I am planning to do two things. First of all, buying a USB sound card with optical S/PDIF connection in order to be able to transfer audio from my laptop to my minidisc retaining top audio quality. I consider minidisc as devices of a much higher quality than MP3 players and I want mine to be my portable audio device. Second of all, buying a big hard disk drive in order to rip my CD collection into digital format.

So I think it makes sense that I should rip into a format that allows me to retain CD-quality when recording songs stored in the hard disk drive into the minidisc unit.

Sure FLAC (I prefer it over Monkey's Audio as I'm a fellowed Linux user and FLAC is more widely supported there) would do the trick, but I wonder if ripping to MP3 using LAME with the --preset insane setting so I get a 320 Kbps CBR would give me a quality as good as ATRAC and would make me save a lot of disk space with respect to FLAC. Moreover probably --preset insane is overhelming and -V 0 --vbr-new would serve me perfectly.

As also running Linux and there's not EAC there, will cdparanoia "do it"?

Any ideas and suggestions are welcome!

Suggestions:
-If you are going with minidisc, Hi-MD rather than the old minidiscs will be much simpler and better.
-Some mp3 players are not bad at all. Though probably more prone to failure on account of having tiny hard drives.
-Don't use a format that your player doesn't support, eg mp3 with minidisc players.
-Make your life easier and use Windows.

very high bitrate mp3 is ok

- if don't use a portable player

- you have a portable with lots of hard drive space

- you don't care for shorter battery life

- you don't plan to transcode to lower bitrate mp3 or another lossy format.

cdparanoia should be fine.

Sure my current Sharp minidisc which is about four years old don't support Hi-MD. What's Hi-MD all about?



Their audio quality don't satisfy me. I don't claim to be an expert on MP3 players, but even Apple's iPod which should be the top quality one as AFAIK it's the most expensive don't convince me to use it instead of minidisc according to listening quality.



The player only supports "putting audio via its line or its optical in", no USB, then...

What I am most concerned is, how much disk space will I waste by using FLAC instead of high bitrate CBR MP3? If ratio is about 2:1 then I'll go for FLAC, but if ratio is 5:1, as quality for sure is not 5:1 then I'll go for MP3.



It's an opinion what each one considers "easier". I use the computer for many things apart from listening to music that are "easier" using Linux.

Good advice! As far as the original poster's minidisc player, I think you're right, it doesn't support MP3. And earlier versions of Sony HI-MD that supported MP3 crippled the MP3 sound quality.

FYI, though, the new Sony MZ-RH1 Hi-MD supports MP3 in an un-crippled fashion.

I've just discovered features of Hi-MD and they look amazing. I just wonder how it's managed by those devices supporting different encodings and formats, i.e. if I load a MP3 from the computer to the device, will it transcode it to ATRAC?

Probably I'll go for MP3, in this case my audio will suit minidisc but also any other solid state based portable device that I could own in the future. In this case, will VBR at a high bitrate give me as good quality as CBR, FLAC or CD?

I think most or all Hi-MD players convert to ATRAC, which is less then optimal. If you're that concerned, I'd probably use lossless.

Offtopic, but has anyone ever run RMAA on one of these highend minidisc players? I tend to doubt the output is any different, but I'd love to see results anyway.

The old mini disc format (i.e. net md and before) only supports ATRAC. So, no matter what your original source is (wav, mp3, flac, etc.), the will be converted (transcoded) to ATRAC on the minidisc. This holds true if you record in real time through the input - it is only an ATRAC device. Storage space is limited as these discs only hold ~180 MB. That's why they only hold 80 min. of music that is encoded at 256 kb/s (the bit rate of the highest quality recording setting). If you intention is to record realtime, your best bet is to use a lossless source, such as FLAC. This way, there is only a single transcode of the data.

Hi-MD is a different story. It holds 1 GB of data and is capable of recording and playing lossless, though uncompressed, audio. So, you only get 100 min. or so per disc with lossless files. I don't think you can transfer files to it in a lossless format. I think you can only record in real time lossless.

The current generation of Hi-MD devices will play mp3 without the need to transcode to ATRAC. However, the drawback is that it isn't gapless. ATRAC has the advantage of being gapless. They will expland the storage space of the old MDs to 360 MB.

Using a Hi-MD device along with Sonic Stage (Sony's music management software) you can use your minidisc player like a portable DAP. A drawback is that the software takes some getting used to and it is only supported on Windows.

You might check out http://forums.minidisc.org/ and http://www.atraclife.com/forums/ for more info.

This is the point! I pretend to record realtime. So I'd like to use a format which don't involve a lose of quality with respect to source audio CD. So, is MP3 320 Kbps CBR comparable to FLAC in terms of quality? How do they compare in terms of storage space?

I must note that I'd like to rip classical music, and I'm concerned that MP3 is worse for classical music than for pop music (I don't know if this is due to high frequency contents, stereo, dynamic range...)

Most of the time FLAC takes up more space but sometimes it's less. I can't check at the moment but my recollection is that with my music (classical) FLAC takes up between 90% to 150% as much space as 320kbs. I use FLAC also with my portable: it avoids the decoding and encoding time, it is the best possible quality, and for me 40Gb of FLAC (about 120CDs) is more than enough music to have on hand.

Also note don't lump all mp3 players together. Each player is different. It's a matter of DACs, software and amps. You can even use external amps and even DACs if you want, obviously at the cost of portability.

Yes, I used RMAA 5.4 and an Echo Audio Mia as signal generator, to test my MZ-RH1 (the latest, and apparently last Sony HiMD model). I only tested the HiMD PCM (uncompressed) recording mode, input from line-in and also mic-in with 150 ohm and 1k ohm source impedance. Results graphs shown below.

http://beale.best.vwh.net/measure/audio/So...RH1_line-in.htm
http://beale.best.vwh.net/measure/audio/MZ...Mic_30_150Z.htm
http://beale.best.vwh.net/measure/audio/MZ-RH1_MIC.htm

Since I like to do ambient and wildlife recording, the low noise of the built-in mic preamp is very nice. I measured it to be -124.4 dbu (A weighted). The noise is about 2 dB higher when the buffer fills and the MD motor starts running, which is about 1/5 of the time in PCM mode (5 seconds during every 26 seconds). Still, I believe the mic preamp is better than any other recorder in this class, considering size & cost.

I have an MZ-RH1, also. It will play MP3 files. The most current LAME at VBR V2 new will give you a very good MP3 version to download and play on the RH1. I can get between 8 and 10 hours of MP3 files on an RH1 in MP3 format. It sounds great over speakers on a good set or through my table model Kloss or through my Etymotic IP4's or through some nice SONY earphones I have. You can record onto Hi-MD in LPCM format, sames as CD's, and upload digitally through the USB port and save as a WAV file on your PC. All lossless and digital all the way.

Recording live LPCM works very well and a Hi-MD will record ~1.5 hours each. Pretty cool, and it fits in your shirt pocket. I use a SONY ECM-MS957 mic for pretty good results. The RH1 looks good, works good and has good electronics in it for recording or playback. Also, it can upload digitally any legacy MD's you might have.

The only downside is the battery, a proprietary LiIon. Get the Macally IP-A481 and you can record about 20 Hi-MD's using it and the included RH1 LiIon battery. The A481 costs about half the price of the SONY LiIon and is an external supply with about 10x the life as the internal LiIon battery. Go, baby; you need it!

L8R