MD DATA DISC

[bleeding eardrums]

Hi all..I,m new to the forums i actually found my way here whist on my desperate search..I missed the whole md scene as i was more wrapt up with my dat decks(i know,crazy) anyway i recently picked up a sony mds-s37 deck for $5 AUD at a garage sale with remote and manual and it has sparked my interest in the whole md format,when i got it i wasnt even shure if you could still get md disc for it,a couple of freinds went on a rant about how md was a dead format like my dat decks and that i would have trouble getting disc for it but to my surprise i found sony md disc at a local electronics store messed around with the unit and was really happy,a few weeks latter i was at my younger brothers and i brought the md topic up as a result he gave me an old portable md unit he had(sony mz-n505) so i now had a md deck as part of my system and a portable md as well...A few days after that my brother called and said he had a mate that had a md multi track unit, he gave a breif description of what it was so i told him i was interested and i ended up buying it along with 50 sony md disc for $50 AUD as his mate said he brought it all but had no idea how to use it and it had just sat in his shed boxed up for ages....I have been told that the md disc that came with it wont work if you want to record on it because the unit uses md data disc ? (its a yamaha md4s multitrack) so i searched the web and found a few sites selling them for around $15 USD and $10 brittish pounds witch i would be happy to pay but their shipping cost work out to between $70 to $90 AUD plus the cost of the disc as well works out to be over $100 AUD for 1 disc ..

So my questions are:

Is it true that i need these md data disc to make my own recordings on the unit (yamaha md4s multi track) ? ?

And if so does anybody know where i can source them from for a reasonable price ?(my jaw dropped when the sites i found charge almost tripple the price of 1 disc for postage)..they seem to be non existant here in australia..

[kino170878]

You can use both MD data disc and standard minidisc on the Yamaha. In 4-track mode you can only use the MD data disc which halves the recording time (e.g. a 74 minute disc becomes 37 minutes across 4 (mono) tracks). The advantage here of course is that you will have separate track information on each of the tracks. If however you only need a 2 track stereo mix then you can use standard minidiscs although you won't then be able to use the 4-track potential of the machine.