MD recorders

[martaru]

Hi -

I'm in charge of podcasting for work and I have to go out and do live interviews. We bought a Samsung YP-MT6 - there is no "Mic in" place so we've had to resort to using the built-in mic...and it sounds awful.

Two years ago when I did radio broadcasting, I used an MD recorder and the quality sounded great. I want to try the MD recorder again. Any recommendations on the best ones (preferably one with USB/great voice recording)? Or should we try something else?

Thanks for your help!

[revupreview]

Minidisc recorders work fine. Standard Play (SP) will give you a maximum of 80 minutes in stereo or 160 in mono, with sound quality equivalent to the highest bit-rate recording on an iRiver iFP 700 or 800 series. And you can use the automatic recording control, which gives a measure of live compression.

Sony make a good mic for use with MD (the stereo ECM-MS907), but I've had excellent results with a Yoga stereo tie-clip mic available here in the UK for about £20 from Maplin Electronics (I understand this mic is known as a Skytronic 173.623 lapel mic in the US). Using this mic plugged directly into the 'mic in' socket means it uses the recorder's 'plug in power' -- it's very sensitive.

The USB Minidiscs -- the standard NetMD models, not the pricier HiMD ones -- offer no advantages for uploading your own recordings. You can't do it, because Sony's Serial Copy Management System (SCMS) considers any attempt to upload something that hasn't already been downloaded as being copyright infringement. Utterly stupid, but there it is. You'll have to play the recorded MD into the computer. If you want to stay entirely in the digital domain after recording, you'll need to play the disc on a Minidisc deck that has a digital output to a CD Recorder. This is what I do -- it's cumbersome but maintains quality (and it means I automatically get a CD backup of the recording).

[audiocollective]

We went through a few minidisk recorders trying to find one that works well. Minidisk sounds amazing but there is no good way to get the audio file from the minidisk to a usable format... Sony doesn’t get it. Now we use an iRiver IFP 899 to record with a nice mic and it works great. If you want a setup that is even better, M-Audio (http://www.sweetwater.com/store/category.php?&c=860&sb=catalogprice&so=asc) makes a really cool little recorder that will do what you are looking for.

[martaru]

What about the conversion tool that Sony offers (http://sonyelectronics.sonystyle.com/walkmanmc/wav.html), which converts its OMA files to WAV? Doesn't that work?

[revupreview]

What about the conversion tool that Sony offers (http://sonyelectronics.sonystyle.com/walkmanmc/wav.html), which converts its OMA files to WAV? Doesn't that work?

HiMD only.

The problem with ordinary MD files is that they only exist on the minidisc -- you can't get them out, other than by recording the playback.