Hi Danny. I am a proud owner of five minidisc (MD for short) recorders, and somewhere around 400 blank MDs, as well as some albums that I bought from the store. I was curious about how these things worked, so here's what I remember.
The minidisc uses what is called magneto optical writing. What happens is a laser heats up the MD, and while the spot is heated, a magnetic field is applied to it which sets the polarity of the material. When the disc is read, these fluctuations are detected by a laser, and you hear what's on the MD. When I got my first MD player in 1993, I also got some literature on how it worked. It used a form of compression called ATRAC. I don't remember what all the letters stand for, but one of the A's is for accustic. Basicly, the MD uses the same trick that .mp3 files use, that is, what the human ear can't hear is removed from the audio. An 80 minute MD is about a fifth the amount of physical storeage as a CD, and the storage is 300 kbps. Later versions of the MD recorders allowed more recording time on an MD by applying more compression to what you recorded. Now for the USB connection to your PC. When I heard about this, I was hoping you could put .mp3 files on the MD and, more interesting to me, copy the contenets of the MD to my PC for editing. When I looked at this player, there were two problems: The program for the PC wouldn't let you copy from an MD, and more important to me, the software on the PC wasn't accessible to screen readers. One thing the software would let you do, and this was something I would have used, was labeling the tracks on my music MDs. Since the software wasn't useable to me, I decided not to buy one of these. Since .mp3 came out, I haven't found much use for my MD units. Two of them are broken, and two of them are somewhere in storage. I have one working unit that I use to record music to my PC and convert it to .mp3. Hope this helps. If you have any other questions, let me know. Kevin Minor, Lexington, KY kmi...@windstream.net To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: pc-audio-unsubscr...@pc-audio.org
