Minidisc is cool, but when you bring a PC into the picture it just doesn't
match the
convenience of CD. Heretical thought? I've started seeing questions of
"what's the
best way to get my music from PC to MD" and answers like "burn it to CD and
then copy
it to MD using Sony's CD->MD box that dups at 4x realtime." Yes, it's a
workable
answer, but doesn't something seem a little *wrong* with this picture??
Doesn't it
seem ironic that the best way to get audio onto MD is by first going to CD??
What we need is for MD to be just as PC friendly as CDR. CD-writers are dirt
cheap
these days, you can digitally-extract audio from audio CDs at 40x and burn
anything you want
to disc at 12 or 16x realtime.
What I'd like: Sony (or Sharp) needs to release both SCSI and IDE/ATAPI MD
drives
that accept the CD-R/CD-RW SCSI command set, and behave just like CDRW
drives. The
drives need to have full read/write capability to MD-Audio, MD-Data, and
MD-Data2/MD-View
discs. A USB drive may be an OK alternative, but personally I'm still a SCSI
fan;
the software support for SCSI and ATAPI is far more mature. The drive has to
be
reasonably fast, 1xRealtime is unacceptable. S/PDIF copying at realtime is
just
a waste of time.
Note that this also means Sony will have to distribute PC-based software for
ATRAC
encoding and decoding to really make the drives fully useful. ATRAC is a
pretty
cool compression technique; they've done themselves a huge disservice by
restricting
it to MD. The whole internet-music world is suffering with RealAudio and MP3
when
they could have had the superior sound of ATRAC all this time. Pathetic...
(Yes, ATRAC3 is cool, but unless original ATRAC is also supported, a lot of
already-recorded media gets left behind...)
Anyone else agree with me? Try dropping Sony Electronics a note at their
feedback web address:
http://www.sel.sony.com/SEL/consumer/ss5/feedback.shtml
Sorry for ranting. I just needed to get that off my chest...
If anyone has some cheap older recorders they want to dump, I may start
doing surgery
on them to build a direct-to-PC interface. Even though all of the
encoding/decoding is
done in a single chip, the ATRAC data still goes into the shock-proof memory
buffer,
which is stored in a separate DRAM chip. It should be possible to intercept
that data
for a PC interface. The data rate is probably even slow enough (35KB/sec)
for a
parallel port hack, in lieu of something more sophisticated.
-- Howard Chu
Chief Architect, Symas Corp. Director, Highland Sun
http://www.symas.com http://highlandsun.com/hyc
-----------------------------------------------------------------
To stop getting this list send a message containing just the word
"unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
