kaiwai

Meh, had a look at connect; given that ATRAC lives on in their flash players, I'd say its in for the long haul. It would be interesting to know whether Sony is willing to licence it or whether WMA has simply taken off because of marketing (rather than cost) given that both as as proprietary as each other.

I assume you want a player and a recorder; the RH1 which I've got is very quiet - the only time you hear anything is when stuff is being written, but that is the case for pretty much any device that has moving parts.

Well, the interesting thing is this; chatting to a mate who works for Sony Style; he regularly has quite a few people inquirer about mini-disc players; sure, they don't fly off the shelf like the disposable flash based ones, but as he said, those who do purchase them tend to know what they want and willing to pay a little more for quality. At the end of the day, I think, Sony is best to throw in the towel in regards to the mini-Disc at the US market; US consumers seem to be rather paranoid about adopting 'dem foreign technologies' - where as I tend to see a good number of people around New Zealand (and Asia) using mini-disc players. What I would like to see, however, is Sony to make ATRAC open and free for others to use, and better still, document fully the protocol for writing/accessing mini-discs so that third party vendors for other operating systems (such as linux/*BSD/Solaris) can access/write etc. to it. Maybe with a bit of competition, SonicStage would improve too.

Interesting, I bought mine from Sony Style in Christchurch (New Zealand), and they sell the EU8 model here, which has the optical cable (no Hi-MD disk though). As for 'ferrite core' - what do you mean by that? what advantage does it have over the 'standard' (EU) one?

True, but then again, I consider recording as part of that one function The competitors try to do everything, and the do each rather crappy; reminds me of mobile phone I had before - did everything really crappily, I would have preferred less features, and for each to work as they should. The MD player, one isn't constantly shitting bricks over whether one has broken the whole device through accidental droppage. Drop an iPod an expect in a couple of days for the thing to die - I've had that happen before. Another interesting thing; I have found that 48k is quite good for vocal only music such as Gregorian Chants; I was able to squeeze 10cds into a single 74minute MD

*puts hand up* I pledge allegiance to the M.D.A I was recruited by a group of M.D.A's after seeing my plight - I have seen the light, and it is good

Well, I've given 48k a go, and funny enough, its actaully not too bad - tolerable enough for when I sit and listen to music on the bus or at university. I wish I had found MiniDisc's earlier as to save me time and money on the wasted ipods of the past.

http://kaiwai.blogspot.com/2007/06/minidis...s-two-part.html Review of a Sony MiniDisc MZRH1 I bought a couple of days ago.

For me, all I'd like to see; bigger display (like that of mp3 players like ipod/sansa/Zen) and discs. Believe me, if Sony got a 4gb HI-MD out and sold them for $5, it would simply crush the alternatives - open up the ATRAC format specifications and OpenMG specifications as to allow transfer on alternative platforms as well.

I gave the 48k a go, and it was ok'ish, but wasn't exactly pleasent listening to. 64k is the lowest I can probably stand Edit: Did a comparison between the 64K and 48K, I must have been thinking the 64k one was better because in my brain I have this fixation of bigger number equals better quality. It turns out I notice very little difference. Unless I really sit there and listen intensively, I found it hard to disguish the difference.

Yeah, tried it. What I'm more looking at is Artist --> Album Name -> Tracks so that when you click on the Artist, all the albums are then listed, then you choose the album.

True, very true. It depends on the codec used to compress too. Not all encoders are made equal; an older version might have a worse audio analyser than a later, and yet, generate the same sort of file. I guess it also depends on the equipment one plays it back on. I'm going to give 48K a go to see what "FM Audio" is like

Meh, for me, I've got a MZ-RH1, using ATRAC3pro (@64k), and its very good in quality; I've listened to a variety of music genre (hard rock, metal, industrial, avante guard Jazz, classical without any problems (or atleast noticeable by me).

Hi, I've recently bought a MiniDisc (cheers ) and would like to group my music by artist rather than album, so when I transfer it to my MiniDisc, it goes Artist -> Album I've tried to use groups, but I can't put one group in another group (unless I'm doing something wrong - most likely I am). Many thanks in advance