Sony Hi-MD for Amiga!?

[MaDDuck]

Well- All of us long time MD users out there knew it was bound to happen, sony announced (through a carfully planned leak) that the 2005 Hi-MD players will support the MP3 format for music!
I already use an MZ-NHF800 as my primary music player (sorry iPopd!) with ONE computer in nine that runs windose just for the sole purpose of Sonicstage software that converts WAV/MP3 to ATRAC the native NetMD/Hi-MD format.

With the NEW players, I can hook right to my A4000 and drag and drop MP3 files right into it. I already keep a partial back up of my A4000 on Hi-MD already. All you need is time, patience, and the Amiga USB solution of your choice!

Here's the original link with pictures:
http://www.mdcenter.nl/redirect.php?file=http://www.mdcenter.nl/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1209


Larger versions of them are here:
http://www.minidisc.org/part_Hi-MD_Sony.html


I for one am excited, and look forward to upgrading my hardware and using my MD fully on my A4000!

[Turambar]

With the NEW players, I can hook right to my A4000 and drag and drop MP3 files right into it.

I'm not sure it'll work like this. My philips mp3 player can also be used as a portable drive however if you want to put music files on the player you have to use software which adds encryption so you cant use the player to distribute copyrighted media. Given that sony are also a major music label i can see them doing something similar.

[MaDDuck]

good point, but my iPod *did* work on my Amiga!
I just burried some MP3 files away in the 'hidden' directories and VOILA it worked fine. USB 1.1 is slow as $hi+, but it worked!!

[that_punk_guy]

My 4-year love affair with Minidisc unfortunately ended this week as I sold my old (pre-LP) minidisc hi-fi. Well, not ended so much as we're just having some "time apart." ;-)

I love the cartridge format, but I just don't see Hi-MD taking off. The advertising emphasis seems to be on portable audio. For years I carried an MD Walkman around with several MDs and that was fine but this was before the advent of affordable iPod clones. More recently I had an MP3-playing personal CD player (after my MD walkman went out of service) and swapping discs all the time, carrying tons of them - it was a pain. So it's beaten on convenience already, since each disc will only hold ~300MB on top of the capacity of a CD-ROM. It's just not enough, considering there's little price gap now.

I got a 60GB Creative MP3 player just recently for £200. Now while that's obviously finite, I haven't come close to filling it. 725 albums on there @192kbps and there's still 20GB left.

The move to support MP3 also worries me slightly. I haven't heard of a single player that can seamlessly play one MP3 after another. A limitation in the way they're encoded means there will always be a gap, which I guess could theoretically be buffered (?) but it's interesting to note that as yet it hasn't been implemented. ATRAC of course allowed for tracks to flow into each other seamlessly. It's almost like Sony's announcement in the late 80s that they were to start manufacturing VHS decks. It's like seeing Betamax die all over again.

[ikir]

I already use an MZ-NHF800 as my primary music player (sorry iPopd!) with ONE computer in nine that runs windose just for the sole purpose of Sonicstage software that converts WAV/MP3 to ATRAC the native NetMD/Hi-MD format.

Also here! SonicStage is windows only :-((((

Do you use it only for data on Amiga? As far i know it is not possible to record atrac on the MD without Sonic Stage.

[MaDDuck]

Yup!
My main computers are G4/G5 Macs and my 060 A4000
and ONE dell winclone running win2OOO just for Sonicstage.
I have tried, and emailed Sony about Sonicstage on ANY other platform, and only gotten the standard form response from them! But I LOVE my MD players, have since 1993 when I got my first one..

I REALLY hope we'll be able to drag -n- drop mp3's to them, it would eliminate the Ministry of Technology(windose) presence in my home once and for all!

If you've used MD for a while, you remember how much *FUN* it used to be doing standard SPDIF/analog recording, so going USB with Sonicstage was a HUGE improvement.

I only use it for data storage on the Amiga, on which it works flawlessly. Blank MD's are supposed to have a 30+ year shelf life so it's idealy suited for the purpose. Heck I've even booted my Mac on Hi-MD before, just to see if I could!!