I am considering purchasing a minidisc recorder to for mix down and transportable archives of original materiai recorded on my computer/home studio. Does anyone have opinions as to whether this is still a viable medium long term. I am attracted to the 50 year claims on the HHB professional discs and wonder if any others have opinions or alternative suggestions.

Thanks in advance

If you are talking about the Sony MiniDiscs (I can't believe what I'm seeing), then they never were a good medium.
- lossy compression
- one has to re-encode every copy
- can't be read/written on a personal computer (S/PDIF doesn't count)
- without expensive gear one cannot read the data with speed higher than realtime
- minidisc recorders may reject incoming SPDIF data if the copyright bits is set

If you are going to store your data for many years, rewritability is apparently not a factor. Use CD-R, or DVD+R.

[quote name='j7n' date='Apr 13 2008, 19:27' post='559008']
If you are talking about the Sony MiniDiscs (I can't believe what I'm seeing), then they never were a good medium.

HHB makes a professional grade disc, reportably 10 times more stable tan the Sony ones, and this is the one I was enquiring about - maybe the other issues are not overcome at any rate.

The disc still has to conform to the minidisc standard, which presents us with issues 1 and 2. Other three issues depend on the recorder hardware. I don't have any experience with supposedly less restrictive Hi-MD.

Archival grade CDs are also still basically compact discs with all shortcomings of the logical format (such as weak error protection in redbook).

Last generation Minidiscs can record one gigabyte of audio, in PCM. That's for the rewritable discs though, not the pressed ones. Also, tracks can be transfered via USB.

Even if Hi-MD is just an unrestrictive magneto-optical disc, I'm not sure if after 20 or more years an HiMD drive will be around.

@nrand: Check what disc formats does your recorder work with – standard MiniDisc or Hi-MD.

Although I am a huge fan of MiniDisc (espescially the newer Hi-MD recorders), the future of MiniDisc is bleak at best. You'd probably to best to look into a flash-based recorder. I don't know much about what's available now in that respect though.

I know there are plenty of MiniDisc haters (with good reason mostly), but the format has been around for ~15 years or so and has grown a lot in that time. It certainly has it's uses, but when all is said and done and the units are no longer being manufactured, you may get stuck with discs you cannot get anything from.

Like I said I'm a huge fan of the format, and use it extensively. If you had asked this question a few years ago I would wholeheartedly recommend it.

If you have any specific questions regarding the format, hop on over to the minidisc community forums http://forums.minidisc.org/ a friendly community that I have been a member of for 5 or so years now. We'll gladly help answer any questions you have.

Thanks for all your replies - in the main they are very helpful. I suppose with digital technology none of us knows how long these media will last - I am faced with similar issues with my photography. What drew me in in the first place was the 50 year claims of the HHB Prodiscs - far more than any other medium I know of currently. By that time, and for my children and theirs who want to keep the material alive, I wonder if its worth keeping a few options in place.... Not putting all my archives in one basket.

So long as they don't come in contact with strong magnetic fields, MD's are pretty resilient little things, being housed in a cartridge and all. However, you're faced with the reality that it is already next to impossible to find MD blanks or recorders in most places outside of Japan - not to mention all of the other downsides that eventually sunk what otherwise was an interesting (and compared to tapes, damn convenient) format.

Choose wisely - using MD's to archive stuff this late in the game is like using 8-track tapes to record songs off the radio in 1985. Sure, it works, but good luck if you run into problems down the road.

You might want to look into DVD-RAM, which is hard-sectored and supposedly a little more resilient than plain old DVD-Rs. Plus, you can format them like a HDD and hardware compatibility (at least to read the flies back from the disc) is a lot better than MD.

(Edit: typo)