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very high quality portable music medium. Use it in your
car, jog with it. Sure you can buy an expensive deck. Great for
making the highest quality MD copies and titling, but why play back the
MD on your $10,000 stereo unit? Play the original CD.
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MD isn't just useful for music on the move (car, portable) but for
"presentation" applications. This is where audio is used as part of a
presentation or similar application. The buffer comes in handy on MD decks
equipped with auto-pause and fader; which brings MD into this realm. A track
could contain a sound effect; music used to dance to, sing to or line some
"patter".
To achieve this goal with tape, you would have to use a cassette deck and a
tape which is recorded with particular sounds in a certain order. CDs and
LPs are limiting hecause they are large and expose their music surfaces at
all times. No affordable domestic CD player uses buffering to "pre-load"
audio so that it is ready to go "on the button".
Affordable MD decks like the Sony JE520 and JE530 have the essential
features for this kind of application. Also, MD has the ability for users to
name tracks and "search by name" designed in from the outset while CD's name
abilities were designed in as an afterthought. When preparing the material,
there is the ability to perform "razor-blade" editing on the recording --
good for eliminating "dead air" from the start and end of tracks. This means
that even in advanced play modes, especially single-track repeat or
program-play mode, there is no "dead air" in the program. Some Sony portable
and car decks use the buffer to eliminate track-search "dead air" during
shuffle play. If a deck is used in "auto-pause" mode, the first couple of
seconds worth of an upcoming track are held in the buffer, ready to be
started when the PLAY or FADER key is pressed -- if the track is edited
properly, the audio comes out on cue.
The size issue also is of importance for people who present music or perform
"on location". They can carry more music than what they could have carried
using other media. For example, a dance caller could keep a huge repertoire
of music on hand in a school lunchbox or similar container rather than a
couple of milk-crates or large cases. This means they have more opportunity
to vary their entertainment "on the fly". Also, they could have plenty of
discs full of many tracks' worth of background music to have playing during
the dinner before the real entertainment starts. A clown, magician or
similar entertainer could keep a few discs worth of "accent" music in a
wallet-size container to play as part of their entertainment.
With regards,
Simon Mackay
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