BLC

Sorry to dig up an old topic, but I thought I should update it! Not long after posting this thread, I talked myself into buying a NetMD. I picked up a Sony MZ-N710 on ebay for around £30 - the exact same model I had years ago... The battery doesn't charge any more - as can be expected from such an old piece of kit - but it still has all the original accessories, including the external AA battery adaptor. Damned glad I did: the sound quality, even on LP2, far surpasses anything I've ever heard out of my phone or any of my iPods... I don't mind the fuss involved with real time recording, either; it forces me to think about what I actually want to listen to, rather than just dumping a pile of music onto an SD card and hoping that there's something there that I'll listen to. Sadly not, I remember throwing it out some years ago; I knew I should have kept it, but was under the influence of one of my girlfriends cleaning sprees!

Hello all I've not been able to find any definitive answer on this, despite all my searching, but if this has been answered before then please feel free to point me in the right direction! Back in the days of my first MD portables, I had no PC equipment that could output over optical; to get the best possible quality I needed to use a CD player. It's now nearly 15 years later and things have somewhat changed; I have a Behringer UCA202 USB Audio interface for the PC which, in addition to 2in/out RCA jacks, has a TOSLink optical out connection. However if I use this as a recording source for my Sony MZ-N710, it will not automatically write track marks. I have quite a bit of music stored on the PC in FLAC format, ripped from CDs which are now tucked away in storage (and rather awkward for me to get access to). I don't want to have to automatically insert 2/4-second gaps at the end of each track for the MD to recognise the new track, as that totally spoils transitions between songs. This is a NetMD recorder, but I'd much prefer to use an optical cable - the difference between SP and LP2 may be negligible, but I'd still prefer to use SP recording (which rules out SonicStage). I did try recording some of the albums back to a blank CD and record from my HiFi - which does output track marks over optical - but my HiFi wouldn't recognise the discs properly (it only saw one long audio track, whereas the PC sees multiple tracks). Is it possible at all to automatically record track marks when recording via optical from a PC? Is this a hardware limitation or is it software? Do I need specific hardware or software? I'm quite ready to tear out some hair over this... You would think that with the computer technology we have now it would be a simple proposition; oh no, of course not, where's the fun in everything being simple...

Indeed the N710 supported both USB transfers and MDLP. Hi-MD really is too expensive; the major benefit to them I can see is the increased storage capacity - that's not what I'd use a MiniDisc player for though. If I need storage space, I can just buy a 64GB SD card for my phone - that'll be far cheaper than getting a Hi-MD device. If I hadn't dropped my original N710, the chances are I'd still be using it now and I'd have never "jumped ship" to the iPod... Very tempting indeed!

Hello all After reading about Sony discontinuing portable MD players, I started writing a blog post about MiniDiscs and discovered this place while researching/reading up... I bought my first MD player/recorder back in around 1998 (a Sharp model, can't remember the exact model number), and it was a revelation (at the time). It certainly wasn't the cheapest, but it offered almost unlimited storage (limited by how many MDs you can carry/buy), a re-writable disc format and brilliant audio quality. It was a little bit of a faff to record on to at the time, but I soon figured out a dirty little hack to get optical out of my PC; a friend of mine discovered that if you hooked up a red LED to the two-pin "Digital" output of a CD drive, you could use this to record to a portable MD player with an optical cable. It took a lot of gaffer tape to keep the cable "attached" to the LED, but it worked. I used this for a few years, before I bought a Diamond Rio PMP300 - that got stolen, so I went back to my Sharp MD player for a few years. I got back from University and bought myself the Sony MZ-N710 NetMD. This was even better - I could still do digital recording, but I could also transfer my burgeoning MP3 collection digitally - even if SonicStage was utter trash. Eventually I managed to drop my NetMD, which pretty much killed it - it would no longer read or record discs - so I moved on to my first iPod. From there I bought another iPod and eventually abandoned iPods altogether; I now use Spotify on my Android phone. Reading so much about MiniDiscs - and seeing that I'm not the only nutter that liked them - has really started to make me miss using them. I hardly ever listen to even my music collection these days, as Spotify is so much more convenient and has pretty much all the albums/artists I listen to. But I do miss the physical pleasure of discs and the much better sound quality... It's very tempting indeed to pick up another MiniDisc unit again - especially when the exact model I had is dirt cheap on fleaBay... I'm certainly not tempted enough to buy a Hi-MD unit though! I've written in more detail my blog, if anyone's actually interested enough to read (no, I didn't sign up here specifically to spam you).