserve this?
I got an Sony MD in 1997. It came with a year’s warranty. The device broke after 11 months. I didn’t treat it well, but not as badly as Ars Technica, who ran over an iPod nano TWICE and it didn’t die! http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/nano.ars/3
So I took my MD back and got a new one. The same thing happened: I guess they’re designed to last just longer than 12 months, forcing upgrade. They just stop reading the discs. I repeated this cycle about 5 times, when I treated one a bit better and it unfortunately lasted a bit too long. These guys should stop trying to justify their betting on the wrong tech, and get MP3 players.
I got a kick out of readind about the varois dead media devices here this afternoon,They have everything here from the Peruvian quipu to the Regina Music box:
http://www.deadmedia.org/notes/index-cat.html
As a young lad I read a book called The Man Who Fell To Earth about an alien that crash landed here and used his superior technology to amss a fortune to finance building a spacecraft capable of hauling him home
Most of the stuff he came up with have more or less become reality in my lifetime,,I mean who in the ’60’s could have imagined a postage stamp sized secure digital card that would hold over a gigabyte of music or data!All this rapidly advancing technology is sure to leave plenty of dead media by the wayside,and it always seems the more proprietary it is the sooner it falls off the beaten path,As I sit here typing this on my favorite “dead”media The BeOS I can only wonder just what they are gonna come up with next LOL
“Oh, and btw, ATRAC has improved a lot in the past 15 years. It is in no way inferior to .mp3.”
This is simply not true. Its inferiority in hardware and software support is obvious. But that’s not the only problem. Many tests that people have given have shown ATRAC to be significantly inferior to other codecs.
See this listening test for an example of ATRAC’s weakness:
http://www.rjamorim.com/test/multiformat128/results.html
(I’d link this comment to the comment I’m replying to…but the quote button wasn’t working)
Edited 2006-04-03 10:00
Don’t know if anybody mentioned it yet, but you got posted on /. ( http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/06/04/03/013254.shtml )
Everyone has one, and if you don’t, you’re old-fashioned
I wonder how long humanity will go with the sheep mentality: “I have got to have what the others have in order to look cool”. I think we must free ourselves from that.
Personally I do not have an .mp3 player, nor do I plan to get one soon. The format that I use to listen to music is solely my own business and nobody else’s.
I have no less than three MD machine and I like them all… surprisingly they are not the same! My first was a Sharp and it still works 3 years on. I have two Sony’s including a NetMD which I could not get to work with my PC but I don’t care. The last one I bought so I could plug in an external mike to tape gigs. I am thinking of buying a 4th off EBay which will likely be a Hi-MD one to play with.
That said I also have a range of other music players (but no IPod – I would like one but prefer to spend the money on something else, alright I admit it, I am an anti-iPod snob, seriously, I refuse to be shcakled to iTunes).
I am as I write this listening to Music Choice Blues channel on the Sky digital box upstairs via my wireless headphones. Later I might activate a station on Winamp or play MP3s on my PC through the HiFi which sits under my PC.
Or I might get out one of my half a dozen portables other than MD. I have an ‘nPod’ a long discontinued 20 gig HD player. I love this despite its foibles of locking up etc. It lets me do bootleg recordings or listen/tape FM radio.
I also have a MuVo 256 Meg. This also records MP3s or playback of FM/MP3. Great because it runs off a non-rechargeable battery.
I have several CD players too but I always disliked their awkward-for-pockets circular shape. That said I also have a Beatman which uses dinky CDs and is square. I got that for under 20 quid off Ebay plus some blanks.
Latest toy is a player which is also an SD card reader. This is close to ideal. It has a tiny (AAA) battery which lasts ages. You can upgrade capacity to 1 gig tho my 265 meg seems enough for now. All I do is plug the SD card in the front of my PC and copy over MP3s from my CD collection I have ripped there.
You can make recordings of your fave net radio using something like Mp3MyMp3 and just copy them across. I do this with comedy radio progs on ‘listen again’ thanks to the BBC on BBC 7. Fantastic!
But going back to the MD – I love the way you can make up your own ‘albums’. I record 3 hours of blues off Music Choice (phono to jack) then play the whole thing editing out on the fly the tracks I dislike etc. After a week you have edited out half of it so you plug it back to record some more… repeating the process until you have a full MD. Great except that I worry how to back up this disc I have spent so much time on. Finally, I should say I also subscribe to Napster and it is easy with an MD to record from the PC and carry around new albums to see if you like them and later buy them. I am not sure this is condoned but since it is for my private use then I suppose it is OK.
I had MiniDiscs for a while. They were great before MP3 players had enough storage to be practical. I started using them as you would a tape deck, going from CD over optical directly to MD.
Then I started using the NetMD, where you could take a CD or MP3 file and “burn” it to am MD over USB.
Let me just say, Sony’s software is, as has been said, a steaming pile of crap. It’s slow in it’s responsiveness, it’s badly written, awkward to use, and overall combersome. Burning takes longer than one would like, but primarily it’s the software.
I used to say to my friend that Sony should put MDs into PCs! Well, now I know I’m not alone!
If new MD players support standard USB Storage Device interface, instead of relying on a software, crap or otherwise, it would have a chance of becoming popular.
I also like the miniDisk for its size and durability. Consequently I try to have the smaller 3.5mm CDRWs instead of the full-size CDRWs. Somehow they never picked up in sales.
blatent slashdot rip
Short version: Don’t buy it!
Long version:
“However, a major malfunction remains: SonicStage. Even though each Hi-MD player can be used as a mass storage device under windows, Linux, OSX, and even BeOS, you cannot just drag/drop .mp3s onto it. You are forced to use SonicStage. Apple may force one to use iTunes to transfer songs to iPod, but at least iTunes is not a steaming pile of crap. And of course SonicStage is only available on Windows, not on OSX or Linux (Sony did announce Mac support for its upcoming high-end Hi-MD recorder, I can’t wait for prices on that thing).”
It doesn’t matter a shit how good specs a product might have if it’s totally useless and doesn’t work.
Who cares? They are crap aswell.
Even sandisk “kind of forces” people to use WMP 10, but atleast you can turn it off and use it as a regular USB mass storage device.
Want a decent player for an excellent value? Go with Sandisk or Samsung.
Got cash to spend but don’t like crap? Get iRiver och iAudio.
Everyone here seems intent on passing off MD as a useless technology, easily replaced by devices such as flash-based MP3 players and the infamous iPod.
Nothing can be further from the truth.
Name another product with the following features:
– Records CD quality audio (yes, CD quality – no compression, 44.1kHz stereo 16bit/channel)
– Can record from analogue, digital sources (via optical cable) and microphone input.
– Has unlimited recording capacity using removable media
– Has CHEAP removable media (Currently AUS $5 for a 1Gb Hi-MD disk)
– Allows in-unit editing and naming of tracks
– Allows transfer of recorded audio to PC in WAV format
– Fits in your pocket
Can’t think of anything? AFAIK, Hi-MD is the only technology that fills the personal digital recording gap. There are other digital recording devices, but none are as versatile or as compact as Hi-MD.
I’m not a recording guru by any means, but I have found many uses for my Hi-MD unit:
– Recording from radio or TV (especially music video shows such as “Rage” which play up to 11 hours of uninterrupted music overnight on weekends, with no chatter overlaying the beginning and ending of songs)
– Recording lectures and meetings
– Recording audio from my favourite DVD’s
– Recording language lessons. Especially useful if the source is the radio, or Real Audio (or something else not easily copied by other means).
– Recording a song from your friend’s iPod, wherever you are.
Seems a shame to give all this up, doesn’t it?
You can talk all you like about the quality of ATRAC etc, etc. For me, it’s more than adequate. I can put 34 hours of audio (about 600 songs) @64kbs on one 1Gb disk and about 45 hours @48kbps (which considering the compression ratio, sounds pretty darn good). Unless you’ve heard it for yourself, you can’t knock it.
So go home to your iPod if you want, but you can pry my Hi-MD out of my cold, dead hands.