Thanks to Michael Hoffman for the links to 8-cm CDRWs for sale at
cdr4less.com and yesbuy.com. I'd never yet heard of those companies and had
not seen 8-cm CDRWs for sale before. On cdr4less.com's home audio CDR page
they perpetuate the myth (repeated to me last week by a Circuit City
employee) that home audio CDRs do not work in burners; I hope that isn't an
indication of their competence, because it certainly is tempting to get a
spindle of 8-cm CDRWs from them.
| But what Earth still lacks is an external Mini-CDRW (8-cm only) burner.
| It will be at least 5 minutes more before there is such a thing. It
| should include headphone output and bass boost, and built-in MP3
| decoding.
I think there might be a confusion of terms here. To me a "burner" is a
computer peripheral, and an external burner is one that connects by cable to
a USB, parallel, or Firewire port on the computer instead of needing to be
installed inside the case. What you're saying there, Michael, doesn't seem
to make sense about external burners but could about a portable component
recorder. One obstacle is such a device would be required to use only
consumer audio discs, and 8-cm consumer audio CDRs don't seem to be
available yet. The 8-cm rings in the trays of today's CD recorders (again,
folks, I'm talking about audio components, not about computer peripherals)
go to waste because there are no 8-cm consumer audio CDRs to record on nor
to trick the machines into recording onto 8-cm data CDRs.
I wonder if it's possible to swap-trick a CD recorder with a 12-cm consumer
audio CDR into recording onto an 8-cm [data] CDR, as long as the music fits?
Michael has also written,
| Why should I have to title my MD tracks when the titles have already been
| entered and uploaded by someone else in CDDB?
1. The tracks on the MD may not be exactly the set and sequence of an album
listed on the CDDB.
2. The tracks may not yet be listed in the CDDB.
3. The person who provided the titles to the CDDB may have made mistakes in
information or in typing.
4. The person who provided the titles to the CDDB may have entered them in a
format that differs from your preference in some varying or unpredictable
fashion, such that the editing changes cannot be pre-coded into your
title transfering software.
5. You might have made your own mix or edit, or your own microphone
recording, or your own computer-composed tune, so the track couldn't
possibly be in the CDDB.
| MD does titling in the most stupid, boneheaded, manual, tedious,
| time-consuming way possible.
Apparently, Mr. Hoffman, you have only a portable MD recorder and don't know
how titling is on decks with full remotes, let alone on a deck with keyboard
input. I find titling on portables to be as bad as you say, but it's not
the only way to title a MiniDisc.
| MDs are a dead-end for trades and each time you do copy an MD you lose the
| titling ...
There are ways to transfer titles from MD to MD. For example, many Sharp
portable recorders have the Name Stamp feature that copies the disc name and
all track titles from any recordable MD to any other with the same number of
tracks, and the Sony MDS-W1 dual MD deck can copy titles between discs. If
the tracks are at the same addresses, in many machines one can clone the
entire TOC, titles and all.
| ... and introduce another generation of lossy compression -- unlike MP3s.
Yes, another layer of ATRACking is introduced (unless you have pro-grade
equipment that can transfer bit-for-bit in the ATRAC domain). In normal
personal copying you won't have too many generations and the effect will be
negligible, but it is a drawback for trading.
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