dex Otaku

There are microphones that cost roughly the same as the MS907 but reportedly perform better. The Sound Professionals "copy" of the 907 is one such example. Take a look on http://www.soundprofessionals.com as well as http://www.reactivesounds.com for more ideas. In all honesty, the MS907, while not being a truly full-range mic, performs admirably well. The only real issue I have with it is that you can do better without actually paying more.

Note that you can write a 700MB data CD in a couple of minutes. A 1GB HiMD takes 30-120 minutes to write. You can also copy the data from the 700MB cd in a couple of minutes. The 1GB HiMD will take 20-90 minutes.

The quality loss is very low, so much so that for most material, you won't notice it. As long as you don't do successive generations of lossy encoding things should be fine. The greatest number of lossy passes I make with anything are two: HiSP converted to PCM for editing, PCM gets backed up, things get converted to mp3 for distribution. It's pretty much unnoticeable that way, though as always - it depends on what you're recording. Some things cause more artifacts than others.

ATM, I'd say the risk is very low, but then - how important are your recordings to you? Very low = non-zero.

Correct. This is pretty much the express purpose of DRM - to prevent the copying or use of tracks from one -installation- of SS to another. [A more accurate way than saying one -computer- to another.] In all honesty, I don't know why you wouldn't choose to make your backups losslessly, using CDR or DVDR. They're both higher in capacity, far faster to both read and write, cheaper in terms of cost/MB, and vastly more accessible than MD or HiMD. Not to mention being limited in fidelity only by the quality of your sound card. Forgive me if I sound down on MD and HiMD. I'm not. I do, however, hold to my personal view that both formats are best used as -intermediary- storage; in the case of data, for moving it from one place to another, and in the case of personal recordings, for storing the recording only until such time as it can be transferred to a more practical long-term storage medium. i.e. Make your recording, take it home, and write it to CDR. Or, if you're an actual archivist, copy it via analogue to open-reel tape, which is still pretty much the chosen medium for archival. The other application, which I consider a fringe benefit rather than a primary focus, regardless of how Sony's marketing tries to push it - is for portable music playback. This is especially the case since pre-recorded MDs have stopped being produced, and since HiMD is not usable as a stamped, read-only media as MD was. In the end, if you want to reformat your computer, there's only one way to keep your SS library - to back it up to another medium, such as a removal hard disc, or CDR or DVDR. If you use the SS backup tool, you can restore the library as it was.

Tracks recorded on the HiMD itself either by analogue or optical digital means can be uploaded [only once] from disc to SonicStage. The European 600 has a line/optical input, but the North American model does not. The Euro version can record, in other words, while the NA version can not. No, you can't transfer tracks that you made and downloaded with SonicStage to any other installation of SonicStage. In fact, you can't upload them to the originating installation, either. SS will simply delete the tracks from the disc same as doing a 'check-in' in previous versions.

Close SonicStage. Open Windoze Explorer. Drop files from wherever onto the HiMD, just as you would with any disc drive or removable media.

There are other options as well, but Total Recorder [$11.95] allows you to record digitally from streaming radio [or any source your computer can play, really].

The specs listed outdo the MS907, so I would expect it to be higher in fidelity. The MS907 does have one thing to its credit, though - as a true M/S stereo microphone, it gives a proper "middle" in the recording [from its forward-facing mic capsule] which makes your recordings better-suited to mono mixdown if the need should arise. [in particular, M/S stereo is used by broadcasters who know their material is likely to be played on both stereo and mono equipment].

Yes. HiMDRenderer will convert any track that is valid in your own SS library. [i.e. copying a OMG track from elsewhere, which won't be playable in SS, won't work] The HiMD module was updated in 2.3. Look in the "Essential HiMD info" subforum for more info.

#1 - update to SS 2.3 if you haven't. #2 - on the Sony website there's an updated version of Wave Converter as well, from mid-December. If you don't have this already, download and install it [after updating SS if you need to]. Otherwise, no. I haven't had problems with Wave Converter.

I have used extensions with an MS907 in the past and never had problems with static from movement. Since all MD type mics are unbalanced, however, cable length will have an -extremely- noticeable effect on what reaches your recorder. Anything longer than about a 2m/6ft extension is likely to cause a great deal of noise by simple virtue of altering the impedance of the mic and acting as an antenna for RFI.

Boundary microphones can be quite good at what they do, but with this one being listed on some websites at $15USD retail, I'm a bit doubtful of its quality. If all you need is something simple and the space you will be recording in aren't too reverberant or filled with outside sounds, the boundary mic might do well by you. Poke around on http://www.reactive.com and http://www.soundprofessionals.com .. at the least, you can get an idea of what's out there. Both sites also have samples of recordings made with many of the mics they sell, so you can get an impression of what things will sound like.

Zip is far faster than HiMD. HiMD is not terribly practical for use as removal storage in day-to-day applications. It's simply too slow. If you don't believe me, try taking a HiMD unit and copying 950MB of files averaging 6-10MB each [like MP3s]. Nominally, on the fastest computer you can find, this will take between 40 and 120 minutes to do. After that, you have to read them back, which will take another 25 to 90 minutes. In that time, I could walk down the street, buy a pack of CDRWs, come home, write 2 of them, and read all the data off onto another computer - likely before the data has finished being written to the HiMD, let alone read from it. Double-sided blanks are an impossibility with MO media. One side of the disc is used by the optical head; the other side by the magnetic head.

The main issue is that MD and HiMD are magneto-optical formats. MO discs are fairly slow to read, and even slower to write. As density increases, potential R/W speeds increase accordingly, but there are physical limits to how far this can go. If you look through the HiMD FAQ on http://www.minidisc.org it lists the R/W speeds of MD and HiMD media. To give you an idea, though, the peak speeds for HiMD [which is faster than MD] are still well below USB 1.1 speeds, hence the lack of USB 2.0 support - it's not needed. Sony actually demo'd a video camera that used modified MD hardware with 650MB discs. There was little interest, and it fell by the wayside. Using a digital camera with either would be painful at best, taking up to or even greater than 30 seconds to write a single high-res image. HiMD does not meet the data rate requirements of DVD video. Just a few notes for you.

What are you using to make the MP3s? And also, just a note - you do realise that the way you're doing things is putting the tracks through 2 generations of lossy compression [if you're recording on the HiMD in PCM mode; if you're recording in HiSP, you're going through 3 generations of lossy compression] .. ?

No idea. The only way to find out is likely to try it.

It depends on how you do your editing. If you want to keep the recording on the original disc, then yes, mark tracks right on it. If not, the track marks are pretty much incidental - the times I've used marking during a recording, I almost always end up merging all the tracks and marking them in my editor later anyway.

It's a natural consequence of this kind of format. CD and MD have relatively simple tables of content, and metadata is also kept pretty simple. HiMD does have a central table that stores tag info, but there's the potential to put a lot more in there, number one. Number two, it uses unicode or some variant, meaning that every character takes more data. I would compare HiMD's initial load time with that of most MP3-CD players, including DVD players that read tags - those have to actually go through every file and read their tags into memory, which takes time. My old Samsung MP3-CD portable would take up to a minute to read the tags from a disc with many tracks on it. On average, I'd say that most of my discs [MD80s formatted as HiMD] take about 3-5 seconds to load. That's using HiSP. If you use lower bitrates, you can get more tracks on the disc - meaning it takes longer to load, since there's more metadata to read.

Heh. I still remember the transition between Gopher and the WWW.. using Lynx, around 1991 or something. MP2 does not have a fixed bitrate, but in the case of VCD it was limited to a single rate in order to ensure that software could play on any player.

Look up mp3 on wikipedia. What became MP2 and MP3 are totally separate formats that were developed [more or less] concurrently. MP2 did not become MP3. Yes, MP3 was designed with the specific intent of achieving equivalent quality at 128kbps as MP2 did at 192kbps. And it's not that MP3 was -released- in 1992, it's that the standard was ratified in 1992. MPEG Layer-I was intended for use at 384kbps if I remember correctly [192 * 2]. I also believe [though this is at least partly subjective] that it's a misconception to assume that l1 audio is higher quality; the purpose of each codec was to achieve equivalent quality at lower bitrates which each successive layer; hence l1 at 384kbps should be of about the same quality as l2 at 192-256kbps, and l3 at 128-160kbps. In practice I've found these to be pretty arbitrary, really. Using a given codec at higher than it's proposed "quality equivalent" bitrate should achieve higher quality, of course. It would thus make sense that l3 at 320kbps should have fewer artifacts than l1 at 384, though in practice it doesn't actually work this way as each codec has its own distinct flavours of artifacting. In the early days of MP3, a lot of people [including myself] chose to use MP2 for "archival" encoding. At the time [around 1997] I had compared MP2 vs. MP3 at 256kbps and settled on the MP2 encoder. The probable reason for finding it better was that MP3 encoding hadn't evolved to the point that it has now. I still listen to some of those MP2 tracks, and they still sound just fine, incidentally. Internet traffic in either did not become common until much later than the point when both MP2 and MP3 were ratified. In 1992 the fastest desktop computers still took over 10 hours to encode a single 4-minute stereo track into mp3, and hardware encoders were both expensive and uncommon. Realtime MP3 decoding was also not even possible in software with anything less than about a P100-based system. This has as much to do with the I/O capabilities of computers at that point as it does with their processing power. MP3 and internet traffic in it is really a post-Pentium phenomenon. I could be wrong about this, but I've been on the net since about 1988 and I didn't know of anyone trading music online until early 1996 [when the P133 or thereabouts was state of the art]. Keep in mind that most computers at that point did not even have 1GB hard discs yet [they were around, yes, but not in the majority by any means], making the storage of music for compression highly impractical for the vast majority of users. 28.8 modems had only been around for a short time, as well. Broadband was uncommon in the extreme [i was peripherally involved in the testing of cable internet in New Brunswick at the end of 1996, as they were one of the testbeds for North America].

I can't be sure that every model works this way, but most MDs and all HiMDs thus far will automatically mark tracks [based on quiet/silent passages of at least 2 seconds] when you use the line-in, regardless of the SYNC-R setting. SYNC-R is valid when you use the optical input, since a valid SPDIF connection will include track marks in the subcode.

Hahahahahahahahahahaha. BRUTAL TYPO TIME! That should have read *1987* not 1997. MD reached the market in North America 1992-3. DCC was ostensibly released at the same time, using PASC which I had previously understood to be a codevelopment basis for Musicam and mpeg l2 audio. Oddly, though I have read this from multiple sources in the past, Wikipedia makes no mention of the PASC connection, so perhaps [assuming the Wikipedia article is more definitive, which isn't necessarily correct] my previous sources on this were dubious: MPEG-1/2 Layer 2 encoding started in life as the Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB) project initiated by the Fraunhofer Society. This project was financed by the European Union as a part of the EUREKA research program where it was commonly known as EU-147. EU-147 ran from 1987 to 1994. In 1991 there were two proposals available: Musicam (known as Layer II) and ASPEC (Adaptive Spectral Perceptual Entropy Coding) (with similarities to MP3). Musicam was chosen due to its simplicity and error resistance. What I said was that the -development- of what became mp2 and mp3 predated ATRAC's, which your wikipedia quote establishes as having started in 1991. I was not sure of when -development- of ATRAC began. Both algorithms were finalized in 1992 as part of MPEG-1, the first phase of work by MPEG, which resulted in the international standard ISO/International Electrotechnical Commission 11172-3, published in 1993. For all intents and purposes, all three formats were established in the same year, if not in fact put into widespread use. In other words, they're all basically the same age. Don't be so sure. I only started learning about MD about 9 months ago, though I had followed the initial release of both it and DCC with interest bordering on outrage [lossy compression being a good thing? Never!] back when I was in high school. And heh, no flamewar. As I said in that previous post, corrections are welcome. Otherwise we never learn.

mp2 [PASC] and mp3 were in development as early as 1997, making their history pretty much concurrent if not slightly ahead of ATRAC's. All "high-fidelity" codecs are considered general-purpose. The MPEG 1 and 2 audio layers [l1, 22, and l3 which is mp3] were developed with things like DCC and DAB [digital radio] in mind, so I would surmise that they were made as much for music as ATRAC was. ATRAC has been used other places, too, such as for Sony's SDDS film sound format [which was introduced as the same time as MD c.1992-3].

Sorry it wasn't good news. HiMD recorders can be used as USB mass-storage devices in this way, but netMD lacks this capability - mainly because MD does not use a filesystem like a computer's. Welcome to the forum, btw.