New Sony Minidisc Players 436
Andy_R writes "Sony's has announced it's new new range of Hi-MD players at the CES show. The range of players (which should hit the shops in April) will start below $200 for a device that can function as a USB hard drive as well as storing a claimed 45 hours of music. The twist is that the data is stored on a new type of removable 1Gb media, a development of the minidisk format, with blanks costing about $7 each. The BBC have some more details including backwards compatibility with old-style minidisks and an ominous mention of 'built-in copyright protection' but I can't find anything on Sony's official site yet." Another reader reader submitted some pictures and specifications (pdf).
Minidiscs as removable media (Score:5, Interesting)
These new MDs coul be a viable replacement for CD-roms, but only if they aren't bogged down with DRM. A physically small, 1GB disc in a protective caddy. It's almost too good to be true.
Re:What's the point? (Score:2, Interesting)
and what would you do with it? (Score:2, Interesting)
you still
A) need a computer
B) power supply (for most of them, a hassle anyways)
C) driver issues
my mom actually bought a meatloaf minidisc from the store to listen to. she's a COBOL hacker for a university, like some of you. when she's home, the last thing i'd ever see is her using a computer.
if you don't want to deal with a computer, you use a minidisc. it's for normal people. sony is losing their market of people who are afraid to ask their techno-savvy friends for help.
remember when one amongst you had the fast bb connection and burned you collections of mp3 files because the lot of y'all had dialup, or worse, AOL (back when it was known as America OnHold... busy signals, automated tech support). the thing is that technology is being accepted by the people who don't care to know how it works or what it does as long as their tunes are available and under control.
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What's the point? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll admit that Sony did practically destroy it's own creation with all of it's annoying restrictions including the inability use the media as data storage. It would have made the perfect replacement for the floppy disc, zip disc, etc.
Re:What's the point? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've got a Sony Altrac3plus MP3 CD-Walkman D-NF610 that I use for jogging and haven't heard it skip once. Street price is $89 and it includes FM/AM/Weather/TV reception. Obiously the TV band is audio only, so don't get your hopes up.
It sounds as if the CD-drive only spins up at the beginning of each song, so I'm guessing it has enough memory to hold an entire song while playing. Also, because it rarely uses the actual CD, the battery life on this thing is unreal. I've gotten well over a month of usage on this thing with 2 double-A batteries when playing MP3's off CD. The battery life goes way down when playing normal CD's.
Re:What's the point? (Score:2, Interesting)
I have a Mini Disk Player (Score:3, Interesting)
Why?
1. The CDRW holds a LOT more music.
2. The CDRW media is cheaper.
3. The CDRW plays MP3 AS IS.
4. The CDRW media is a lot faster than the Mini-Disk medai.
5. The CDRW does not require any special software.
Play MP3s as is (no re-encoding them to your own crappy custom DRMed format) and get rid of that GOD-AWFULL software that comes with the Mini-Disk. Honestly, that software my Mini-Disk player came with was amongst the worst I have *EVER* used.
Do the above, and I might consider another one. Until then, stick with your ipods and CDRW players.
Bryan
Re:convenience (Score:2, Interesting)
For me, most of my music listening time is in the car. I tend not to listen to music as I walk around, as it bothers me to not be able to hear my sorroundings.
That being said, MD is great in the car. The disks are plenty tough, and its great to be able to just throw them on the ground or in the back seat or in the console and not have to worry about them getting scratched up. The only real problem is that there's a distinct lack of hardware that supports them (since no one really uses the format except... me. And the Japanese. Or something). I have a Blaupunkt head unit for MD, and a CD Changer in the console that mainly gets used on road trips and when other people bring music. My ideal solution would be two changers, one MD and one CD, or a CD head unit and an MD changer, but the only car audio manufacturer who has support for that kind of configuration is, you guessed it, sony.
Now, a CD changer that read ISO9660 discs with MP3s on them and provided a useful interface to them, that'd be a hell of a thing.
--
phil
Re:sony has their own encoding scheme (Score:2, Interesting)
Minidisc as a data format - what happened ? (Score:2, Interesting)
This reminded me of the scene in the Matrix where Neo hands over some data on a Minidisc.
Minidisc looks like such a cool format, smaller than zip discs - a PC drive bay for them was manufactured however good luck if you want to find one...
With the ability to use for data, and even copy music from your pc to them - they could have wiped the floor with other storage formats... what happened ??
They Actually Might Have a Niche... (Score:2, Interesting)
Some MP3 recorders can record in uncompressed Wav format, but I have yet to see one that can do that without destroying the batteries in the process. Maybe there is a good flash-rom recorder that is broadcast quality that I'm not aware of. (Please post here if you know of one.) However, all of the HD based MP3 players that can record (that I've seen) they either have terrible quality for a source recording (usually the max is 160 kbs MP3 which is fine for downloads, but not pro audio) or you get 15 minutes of recording time on standard batteries when trying to record sound in uncompressed Wav format.
Now if SONY makes these players able to record for extended periods of time with 1GB of storage for $7 as opposed to several hundred for 1GB of fast (32X) flash media, I'll ante up. MD has been the most reliable recording format for use in the field IMO. The media is also damn tough to beat up. In fact, the discs will last much longer in storage than CD-Rs.
Yes this is a niche, but if SONY doesn't ignore this niche, they might have some more buyers. Recently they've been removing the mic inputs on their lower end consumer MD players. I hope there is a version of this with a mic-in.
- The Audio Guy
Big deal in Japan not the US (Score:3, Interesting)
The More Important Issue (Score:3, Interesting)
Copy Protection (Score:2, Interesting)
"...the USB interface was only to be used to "check-out" purchased music from the hard drive to the MD unit. The only permitted function of "checking-in" is to return previously "checked-out" music from the MD to the hard drive, a function that I cannot imagine ever having a use for. Apparently, Sony did not include a truly digital USB/MD option in order to discourage piracy (Sony is, after all, a major publisher of music content as well as audio hardware)."
I didn't see anything specifically saying what the copyright measures were, so I hope this helps.
The Hi-MD supports PCM now. (Score:3, Interesting)
These new Hi-MD players support native PCM equal-to-CD-quality recording. Goodbye DAT, hello Minidisc - while DAT offers 48KHz sampling, it is nowhere as small and resilient as the minidisc format which was originally developed for portability as a key design requirement. Plus, battery life on the DAT walkmans rarely exceeds 4 hours in ideal situations.
And if you use the mic input (the specs explicitly mention mic-in so this may not apply to line-in), you can upload your PCM recording at high speed to a PC and master it straight onto a CD.
The Hi-MD is a bootleggers dream
Re:Sony Has No Chance (Score:5, Interesting)
* iPods have poor battery life compared to the NetMD and Hi-MD units (8 hours spec-sheet vs. about 30)
* iPods can't record - only accept uploads.
* iPods are HDD-based, so less resilient.
* NetMD players are smaller and lighter than even the iPod mini so I would expect the trend to continue with the similar sized Hi-MD walkman.
* The Hi-MD walkman is the first to support PCM recording - while the iPod can play back PCM wave files, the Hi-MD walkman can also record them in realtime, effectively a pro-sumer solution to the bulky and expensive DAT format.
Re:Copyright Protection Technology (Score:2, Interesting)
Fortunately, there's ways to get around them. My personal favorite is making a Audio CD image of all the songs you want, then mounting it using a virtual drive. Then use Sony's own tools to copy this CD to the MD, bypassing all their DRM. Using Ahead Nero Burning Rom and Image Drive, I've made 1.5 gig CD Images which can be copied to my NetMD[1]. There are tools out there to help speed this up, like SimplerMD [minidisc.org]. OpenMG/Magic Gate is more of a pain in the ass than anything else, but it certainly doesn't stop people from listening to their "illegal" MP3's.
[1]: For those of you confused to how I stuck 1.5 gigs of raw data on a minidisc, NetMD units support LP2 and LP4 modes, which let you store more music, but with lossy compression. If my MD holds 80 minutes of music at standard compression, LP2 holds around 140, and LP4 holds around 320 minutes - hence, the oversized CDs to fill 140 minutes of music.
more info on the 610? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Discs are a good thing (Score:3, Interesting)
I have another MP3 CD player hooked to PC speakers in the office, and a boombox that takes MP3 CDs upstairs. (And a mini-CD MP3 player for trips.) So I have a good bit of equipment that is compatible with the format.
The downside is that I have to keep track of dozens of MP3 CD media, but at less then $0.50 per disc, I usually just burn two or three copies (one for each location). Sometimes there's a trade-off because I can only stick 700Mb worth of songs "together", so I have to pick-n-choose. MP3s on DVD-R would be very nice howerver.
Re:why use MD if there are mp3 players... (Score:2, Interesting)
I know someone who has experience with the Archos, and is pretty happy with it. There's an open-source firmware for it, too.
I have been an MD user for more than 8 years. (Score:3, Interesting)
My oldest unit, a japanese Sharp MD, had a very reliable and high quality performance, beating anything available at the time (in terms of price/performance/convenience, remember 8 years ago there weren't many CD burners and DAT/ADAT were too expensive and not very portable). It has S/PDIF, Line In and MIC inputs. The ATRAC codec had a very good psychoacoustic model and better yet, it had forward and backward compatibility with several revisions of itself. My parents are musicians and I'm an engineer, so I know what I'm talking about. I still have this unit, it is a really good piece of hardware. Later I had access to an MD Deck that had S/PDIF output so I could record and edit some live tracks on my computer.
My newest MD, a Sony NetMD unit has also the same inputs (S/PDIF, Line in and MIC), I bought it because it's smaller, has longer battery life, the ATRAC codec is several generations newer and the overall quality is better. I was also hoping NetMD and its applications (OpenMG, Sonic Stage and Simple Burner) would give me a way to upload my live tracks and simply skip the MD Deck stuff, while speeding up the downloads of my tracks.
But NetMD is a piece of crap. Not only the new ATRAC LP2/LP4 are low quality (which is OK for non-audiophiles who listen to MP3s anyway), but the whole OpenMG/NetMD fiasco is completely useless. Here's a little list of the annoying stuff for your reference:
- You can't upload any tracks you recorded from other inputs.
- You can't edit on the MD the stuff you downloaded with Sonic Stage.
- You can't download in plain ATRAC (only LP2 or LP4) from Simple Burner.
- The DRM locks the tracks you downloaded to your computer. If your computer crashes, your MDs can't be erased or edited.
- The protocol is obscure, proprietary and Sony has rejected petitions to solve the above-mentioned issues.
I can understand (but not accept) Sony feels the need for DRM with all the music pirates out there, but I'm not an MP3 user (there are better formats for me), I don't download music from Kazaa or whatever, I don't buy pirate media, and as a legitimate user I feel I'm the only one screwed by this DRM fallacy. The new Hi-MD would have me interested by the specs, but either they change this attitude or iPod and friends will definitely kill MD for good. The USB Mass Storage compatibility is definitely a good step, but it doesn't clarify if the unit will be able to play the music you download this way or if it will only play the MagicGate encoded stuff.
Re:Compatible with PC. What about Mac? Linux? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What's the point? (Score:2, Interesting)
Voice recording capabilities aside, there's still no consumer level device that I'm aware of that has anywhere near the overall utility/ease of use of MD units for this. The ability to place and remove track marks easily, record to reasonable quality (or trade it off for length), having a dedicated MIC-in (with plug-in power) added up to something that was mighty handy for this. I've poked around the various other portable unit types, and I haven't seen anything affordable with anythng other than atrocious editing facility yet. I'd be delighted if someone could point some out.
I used mine primarily for recording rehearsals ( musical theatre and choir) and singing lessons for practice, and occasionally choir and my wind band concerts. Until some aspiring youth nicked it, anyway.
If you were willing to get a decent deck as well (with a digital out), you could actually wind up with a usable, transerable recording. Of course, Sony being Sony, the PITA DRM will likely continue to hamper perfectly legitimate usage - direct USB transfers of your own, or uncopyrighted material.
Sigh.
Re:why minidisk is better than mp3 (Score:3, Interesting)
You are probably right, but you should be aware that atrac uses a compression ratio of roughly 5 to 1, mp3 files generally somewhere between 10 and 14 to 1. Im sure an mp3 file encoded at a bitrate that averaged out at 5 to 1 compression would sound pretty good. Its also very important to have a good compressor I have found Lame to have excellent sound quality, again though you need decent dsp's for playback.
mp3 is useful if (like me) you tend to leave stuff lying around. I used to have a minidisc player and used to get annoyed sifting through stuff in my bag to try and find disc's covered in crumbs. I like the fact that I can carry my entire CD collection around on a device that fits in my hand.
Minidisc is, however a nice format with many real world uses such as making live recordings etc. I always thought sony were stupid for not making the system more open. They could have made a great low cost solution for removable storage media. This new 1gb minidisc format may be a viable solution. Only time will tell.
Minidisc players have somewhat declined in popularity over the years, its all MP3's everywhere you look. The sheer portability of the fileformat is the reason for that. If i were sony i'd capitalise on this and push the system as a file storage system. Fixed media systems