I've noticed, while searching the net for an MD recorder and trolling some forums, that there's a pretty strong MD community out there.

Since it's a totally legitimate audio format, could we try putting up a Minidisc/ATRAC section here?

Nah, ATRAC compares quite unfavorably to other codecs and is proprietary. The only reason MiniDisc users are using ATRAC is because they willingly put themselves into a position that limits their choice to a proprietary and inferior codec imposed/forced on them by Sony. Hence I don't think them making such a choice entails HA community to open a board for them.

It's already included in the Other Audio Codecs section. I really think the format will gradually fade out. It had it's prime when there were no MP3 portables available, and i agree there is some neat MD hardware. But with all the MP3 devices flooding the market, Sony only holds a niche nowadays. Of course, people invested quite some money in MD and maybe want an own "community" for it, but there isn't that much to discuss really...

...But MD is good for personal recording, and it's user-friendly.

I'm just curious, what is there to talk about? I don't own one myself, but is there really that much to do with a MD?

Btw: I voted from a Hardware point of view, thought there would be other hardware devices that deserved it's own section before MD.

ATRAC is unimpressive IMO and proprietary. Also the MD mp3 support via transcoding to ATRAC is disappointing if typical Sony.

If any section should be added it should be a listening tests section. There are so many and there will be so many more.

That, I agree with.

Agree, what is there to talk about? Is Sony still investing in MD other than new styles, smaller form factors, etc.?

Hmmm ... I do not see how MD (since ATRAC 4, of course) should be regarded as inferior ... it is a transparent way of data reduction at a decent bitrate of about 20% of the original data. It surely is old (ATRAC 4 which was the first "real" HiFi ATRAC has been released in 1996 and has not been under a comparable strong development like the lossy codecs we use in a computer environment) but that does not mean it is outdated.

You must take into account that MD has been designed for computer noobs that just enjoyed their home stereo systems, portables and car stereo on a convenient medium at a time when broad lossy audio compression standard was 128 kbps XING or FhG and CD-Burners were not available at decent pricing (nor DAE capable drives except some old Plextors) ...

But after all, MD has been overtaken by computer audio ... it is slowish, not backward-capable, uses expensive media uses CBR ... its quality is good, no doubt but there is no need to buy an MD recorder today.

The ATRAC encoding format is progressively removed from the Sony family. In order to compete with mp3 portable player, Sony released a new transfert protocol, called NetMD. Encodings are now performed on computer (and powerful CPU), and files are transfered via USB. In ten minutes, a MD user can fill a whole MD.

Problem is : this protocol doesn't allow ATRAC encodings, but only ATRAC3 one. Why ? No objective reason : pure choice of Sony.
The most common setting for MD is now ATRAC3 at 132 kbps (pure stereo, CBR). For a lot of people, LP2 is transparent, close to ATRAC quality, and therefore close to CD (for some rare people, ATRAC3 is > to CD ).

Consequently, it's difficult to say that MD "is a transparent way of data reduction". It was, but it isn't anymore. Very few people can bear real time encoding and transfering with modern MD units. NetMD is much more comfortable (more buggy too), widely adopted. If someone is going to talk about MD encoding quality, you can bet that he have in mind LP2.

I voted yes, because I can't see how it could hurt. If you visit the MD forums, they are very ordinary, extremely biased and they show a complete lack of the controlled terms of service/properly organised listening tests/moderated expressions of opinion that we have come to expect form HA. As a result, the info on there is near useless, and I have gained significantly more benefits in relation to using my MD properly from HA. B)

I just wish some of the other MD boys in the hood would do the same...

I also think there is a distinction between ATRAC as such and MD, especially with the way in which NetMD works and direct ATRAC encoding inside the MD hardware, versus the other ATRAC options via Real...

In response to some of the other posts regarding MD, Sony alone have released 8 new MD players/recorders this year so far, with more to come. Sony alone have sold in excess of 56 million MD units, and there are still players/recorders being regularly released by Sharp and others also. The format is hardly dead, and after 11 years, sales are still growing year on year globally. It's also to Sony's credit that they have maanaged to keep evolving and improving the codec, yet it is completely backward compatible with the original players at the default bitrate.

It's actually quite rewarding to listen to some of the early pre-recorded MD's versus the same album ripped from CD and encoded in a recent version of the encoder. Huge difference and improvement in quality.

I also understand though why others would not like to see it here as we have ATRAC already covered. It's just a shame there is not a decent forum like HA for MD.

Den.

I don't see any reason to create a dedicate forum to MD, if few people will post about it. Others Audio Codec section is the right place, especially when activity is low.

MD has maybe 56 millions users, and some big dedicate board. Nevertheless, there are few thread on these forums talking seriously about sound quality. No reason to expect a miracle here.
Then, we can't expect any answers from sony (or Real) by discussing here about artifacts, flaws and others problems of ATRAC3 coding. Dear Sony, after a double blind test, I noticed than encoding with SonicStage 2 introduce more pre-echo than with 1.5 release... etc. It isn't serious, or even useful.
And HA isn't the right place for talking about NiMh battery, transfert problem with SonicStage, or speculating about last N10 Type-S audio performance.

Therefore, creating a new section, for less than one interesting topic per week, is, in my opinion, totally useless.

Sad, but true. I just miss being able to converse though with people such as yourself in an area where the opinions are generally well considered and backed with some evidence. To use your example, I once posted in some MD forums asking whether it was worth upgrading to Sonicstage, as I use Open MG. I was flooded with "Sonicstage rulz", "Sonicstage sux", type crap, where as if you posted, "well actually, I've noticed that there is some extra pre-echo with some recordings featuring cymbals" I would take that on board and consider installing Sonicstage for some tests of my own, or whatever.



Not completely useless. What is not interesting to one, may be important to someone else. The more I think about this though, ATRAC3 coverage in the Other Codecs section is probably sufficient...

Den.

MD never caught here, the media is way too expensive. These little 140MB MO discs could have been an interesting floppy replacement, but they didn't push it for data either. Today the zip discs have 750MB, just put some sort of real time encoder with any other standarized compression format (such as AAC) and you got MD killed. Now just imagine if someone does just that (such as IOMEGA?). Then we could also use 8cm DVD-(+)R(W) discs too, meaning a standard disc, and standard codec, what is again the appeal for MDs? Ah yes, recording.. But i still rather have one of those small 10GB~20GB 2.5" HD portables instead.

owned/still own a minidisc player/recorder.

nice for recording shows....especially because they're so small, last quite a bit longer than hd recorders do as far as batteries (like the nomad 3; which is about 3x as big as as a netmd, and recording w/ it is apparently not as high quality as you get w/ the netmd, but that only based on 1 opinion)......

as far as getting mp3's on it....the software that comes with the unit sucks butt, but there are sneaky ways around it...

(in the event anyone wants to know, check out m3u2sb with daemon....do a google)

it's a pain to get stuff you've recorded onto md into mp3 format; you've got to do it at 1:1 speed, and for quality, you need digital soundcard capabilities.

other than that.....................................................well, i own a creative nomad zen now, and will likely be giving my net md player away.

all in all: i'd say they're a good bit better than flash based mp3 players, but inferior to hd based.

and...i wouldn't call the media expensive....especially when compared w/ solid state.


you can pretty easily get discs for about 1.50 to 1.60 a piece. not bad for 2 cd's at decent quality, or 4 at mediocre quality. it's certainly expensive compared to cd's when you do stereo, but then, you can't carry 6 cd's in your pocket, and record to them.

I voted yes, if only to draw some MD users away from their biased boards towards a more scientific community. Sort of an audio evangelism if you will....get them here for MD, to convert them to a real format I once posted frequently on MD boards and corrected many mistakes about audio compression/etc. (mainly by sending them to HA).....crazy statements like "joint stereo sucks," "LP2 is better than a 320kbps MP3," "MP3 players are stupid," "MP3 players are going to die and MD will rule the audio world" and so on. The worst part is the fact that no statement anybody makes on those boards has any basis in emprical fact. Their enthusiam and "fuzzy feelings" for their 300-dollar MD machines somehow clouds their reason and results in a flow of stupid, unsupported statements on how great MD is Not long ago, I was an MD fanatic myself, so I know this firsthand. Once I sat down and thought logically about MD and it's shortfalls, I realized that other formats were far superior in terms of sound quality, features, and cost. In short: MD is old news and is dying a slow death. So, perhaps the "other audio formats" forum will work just as well if people advertise it.

(Edit: spelling)

Good Post! I actually thought it would bring so many zealots and induce flamewars. Maybe I was a bit pessimistic and cynical. HA has a great potential to squelch zealotry though. It might really work.

It's not quite that simple... last time I checked, Zip disks read/write pretty slowly, so it's not certain that Zip could ever be used to play MP3's in realtime.

Zip drives have much more than 320 kbps throughput.
These achieve their maximum tranfer on ATAPI, SCSI or USB.
Not on parallel port, even ECP.

Yes, they are slow compared to CDs, around 1.5x maybe?

/EDIT\ Did anybody say Jaz drives? \EDIT/

Depends on your interface. I was one of the few weirdos who actually bought a SCSI ZIP drive, and it was fast (for a removable media drive, that is). 100Mb transferred easily in under two minutes, which would have been more than adequate for a portable player/recorder. One of my friends had a USB-based ZIP drive, and couldn't understand why I liked mine so much. Turned out his USB model took about ten minutes to transfer the same amount of data, which would have still been adequate for portable playback.

But ZIP drives - at least those with which I've had the most experience, which may not mirror everyone's perception of them - are rather loud. Noisy, in fact... and that would not be my choice for any portable.

- M.

Nope, and nobody said (Syquest) SparQ drives either, thank god (remember those?).

Wanna know what I did with mine, back in the mid 90's?



If anyone ever sees one on Ebay, don't even pay 10 cents for it.

http://www.sysopt.com/userreviews/remove/r...rnal_1_gig.html

Edit -- OK, to stay on topic... I did vote in the poll... Never did own a Minidisc player/recorder, but always thought it would be fun to have one (until MP3 portables came along).

Think about it ATRAC has got to be just about the second most common lossy format!

Well, I voted no and guruboolez said everything I could say to justify it.

/OFFTOPIC

fewtch: I also had an external SyQuest Spark (parallel port) and I was quite happy with it. Much, much better than the parallel port Zip drive I had before. It lasted 3 years without any problems (both drive and media) until one day a friend of mine disconnected it while I was transfering some files to it... from that day on it started behaving in an erratic way... I didn't know better at the time 'cause I continued to use that disk and maybe that's why the drive got ruined... (just like the ruined Zip disks "virus")...

/OFFTOPIC

cya

I voted no because there isn't all that much to talk about ATRAC. Most of the times I've seen ATRAC mentioned here, it was in comparison to another format or about transcoding your current music to ATRAC. Either way, the other codecs played the dominant role in these discussions. What remains to be discussed about ATRAC as a format is well placed in the "other audio codecs" forum. You can talk about MD hardware in the "audio hardware" forum.

Imo MD technology was attractive in the past but nowadays hardly has any distinctive features afaik. It was mentioned that solid state memory is more expensive than mini discs, but how often do you reuse a minidisc compared to your CF/SM/etc. card? You can just plug your player into the pc and whip some fresh music on it. The few MD users I know usually cumbersomly encode a large part of their collection in realtime and never overwrite the discs ever again. Own a digicam? Like to carry around some data? Shockprotection? Durability? Size? Solid state is pretty versatile. If you want to quickly fill your MD, then you are limited to mediocre quality.

Minidisc recorders are great for recording shows, band practices, etc. where having the highest fidelity of sound is not always necessary. The thing that makes no sense to me is that they make it easy to transfer music from your computer to the minidisc digitally (which I have no use for), but going the other way around can only be done analog.

So, if you're recording things via minidisc, you end up going analog -> digital (lossy compression) -> analog -> digital. That's a lot of A/D conversions. However, the sound quality is still decent. It's certainly much better than using a cassette recorder, and good quality for the price range ($200-$300 for a basic minidisc + microphone setup).

gutza....not true, i don't belive.

you can come back digital w/ some minidiscs.

Firsly, I voted no, simply because there are forums, like www.minidisct.com, that are purely for MD and they can sort out all MD related issues there. I know, I'm a MD user. And when it comes to codec's, Atrac3 is not something that can be improved on except if Sony wants to improve it, and I feel that the Atrac3 codec is not the greatest if you want really HQ files. (unless you use SP encoding)

Just FYI: A MD is rewritable - some say millions of reads&writes - a bit exaggerated, but mine have lasted well (no problems over a year of good use). Also, if you haven't seen NetMD, it's sort of created the MD as a Mp3 player. You can transfer via USB, after transcoding to Atrac, and carry your songs around on a cheap disc that has a 80/160/3200min rec space (depending on what level compression you use). This has helped MD from dying out completely and is huge in the East. Look, ask any NetMD user and they're going to be very disappointed about their investment (just go look at those forums and see the major issues and limitations) but in some cases, it's worthwhile.
I just feel other forums do the job without having to have one here.

I don't get the idea behind "NetMD", why bother if the thing is transcoding to atrac anyway? Maybe a little less loss because the transfer is digital?, or simply because it is faster than doing the analog record? (or maybe its a cheaper device that can't encode real time by itself?) Seems like a waste to me.

whatever happened to the minidisc-based pc drives? I seem to recall Japan having them but they never made it over to North America for some reason. At the time they would've been awesome removable storage, 128MB IIRC, and I believe was long before CDR was around, or at least affordable.

MD Data drives were aound in 1994 or '95, but they never took off for several reasons and never were more than a neat toy (for the time). For one, they were very slow, not much faster than a floppy. Two, the 140MB MD Data discs cost around $15 each, and were not interchangable with MD audio discs. The third and most obvious reason: Sony did not aim the product towards the mass market. In my opinion, of Sony wanted (back then) to make MD a more dominant audio format, they should have marketed a fast, low-priced MD data drive that used the same discs as audio MD recorders. Instead, they insisted on trying to market audio MD's as something different every time a better product came along.

At first, MD was marketed as a replacement for cassettes, and later became marketed as an alternative to an MP3 player, which it is not. NetMD is a slow, restricive and cumbersome way of making your music portable. It's MUCH faster than realtime recording, but maybe I don't want to wait 10 minutes to transfer 2 CD's worth of mediocre-quality, 132kbps ATRAC3 files onto a little disc when I can transfer --aps recordings onto a flash card in a mere fraction of the time. Plus, a little flash card plays on my PDA as well as my mp3 player and works in my d-camera too.....MD's are only for MD players, and if you record in the MDLP modes, your discs might not even play in older players. I liked my NetMD player at first, but the thrill of cheap media wore off very quickly...I never carried more than 1 or two discs anyway.

Flash is great for the ultimate portability. When portability is not my main goal, a CD-R 99 (870MB) filled with --aps encodings will thrill me for days. MD just doesn't fit in anymore unless you are a recordist...and even then, you might be better off with an MP3 recorder such as the IMP series from IRiver, as it makes great recordings at 320kbps and can be uploaded and burned to a CD.

This is true, but all the minidisc recorders I've seen with digital outs are ridiculously expensive. It sort of defeats the purpose of having it, because if you're going to spend that much cash on it you might as well get a portable DAT recorder.

Agreed. People who don't need the highest sound quality also could do what I suggested, i.e. buy an MP3 player/recorder like the IMP-XXX or Riplflash that ports recordings back to your desktop. If you need to record a concert, 224, 256, or 320kbps will sound even better than ATRAC1 Type-R in my experience (I would put ATRAC1's performance at 292kbps at about the same level as a 192kbps MP3, at best). All are better, faster choices than MD, IMO.

Hi i'm new here, my post is a little offtopic to this poll, but more about the MD discussion here in general. What i wonder is, you guys seem to so picky about codecs and audioquality, but forget that most MD player (i'm speaking portables here) have far superior DACs and opamps than portable mp3 and whatnot players. Also battery life is much better (my sharp dr7 goes up to (tested, not advertised) 100 hours with one attached AA and internal gumstick battery).
While i definately see a big future for mp3 player/portables in Europe and America, in Japan it'll still be MD in the future. My GF doesn't even know what mp3s are, as long she can play them in mediaplayer she doesn't care

To my ears LP2 ATRAC (around 130kbps) compares with 192kbps mp3 and sp ATRAC with 320kbps mp3 (source: audiophile -> corda ha-2 headphone amp-> dt880 & grado rs1). I prefer listening to MD over my mp3s, but maybe it's the audiophile. cygnus, just out of curiousity, what's your sources for doing listening "tests"?

Because the fastest you can record a disc without NetMD is either realtime, or some sort of "fast dub". But with NetMD, you can fill a disc in under 5 minutes. It also allows for the same material to be recorded bit-indentically (to each other, not the source, obviously) to multiple minidiscs.

It's also because Sony's not capable of getting ATRAC3 to encode on the player itself in anything close to realtime.

Hi Fur! Welcome to the board.

The conclusions I draw about MiniDisc are from blind-testing ATRAC against other audio codecs, using well-recorded CD's and several hard-to-encode samples that are known to pose difficulty for transform encoders like ATRAC and MP3. Back when I owned a MDS-JE530 deck and MZ-N505 NetMD player, I encoded clips from about 20 songs and samples, including the following (not an all-inclusive list): Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, second movement; Dave Bruebeck's Time Out; Pink Floyd's Keep Talking; The Police's Walking on The Moon; Return to Forever's Romantic Warrior (jazz); Mile's Davis Bitches Brew; a door-creaking sample; a sample of a tolling bell in the end of Pink Floyd's High Hopes; the opening of AC/DC's Hell's Bells, and a sample of applause (plus a few more that can't recall off the top of my head).

I recorded each sample to ATRAC digitally through the TOSLINK input of the deck, and recorded the resulting MD through the digital outs using a stand-alone Philips CD-RW deck. To test LP2 @132kbps, I used my NetMD player for the same samples and used Total Recorder to grab the wavs while playing the samples in OMG Jukebox 2.2. The wav files from the deck were grabbed from the CD-R using EAC's secure mode, as were the orginal wav samples to be compared to. I then used a blind-testing program to listen to each sample, to see if I could tell the sample apart from the original (called ABX'ing around these parts). Short story: on almost every sample tested, my ability to tell the ATRAC encodings apart from the CD source was significant, p<.05. For 132kbps, I was able to ABX every single sample from the original, and the level of confidence was even greater, p<.01. Thus, I objectively tested ATRAC/ATRAC3 against the orginals and found them to be different than the CD source. Was this done using expensive components? No. The grade of your euipment has little effect on one's ability to ABX samples, for the type of artifacts I listened for (pre-echo, ringing, etc.) can be heard just as well on cheap heaphones as they can with expensive ones, etc.

Artifacts I noticed with ATRAC1 Type-R: ringing and harshness on high-frequency notes such as brass and percussion, pre-echo, crackling sounds on bell ringing, "whooshing" sounds on some electronic notes, and occasional popping/dropouts on loud material. And this was using Type-R compression....the early iterations of ATRAC were so bad that I actually liked metal cassettes better than MD when it first came out. Needless to say, I don't own that deck or the portable anymore....I sold them on eBay last year.

As far as ATRAC3 @ 132kbps sounding like a 192kbps MP3, I would suggest that you try encoding some material using LAME 3.90.3 and the --preset 192 setting (or --preset standard, which results in an average file of around 192kbps). Preset standard is transparent on 99% of material, and that is due to the type of testing and tuning that I described. It is common knowledge around here that even TYPE-R doesn't do as well as --preset standard.....read the "other audio formats" forum and you will see this mentioned several times. Thus, ATRAC3 (LP2 setting) doesn't even come close to alt-preset standard; in another thread, a member actually prefered LAME @ 128kbps to ATRAC3 at 132. For one, the 17.5Khz cutoff on LP2 recordings is noticeable on certain recordings, and there is a loss of detail on orchestral music (as guruboolez points out in that thread I cited), as well as pre-echo. Listen to the door-creaking samples on the page as well, and you will see how ATRAC3 and ATRAC3plus artifacts...when it runs out of bits, you get strange sounds that even MP3 does not create.

In short: I have nothing against MD, but have tested it enough to know that better formats exist. If it works for you, great! Just make sure to do comparison testing to some LAME encodings and orginals before assuming that 132kbps ATRAC3=192kbps MP3. I think you'll be glad you did.

According to my tests, LAME --alt-preset standard around 200 kbps is way better than ATRAC SP 4.5 at 292 kbps. I coincide Cygnus X1 appreciations. Details at http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....c=3373&hl=ATRAC

ATRAC SP is very bad on pre-echo, no need to use expensive hardware to perceive this. And is not as good as LAME alt-preset standard on other things.

Nope. I use a "flash" MD disk which I erase and rewrite with fresh tunes everyday, and not in realtime... I'm not alone with this. Many other NetMD users do the same thing. It gives you a mp3 flash player convenience, with the higher quality electronics associated with MD products.

I do however also maintain some of my all time favourite CDs on MD for selected listening. B)



Its the convenience. And no, my Sony can encode ATRAC3 132 kbit and 66 kbit in realtime, it's called LP2 and LP4, but it's the same thing. I use NetMD to prevent recording 160 minutes or 320 minutes in realtime.

Thanks for the interesting discussion.

Den. B)

Ok, so i tried the castanets samples at http://www.pcabx.com/product/mds-jb920/index.htm myself. The processed wav shows pre-echo, no discussion about it. But recording the unprocessed wav to my dr7 mdr in SP, i can't hear pre-echo there. (used analog out though). So judging MD or ATRAC by a single wav file from the internet seems silly to me.

Why silly? Castanets sample is a typical pre-echo test sample. And at several of the rest of samples at the PCABX page I can hear problems too. Those samples where recorded with a high quality ATRAC 4.5 machine. Cygnus X1 has performed his own tests with his own hardware and agrees with me. You say that you don't hear problems in yours. Maybe if you could provide us with that compressed sample we could judge by ourselves.

One of the reasons often cited for the popularity of MD hardware for field recording is the quality of the microphone preamps in high-end MD recorders (with a battlefront between Sony and Sharp camps). Multitrack CC "portastudios" were gladly jettisoned when portable DAT machines were first released, and many DAT users were happy swapping quality for convenience when MD appeared.

In addition to their capacity for the storage of compressed digital audio, MP3 jukeboxes provide portable means for PCM recording straight to a hard drive with equally straightforward support for getting the recording onto the wire. This ought to make them pretty much ideal for field recording, even if they commonly only have line-level inputs and thus require external microphone preamplification.

I believe that the recently released iRiver iHP-100 has an external microphone jack. If that's correct, can anyone comment on the quality of the mic pre? If it is comparable to the one in a good MD recorder, it wil be interesting to see how deeply it penetrates the market for lightweight field recording gear.

I didn't mean the castanets wav itself, it's obviously good for testing pre-echo. But using an old "high quality" deck for recording is silly, not even comparing with updtodate hardware even more silly. Or would you use that l3enc DOS command line tool instead lame? ATRAC is changing almost with every new generation of gear and different companies like Sharp use/develop their own ATRAC versions just like there are different mp3 codecs. Anyway i'll try to put something online later this evening.

Yes, but I used a Type-R deck, the most current algorithm, and still was able to ABX almost every sample. Sony's "new" Type-S version is just Type-R with the MDLP decoder on the same IC. And when it comes down to it, ATRAC does not improve as much as you think between generations. Problems like pre-echo and ringing that are present in Type-R have been there since ATRAC 1 in 1993. These are probably due to the fact that ATRAC can't really get much better due to the limitations of it's structure...it's an old codec comapred to the likes of AAC, MPC, of Vorbis. It's not state of the art or flexible, and thus can't be expected to compete with codecs that do better than it usuing 2/3 of the space. Plus, you have to remember that any big changes to the ATRAC encoding end will break hardware compatibility with players, so that's another reason why ATRAC cannot and will not improve much in the future.

(Edit: formatting)

That deck was ATRAC 4.5, which is the version just before ATRAC-R, which is last version. I doubt that throughout all historic ATRAC SP versions, just the last one (ATRAC-R) solves all the previous ATRAC problems, including the serious ones remainig at ATRAC 4.5. Anyway, Cygnus X1 has addressed that now.

Can you explain "quality electronics" and how they benefit you?

I don't know about you personally, but many MD users are totally unphased by the artifacting ATRAC produces, so clearly the quality in the DAC is not very important.

And, judging by the tech support posts at the Minidisc T-Boards and at Minidisc.org, you can't possibly mean the durability of the units.

So, please, tell me, what do you mean by "quality electronics?"

Ok, now i got a bunch of Files here, my quality ranking (concerning pre-echo/transparency):

1. castanets.wav
2. castanets from my dr7 (and that's with using digital to analog -> md and anlog to digital -> pc conversion!, no digital copy to md and back)
3. castanets lame --alt-preset-insane (there's only slight differnce to 2., but noticeable)
4. castanets from the sony mds-jb920 deck that was supplied on the page
5. bladeenc 320 kbps encode, just terrible

I'm really curious how you guys would rate the files, maybe my ears are just seriously fucked
Anyone who wants to host the files (1,7mb)?

It is really time for MD and ATRAC to just die. Creating a forum for it would be like kicking that oh-so-close-to-dead horse. It would take away from the legitamacy of the forum.

^ STFU Minidisc must Never die, Althought the way Sony Are carrying on it might Did you know they cant cary data? And ony Created a 650MB Minidisc in 1996, I don't see any

I think a forum for all Audio formats would be a good idea how about alloveraudio.org and the forums could be

• CD Forum
• Computer Music Forum
• Cassete tape Forum
• Reel To Reel Tape Forum
• Minidisc Forum
• General Forum
• Vinal Forum
• Misc Forum

Each couldhave there own subforum E.G. The Misc forum could have a Forum for DAT and failed formats ETC ETC