Live Recording - Home User

[Luigi]

I'm TOTALLY new to this, and my question has probably been asked a million times -

Is minidisc appropriate to use for home live recording - I am interested in recording myself playing the piano. Can anyone recommend a decent minidisc model with an internal mike and the ability to manually adjust the recording levels? Also, what about an external stereo microphone?

Does minidisc offer the same flexibility that cassette does, such as start and stop, record over, etc.

Thanks!

[Ppk3000]

  I'm TOTALLY new to this, and my question has probably been asked a million times - 

Is minidisc appropriate to use for home live recording - I am interested in recording myself playing the piano.  Can anyone recommend a decent minidisc model with an internal mike and the ability to manually adjust the recording levels?  Also, what about an external stereo microphone?

Does minidisc offer the same flexibility that cassette does, such as start and stop, record over, etc.

Thanks!

It really depends on your purpose. If you are recording yourself only to hear the quality of your playing (pianist right here) and nothing else (no burning to CDs, no sending a copy to your friends), then any MD recorder would do.

Information on many Sony MD recorders (except Hi-MD) available at:

http://www.minidisc.org/part_Recorders_Sony.html

If you're just using your MD recorder purely for recording, then older models are good enough. If not, and instead if you want your recorder to also be your handy portable player (and have a few mp3s and/or wma's you want to hear on the go) then Net MD a possibility. If you want the biggest capacity possible MD recorder, then the recent Hi-MD is your answer... but neither Net-MD nor Hi-MD can really forward/rewind in the cassette style, and only offer a CD player's "skip by track" method.

**NOTE** Net-MD recorders disallows transferring your recordings back into your computer... well technically you can using the "analogue trick", but it degrades (and alternates) the quality of the audio quite a bit, which is probably the nightmare of every musician.

If you want to transfer your recording back to the computer in its original format, I suggest you target the Hi-MD players. Although Sony seems to disallow burning the uploaded audio on to a CD, or even extracting it for other purposes, you can record a near-clone of your computer's own audio output providing you know how to adjust the windows mixer settings properly and have a decent sound card.

In addition, some claim Sony finally disabled the Hi-MD's file protection on Sonic Stage 2.1, but the release date of this software or whether the long-craved-for protection-removal update would be included...

Edit 07/21/04: Sony just might fix the protection problem... http://forums.minidisc.org/viewtopic.php?t=5417

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On the note of the microphone, I'm rather inexperienced with this. I personally recorded many live performed music with a Sony ECMMS907 mic... it's pretty good except I would prefer a bit a higher response range. (100Hz - 15KHz).

[classicalnut]

I hate to disagree but you can get a great recording with minidisc and then transfer analog to omputer without much loss at all. I record piano all the time both myself and others and nobody has complained about the sound when I then burn a cd. You might want to try a better microphone. I use a couple of different ones depending on the situation. My first choice is the Rode Stereo NT4 and my second is two Earthworks SRO. So much depends on the type of piano, microphone placement and the room you are recording in that you will just have to experiment.