100X High Speed Recording

[marvelous]

I am looking at the purchase of a HiMD portable. I assume the following if possible would be accomplished via Sonic Stage software. Is it possible?

1. Id HiMD LP 45hour mode comparable or better sound quality than CD?

2. Can Sonic Stage upload audio CD's faster than actual play time? Can any software?

3.. What is the quickest process for transfering a large library of CD's to HiMD?

[A440]

1. Id HiMD LP 45hour mode comparable or better sound quality than CD?

NO. It's not even close. The 45-hour mode is the old MD mode LP4 and it is noticeably compressed, only really good for speech. You can put CD-quality sound on a Hi-MD--it's called PCM--but you will only get 90 minutes of music on a Hi-MD. You can put nearly eight hours of very good, but still not CD-quality, sound on a 1GB disc as Hi-SP.

There is usually a tradeoff between file size and sound quality. Beyond a certain point, you can't shrink a file--which means throwing out information--and maintain the sound quality. Some sonic information has to go.

2. Can Sonic Stage upload audio CD's faster than actual play time? Can any software?

3.. What is the quickest process for transfering a large library of CD's to HiMD?

2) Yes, SonicStage transfers files considerably faster than realtime. How fast depends on your computer and which Hi-MD unit you use.

3) Even quicker than SonicStage is SimpleBurner. SonicStage has to be installed as well as Simple Burner. With Simple Burner, you put a CD in the drive, it gets track information online and (using parts of SonicStage) transfers the CD to MD without leaving a copy on your computer.

Edited March 9, 2007 by A440

[poe]

The 45hour figure is for 48kbps and really is only good, as pretty much agreed upon in this forum, for voice. HILP is 64kbps depending on who you ask isn't all that bad to listen to through headphones, and you'll get around 34 hours on a disc. As A440 mentioned you can record in PCM, but you can also use 352kbps which sounds very, very close to CD. If you really can tell differences between compressed and CD give the 352kbps a try. You'll be able to hold 6hrs, 22min in 352kbps on a 1gig disc. Later, POE.

Loading your CDs into Sonic Stage is pretty fast. Depending on the bitrate that you put them into your computer determines download speed to your minidisc i.e. the higher the bitrate the slower the download. All in all, it really isn't all that slow. If you've used a mp3 player before, I'll be the first to admit minidisc will seem very slow. I use my MD everyday for podcasts, about 20 min. before I leave for work I throw a disc in setup the transfer then go get ready for work and it's done. So you just can't do it at the very last minute. POE.

[marvelous]

Thank you very much for sharing the knowledge!