what do you guys think of minidisc's?

Lower sampling rate than a CD; still somewhat esoteric in the US; only reason they've survived for so long is because they've achieved significant market share in Japan. Because of the latter, I don't think MDs will go the way of DAT anytime soon. They're perfectly okay for home recording. I wouldn't necessarily shop a demo on one, though.

Hey all,

My drummer just picked one up recently. After trying to record in our tiny rehearsal space with a boom box, mike-to-p.a.-to-mixer-to-tape, and who knows how many other ways, we've found that the minidisc is THE way to record rehearsals. You just turn on the mike, press record and there you go. It almost can't make a bad recording. We can hear all our instruments clearly and it has made learning from and listening to our rehearsals very very easy.

I highly recommend anyone looking for a way to tape band or solo rehearsals to get one.

i think that for home they're ok. But other than that, i don't think that are really worth using. I agree that they probably will not remove ADAT.

I've been using MiniDisc to record my band's gigs, as well as rehearsals and workshops for 2-3 years now. The quality is very good for being able to hear everything without distortion, but is obviously not going to be good enough for an album release.

The big thing about them is convenience - the recorder is smaller and lighter than a paperback book and the discs themselves are tiny, but hold 74 minutes of recording, so you can carry everything you need in your pockets, if you wanted to! I have talked to a few pro Jazz players in the UK who record everything they do, as a learning tool - so they know that they aren't repeating themselves in solos or falling back on licks and cliches, rather than truly improvising!

It's also useful to prove to your fellow band members that - no actually the bass wasn't too loud and could have done with being turned up! ;)

I love MD, I keep most of my CD's in the 300 disk changer at home. That way they stay scratch-free, I don't lose them, an no-one borrows 'em. I make my own mixes with tapes, LP's & CD's on a Sony home MD player/recorder. It has digital & rca in/out plus a built in cd player that can copy a CD to a MD at 4x speed! I then play my own mixes in the car on a Alpine MD h/u. The MD are compact, don't skip a easily as a CD, never get scratched (because they are fully enclosed like a 2 1/2" floppy disk), and unlike CDR's can be edited/mixed/re-recorded infinatly. In the future I plan to record simple drum-machine & keybord MD's to jam with for practice. Oh yeah you can record stuff off of the compouter too, like mp3's ect. Just my .02!

I don´t have much expirience(sp?) on using MD´s since I haven´t got enough money to buy one... but I have the Steve Lawson album and it´s recorded completely through MD (except for 1 track) and it sounds great. but of course that´s not a whole band with drums and g**tars and vocals and stuff so I don´t know how it would sound with that... but I know that this album sounds AMAZING!! :D

so IME they work out well... :cool:

I too use a mini disc recorder to rehearsals and it works great for that. I've also used it to record an outdoor jazz concert that my bass instructor was performing in and the result was very, very good. When I'm recording rehearsals, I usually use mono mode, which gives me 148 minutes of record time, more than enough time to capture a two hour session. I then edit this down and burn a CD to give to my band members. This is something that I'm glad that I bought, it's much better quality than a tape recorder, and in mono mode records longer than any available cassette that I know of. True it's not CD quality, but with a quality microphone and 24 bit sampling, it's close.

Phil

I use an MD for gigs. I'm in a rock/blues type duo. I play bass (obviously) and my bro takes care of guitar duties, and we share vocals. (BTW, in Britain, there is a law regarding entertainments liscences, if the pub or club don't have one, they are only allowed to hire in a band consisting of 2 or less people, hence why we formed this duo)
We had been messing about creating midi backing tracks on the puter, and then tried to find a convinient and relatively cheap way of playing them back for gigs. We thought about tape for about 10 seconds, then CD, but if we wanted to change one song, we'ed have to re-do the whole disc. We even considered taking the PC with us.
Then I found out about MD. Really easy to record, even easier to play back, great sound quality through our PA system, bloody small, and you can re-record single tracks without losing the whole lot. A bonus is the tracking titling, so I don't need to write up lists of which track number is which song.

Originally posted by The_Bass
I don´t have much expirience(sp?) on using MD´s since I haven´t got enough money to buy one... but I have the Steve Lawson album and it´s recorded completely through MD (except for 1 track) and it sounds great. but of course that´s not a whole band with drums and g**tars and vocals and stuff so I don´t know how it would sound with that... but I know that this album sounds AMAZING!! :D

so IME they work out well... :cool:

It's true that my album was done direct to Mindisc, with a Sony ECM-MS907 stereo mic in front of my cab. The record quality is great (like I'd have released it if it wasn't?!?!?!?) and I can't hear any difference between it and CD, at least not without running it through huge great studio monitors, and how many people have got those at home?

I think that MD is the most exciting thing to happen in home recording since the 4-track - for any live recording, the possibilities are huge, whether taking a line off a mixing desk or doing what I do.

Go and have a listen to the MP3 of Drifting on my site, or better yet, buy the album to hear what it sounds like! :o)

Steve
http://www.steve-lawson.co.uk

Originally posted by Christopher
Lower sampling rate than a CD; still somewhat esoteric in the US; only reason they've survived for so long is because they've achieved significant market share in Japan. Because of the latter, I don't think MDs will go the way of DAT anytime soon. They're perfectly okay for home recording. I wouldn't necessarily shop a demo on one, though.

I've gotta agree with this. Of course you can produce a professional quality recording on an MD --it's been done on a cassette 4-track, too-- but does that mean that it's yoru best option? I would have to say "no". Given the huge drop in cost for a standalone hard disk recorder or the potential to adapt your existing computer to hard disc recording for less than $500.00 (perhaps under $100.00, depending on the quality of your existing sound card), it's hard to argue that your money is better spent on an MD multitracker which has inferior sound quality and, in the case of computer-based recording, far less editing options.