Neruda wrote:
>CD's are an incredibly cheap media (way under a dollar in bulk),
>compared to MD which tends to be more than $2 per disc!
Actually, you can easily find MDs for $1.30 or less per disk, with each holding 74, 148, or 296 minutes of music (that sounds better than comparable MP3 bitrates).
>And depending on how much music you carry with you a CD/mp3 player is
>way more portable than a minidisc player. in large cases, MD's take
>up more space than CD's (a 24 MD case is larger than a 24 CD case).
LOL, only for someone silly enough to carry their MDs like that
Unlike CDs, MDs don't need a case at all. You can throw them around, drop them, scrape them together, and nothing will happen. So 20 MDs are actually quite small. I regularly take my MD player and 15 MDs in the same space I used to need for a CD player alone. That's 74 hours (4440 minutes) of approximately 128k MP3-quality music, or 37 hours (2220 minutes) of better-than-256, or about 20 hours (1110 minutes) of audio better than any MP3 encoder can approach, all in the space occupied by a portable CD player (without room for any CDs
). To me, that's pretty good portability.
>The only thing better would be a Treo HD MP3 player or a personal
>jukebox, since hard drives can carry so much more information in such
>a small space. (And at $350-$400, the Treo will kick the ass of any
>MD player on the market, it seems to me.)
I disagree, on many fronts. MD encoding is better than even the best MP3 encoding, so at comparable bitrates, MD sounds better. MD has much better battery life (I can actually get up to 100 hours on one charge and an AA battery). MD is cheaper for the same amount of media. MD has better shock resistance, and in fact HD storage is prone to drive failure -- I've already heard of people whose HD-based MP3 player has gone south because they dropped or bumped it too hard. MD is much more *truly* portable -- if I want to go to the gym, I can slip my MD player and an extra MD in my back pocket and you can't even tell I'm carrying anything. If I want hours and hours of music, I can bring all the extra MDs I want, in a pretty small space. With a HD-based system, I'm stuck with the big, bulky unit no matter how much or how little music I actually need. I prefer the flexibility of MD, and I personally don't call a CD-based MP3 player with 48 CD's "portable"
But that's all my opinion
Thomas wrote:
>Cost of media- no one buys stacks of flash memory cards to hold their
>music. You only use 1 flash memory card, which is built in the mp3
>player.
Actually, everyone I know with a memory-based MP3 player has bought more memory -- who listens to the same 10 songs over and over? IMHO, without extra memory, RAM-based MP3 players are worthless. 64 or 48MB tops is just not enough. Unless you want to spend all your time changing your playlists.
>convenience-MD can only record in real time, so it does take a long
>time to transfer music.
True, as I mentioned. However, for MP3s, you have to factor in the time to download and transfer, or rip and transfer, so while there is a difference, it's not as big as you might believe. And if you truly don't buy extra memory, you have to factor in the time it takes to erase and re-transfer each time you want to change the music on your player, whereas with MD you copy once, an you have it forever, unless you want to edit. For $1.30 for 74, 148, or 296 minutes of audio (with better sound than 300+, 192, and 96k MP3, respectively).
There's also the fact that MD can record live audio -- something no MP3 units can do.
>Then you have to manually enter in all the track titles, whch will
>take at least 15 minutes of contantly pushing tiny buttons.
Actually, there are units and cables that let you do joint text transfer. And most home decks have some type of keyboard -- heck, my MD recorder let's me hook up any PS/2 keyboard (I bought an extra for $1.99 at Fry's) and title discs. Faster than naming my MP3s on my computer, even.
>And MD's are LARGER than the majority of MP3 players,
Only larger than the smallest RAM-based ones, which have no advantages in terms of battery life, audio quality, or cost.
Real-world example: my MD player is 77mm by 71mm by 12mm. Smaller than two MDs stacked on top of each other, and not much bigger than even the smaller, limited memory, MP3 players.
>MUCH heavier
My MD player is 58 grams. That's less than 2 ounces. If I stick a LiIon battery in it, it weighs 83 grams. How much does your MP3 player weigh?
>and have many mechanical parts that are prone to skipping/wear and
>tear.
Truth is, most of the work done in an MD player is electrical and memory-based. The MD spins up and the laser reads data for a few seconds to fill up the memory buffer. The rest is all done in RAM. Sure, more parts than MP3, but it's safe to say that most people will have moved on or upgraded before their MD player wears out.
>And you know that net md will be a piece of crap. Its designed so
>that sony can reduce costs by removing the mic preamp (as they have
>already started doing), ADC, and ATRAC encoders from the md. All your
>MP3's will have to be converted into ATRAC by your computer, probably
>taking longer than real time on a slow computer.
Actually, ATRAC is quite fast. Sony has produced ATRAC MP3-style players for a few years. They work exactly like MP3, except they use ATRAC instead of MP3 encoding (meaning the sound is better, too), and the encoding is much faster than realtime. And it should be, considering that these little MD recorders can do it in realtime
I agree that the copy-protection stuff sounds a bit fishy, and I'm a bit anxious to see if consumers are going to get screwed by it. But more important, IMHO, is the fact that the technology for PC-MD data transfer is there. That's very promising for MD.
