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Entropy
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My friend is leaving for Japan tomorrow morning. Do any of you know if the black RH1 has turned up as a "world tourist model" yet? Thanks. ~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>
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I'm hoping my friend who's going to Japan for Aikido in May will be able to bring me back an RH1. Do we know if they're actually available there yet, and whether there's an export model with English as the default language? She'll be in Nagoya, I have no idea if they have electronics shops there. Thanks. ~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>
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Hi guys, Is the daily new topics digest actually supposed to send me new material? I've gotten the same digest every day for weeks now, with nothing more in it than the first post in every subscribed thread. ~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>
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The problem is, they've already lost that market. I just (last week) found a homemade wooden crate with 75 MDs and a smashed player, in a trashpile three blocks from my house. That's over $100 of media just sitting on the curb, not even worth posting to craigslist or freecycle. I gotta say, I'm happy to have a year's supply of media for my new RH1. But any mainstream player market for MD really is dead. ~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>
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And that laptop will serve you well until some clumsy oaf of a reporter steps on it or knocks it off the stage. Or until someone starts playing with it. I'd never be willing to put my PowerBook on stage, though I might put a cheap old laptop up there. A number of years ago I was calling a dance in Louisville . A reporter introduced himself to me with "Oh, that was *your* recorder I nearly stepped on." Needless to say I was a bit put out; if he had actually stepped on it, he'd've learned what a MiniDsic recorder feels like when it travels from the stage to the floor at high velocity--but the MD was both a smaller target and much more durable. ~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>
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A few millimeters larger than "necessary." But the unit is smaller than necessary for many of us now, since we need to be able to swap batteries while recording in the field, and some of us need to be able to title recordings and therefore want a jog dial. For live/field recording, the machine could be 50% larger and still be plenty small enough. At twice the size--still tiny--it could hold multiple batteries and enough flash memory to allow you to swap discs in the field. Remember when people used to lug around Sony cassette recorders? I don't need my hardware to be the size of a postage stamp to consider it "small enough." ~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>
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That's a really good point. I'm very happy that this year, April 1 fell on a day where most web sites are idle, so that we weren't flooded with stupid and possibly dangerous fake news items. If they were universally funny, I'd mind less, but only NPR manages to make a good one every year, and many of them as as harmful as this one was--spreading presumably (!) false but damaging rumors. I wonder how many people will be telling me "But MD is officially dead, I read it on minidisc.org" every time I show them my shiny new player (though I want the black one so it won't be shiny at all.) ~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>
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Good point. I was thinking about ATRAC recording--my understanding is that the current MDs only write to the disc occasionally, not all the time. True. I thought about that. A future unit could have a button, but it would probably be easier to just build it to take two batteries. ~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>
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And that's probably a good thing for people like us. If MD is a niche market, Sony won't waste design time and money on frivolously cute units and repackaging the same product 3 different ways. They won't care so much about DRM (a change which we've already seen) because, well, nobody important uses MD anyway. They'll design and sell machines at prices that make profits, instead of trying to compete on price with everyone else, since the people who *need* these features (like the press) will pay for them. &c. ~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>
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That's great to hear. What would be really cool is if you could switch batteries while the player was recording. Ten seconds would be plenty to swap a battery, and I can certainly imagine a capacitor big enough to run the machine for that long, especially if you could shut down the the display and even the laser in the middle of a write without losing data. With a separate battery charger (maybe even solar-powered) and a pile of gumpacks you could be happy for days. :-) ~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>
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A USB battery box and LED flashlight to light up the tangle of wires behind your soundboard--now *that* is cool. I'll be ordering a couple of those I think. ~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>
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Because if you have a mono signal, it's a waste of disk space to record two copies. And there's never such a thing as *too much* disk space. 2h20m in stereo wastes 2h20m worth of disk space--and that's the difference between getting a whole evening on one disc or two. Ideally, the algorithm would actually *notice* that the left and right signal are identical and automatically record only one copy. That of course is far too much to ask. That really sucks. Recording from a soundboard, one can get dozens of trackmarks in a few seconds. One can hope the auto-trackmarking on the RH1 can be set to some useful time interval. I guess this isn't a perfect live recording machine, but it's certainly better than anything I've seen since the R30/35. ~ Kiran <entropy@io.com
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Like these? http://www.sonicstudios.com/batsys98.htm If you have other links, please post them. ~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>
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I'm amazed that there isn't already a giant battery pack that can power and charge all kinds of USB devices. (You'd think someone would make one for the iPod, with a honkin' big UPS battery in it.) The fact that the unit forgets its settings when you swap batteries is a BIG lose. Who the hell could have been THAT stupid in 2006? (I'm actually surprised that they consider miniscule size a feature in a professional product. Give me a machine twice the size with bigger buttons and a giant battery pack already--even a few millimetres thicker and they could have stuck four more gumpacks in there.) ~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>
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This thread has grown by two pages while I've been reading. I hope both Sony and Apple are paying attention. (Why Apple? because a recording iPod would give Sony the competition it needs to get serious about modernizing the format, or would give us a better product from Apple, or both.) I do think that losing the AA battery case is a serious shortcoming--in fact, I'd prefer a model that just takes a AA battery instead of the silly gumpack. (There is such a thing as TOO small even in electronics.) However, if the unit will charge its battery over USB I could live with that--ZipLinq cables do work. And the batteries do seem fairly cheap on eBay, though one would have to remember to keep a bunch of fully charged spares around. One can hope Sony will make (does make?) an external charger for these gumpacks. As for CF recorders, I've looked into those. Some of them are really cool, but because flash is so expensive, they're not really suited for recording much other than short "songs." I record a *minimum* of 3 hours at a time, and at a weekend event I might need to record 20 hours. Removable batteries and removable (or large) media is important to me. Furthermore, you aren't going to be tossing CF cards in drawers, you're going to reuse them, but MDs are cheap enough to be their own backup. (That's a big deal for me--live recordings are irreplaceable, and I like being able to toss my MDs into a drawer instead of recycling them.) It's unfortunate Sony didn't decide to add Mac support or uploading of legacy recordings to its previous generation of MR recorders, but better late than never, I guess. If those features work as advertised, I'll buy at least one of these, and maybe an RH10 to use in the field--I really like that big OLED and AFAICT there's no easy way to title recordings on the RH1. ~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>