Reni

I have an N707 which I also use to record my band's practice. I initially ran into the exact same problem you were having -- when I plugged the mic directly in the MD unit I got massive distortion on my recordings. The problem, (like sudden suggests above) is that the mic pre-amp on the N707 (and R700) is extremely poor and distorts anything above loud speech. What I did is buy a battery box from sound professionals and after that everything worked fine. I plug the mic into the battery box and the box into the line-in. I'm not really sure if using a headphone amp is doing the same thing as a battery box would, but using the battery box solved all my recording problems. Hope that helps.

Hi Kevs, 1) Well the thing about mp3 is that it is a compressed lossy format. Just like ATRAC for MD. So 500 gigs of raw .wav files (or CD data) would compress down to roughly 60 gigs of .mp3 files. Probably a little bit more, actually if you used higher bitrates. 2) This is actually one of the best things about mp3 players. You don't have to decide what 5 minidiscs you're going to grab for the day. You always have all of your music with you. As for editing songs on the player -- well, this is currently impossible to do on an ipod. You have to hook it up to a computer if you want to add or delete songs. Making a custom mix is very easy though -- you either just make a playlist on your computer and copy it to the ipod or you can just make the playist on the ipod itself. I also used to make a lot of mixes on MD but I find I mix it up (sorry, bad pun) a lot more with my ipod because it literally takes less than a minute to make the actual playlist whereas when I would make an MD mix I would have to dig up the CDs and re-rip the tracks to my recorder. 3) I had the same fear about navigating through 2000 songs on one device but this is surprisingly easy on an ipod. You can browse by artist, album, genre, or individual songs. If you want to hear a particular album you just navigate to the album and hit play. If you want to hear all albums by, say the Beatles, you just navigate to "Beatles" and hit play. If you want the ipod to shuffle between all 40 (in my case) jazz cd's you just turn on shuffle, navigate to "Jazz" and hit play. I have to warn you though, that not all mp3 players have such a clean interface. Having said that, I still use my MD recorder for a variety of things, mainly recording live music. Like I said in another post, I'm still worried about the ipod being more 'fragile' than my N707 and the idea of the hard drive crashing someday definitely scares me. Plus if you ever go from MD --> mp3 it's going to be a definite pain to rip 800 CDs to mp3 format. I was really into MD before I saw an ipod. But after having both for a while now I just find the ipod to be more convenient. When it comes to just listening to music nowadays I always grab my ipod rather than my MD recorder. --Matt

Hi Kevs, 1) Well, assuming that each of your 800 MDs contained 74 minutes of music they'd probably all fit on 1 60 gig jukebox zen. 2) Why would you have to back up your mp3s any differently than the way you back up your MDs? 3) Since I'm one of the people who brought up the innovation point, I guess I'll reply here. My point wasn't really to ask what kind of gadgets or doodads they're going to add to MD in the future. I was more trying to ask what MD is going to do to stay competive with MP3 player/recorders. In a couple of years, I think you'll have an mp3 device that can do everything a portable MD recorder can do -- with the added benefit of being able to hold all of your music. If the two were roughly the same size and price (with the additional benefit of being able to record uncompressed audio), then which one would you pick? Just as a point of curiousity, why don't you want your whole collection of music in one place? I'm not trying to be antagonistic in asking this question, I'm just wondering why you wouldn't want to store your music this way. Just my $.02, --Matt

Ah, that makes sense. I never record anything from the radio but I can see how it would be useful for that case. --Matt

Skyther is correct in that MD allows you the ability to combine or edit the order of your tracks while MP3 players have no such capacity. I have to admit, however, that I never utilized these functions on MD recorder. Do people out there actually reorder their MD's or combine/divide their tracks? --Matt

How loud do you play when you're practicing? I recorded myself practicing on my drumkit and I got massive distortion but I recorded our guitarist playing by himself on an acoustic guitar and the recording sounded fine. I ended up buying a battery box and now I record into my N707 through the line in. In general though, you probably are better off with a sharp if you're going to record live music. Sony units are notoriously bad when it comes to their microphone pre-amps. --Matt

Well, as someone who owns both an ipod and a MZ-N707, I can't exactly "pull" for mp3 players, but will reply to some points in this thread. The main reason I still own an MD recorder is just that -- I like to record things and so far hard-drive based players can't do this. I also have to say that my MD recorder seems more "solid" than my ipod, both in construction and in exterior feel. And one more thing is that my N707 was less than half the price of my 15 gig ipod. Having said all that, however, I find I almost never use my N707 anymore when I just want to listen to music. The main reason just being convenience -- I don't have to decide beforehand what I'm going to listen to for the day. Before as I was walking out of the house I would select a couple of MD's for that day and listen to those. But with my ipod I just know that I have all my music with me so I just pick that up and go. Yes it's true that you can't combine or delete tracks on an ipod when you're away from a computer but because of the large number of songs I can store at once, I don't really care about this at all. If I don't want to listen to a particular track, then I just don't put it on my playlist. As far as the sound quality goes -- I rip all my mp3's at 320kbps and I can't tell the difference between this and my MD's ATRAC compression. Even though I've ripped my mp3's at this high bitrate, I still find I've only filled half my ipod. As for the battery life -- I only get around 7 hours of playback but this is more than enough for me. I just recharge it every night or every other night. Having said all that though, I still feel like MD is more of a fully mature technology (conversely, I feel that MD innovation has dead-ended and may have reached the end of its evolution but that's a post for another thread). I trust that recordings I make on my N707 will be around whereas if I was recording onto my ipod I'd always be afraid that the hard drive would crash before I could transfer the files and my recordings would be lost forever. As far as the interface goes -- the ipod is as easy to operate as the N707. In fact, I think it's easier to operate because of the larger display -- menus are easier to scroll through when you can list several options at a time. Both units are really great when it comes to intuitive user interface. (I also have to say other mp3 players do not have as great of an interface -- I had an Archos recorder and I returned that thing within a month because the interface was so kludgey.) So to address the original post -- if you want to record live, I would stick with MD for now. That's what I'm doing, anyways. But I am keeping a close eye on the ability of mp3 players to record. Like BJ, I agree that this ability will probably be incorporated within the calendar year. --Matt

I just had a note about the Nomad Jukebox 3 -- the built-in preamp on this thing is pretty crappy. If you record straight into the Jukebox you're going to get a lot of distortion if your band is even moderately loud. My friend has one of these and has to use a battery box in order to get a decent recording. --Matt

I think the question is more of how the minidisc format/hardware is going to evolve in the next few years. The MD has been around for 10 years now. It's very unlikely the hardware will ever get much smaller, nor will batterly life likely to get much longer. Other than enhanced codecs, where is there room for innovation in the MD world? The only thing I can think of would be if manufacturers finally allowed you to upload your tracks via the usb connection but we all know how likely that is to happen. Hard drive recorders, on the other hand really only been around for a year or two. Let's not forget that when MD units first came out they were also prohibitively expensive, their battery life was terrible, and they had no LCD remotes. But over time, the prices came down, the units got smaller, and batterly life increased dramatically. I tend to think that the same thing will happen with hard drive recorders. I even think that as media gets cheaper, manufacters may switch to memory-stick type formats rather than hard drives. And I also feel that the inherent superiority that ATRAC holds over the mp3 codec will gradually erode in time as people start ripping their mp3s at higher and higher bitrates. So yes right now, feature wise, MD is the superior format for me. I recently purchased a N707 over an Archos recorder because of the portability, battery life and the overall clunkiness of the Archos interface/design. But I really don't see how the MD format will continue to innovate in the future whereas I can easily see how hard drive or flash memory type recorders can only get smaller, cheaper, and capable of holding a greater capacity in the future.