Archive | geek stuff

New Hi-MD Will Allow Uploads

According to minidisc.org — the best source for minidisc related news and info — Sony’s reps at the Consumer Electronics Show say that the new Hi-MD format will allow for uploading audio from minidisc to PC. As best as I can tell this is only for audio recorded with an MD recorder — like audio recorded with a microphone or through the line-in. But that’s EXACTLY what MD users, especially those using MD for reporting and other indy media projects, have been clamoring for since NetMD first came out about two years ago.

To help us keep track of this new format, minidisc.org has started a Hi-MD FAQ.

Continue Reading

Sony Announces New Hi-Capacity Minidisc – Might Be Just The Tool Mediageeks Have Been Waiting For

I generally don’t dedicate much space to product announcements here on mediageek, largely because so many of them are bogus PR devices, and because the treadmill of constant product upgrade is unnecessarily wasteful.

But once in while a little news comes along that I think is good for independent media folks, and this is one of them.

After a day of rumors, yesterday Sony announced a new high-capacity minidisc that holds 1 GB of data — about six times as much as current mindiscs, first developed over ten years ago. In terms of audio, Sony says that the disc will hold up to 45 hours at the highest compression rate (which is a pretty measly 48 kbps), and about 300 minutes of standard-quality (SP) minidisc stereo audio.

This announcement is significant for a number of reasons. The biggest reason is that minidisc has become the de facto standard for audio and radio field recording, since it’s relatively inexpensive, robust and reliable. Nearly every IMC and community radio station, not to mention many public radio stations and the BBC, use an arsenal of minidisc recorders for doing radio reporting.

It’s also significant because it represents Sony’s continued support of the format. Minidisc took many years to really take hold in the US after being introduced in 1993 — part of this was because Sony stupidly marketed it as a replacement for CDs rather than a replacement for cassettes (recall that CD-Rs were but a dream in 1993). In fact, for several years in the late 90s, it seemed as though MD might disappear altogether.

But, unexpectedly, due to the music downloading phenomena, and Sony’s support of USB direct-to-MD download for MP3s, MD had a banner year in 2003, becoming the top-selling “digital music players,” according to Sony.

Still, the array of apparent new benefits from the new Hi-MD format go further, according to a spec sheet released by Sony.

The most interesting thing about Hi-MD is that minidisc now becomes a true general purpose mass storage device because it adopts FAT as its disc format, which allows any type of PC data to be stored on the disc. Minidisc recorders will be recognized as USB storage devices when plugged into PCs, meaning that drivers should be unnecessary on any PC running Windows 2000 or XP.

Sony also says that new Hi-MDs will allow you to record in uncompressed PCM digital audio, just like CDs, which would yield about 90 minutes or so of CD-quality audio.

What is still unclear is whether or not the new Hi-MD format will also allow uploading audio from MD to PC. You’d think that with the MD being seen as a regular USB storage device this would be possible, but there’s still the risk that Sony will disallow this, since it was kept out of the NetMD standard.

Since Sony has implemented digital rights management (DRM) for music files downloaded to MD, perhaps that is sufficient protection to make them feel safe in allowing live audio recorded to Hi-MD to be uploaded to PCs.

A few final features that merit attention are the fact that current regular blank minidiscs can be formatted for Hi-MD in order to increase their music capacity and allow them to be used for data storage, and the new players will be backwards compatible with existing MDs, though old players will not play the new Hi-MDs.

Sony says the new Hi-MD recorders will be available in April, with prices fairly equivalent to current MD recorders, and that Hi-MD discs will cost about $7, which is definitely more than regular blank MDs, but may be worth it for all the increased storage capacity and use.

I have to say that if Sony allows us to upload our live recorded audio to PCs, in addition to all the new cool features of Hi-MD, they may well beat out hard disk players and low-quality voice recorders to win a permanent place in every independent media makers bag of gear.

Continue Reading

E-stonia

This AP article in USA Today takes a rosy survey of Estonia’s relative technological advancement, especially in comparison to other former soviet republics:

“Dubbed E-Stonia by some, the country ranked No. 8 out of 82 countries in putting the Net to practical use in a recent World Economic Forum report. The country ranked No. 2 in Internet banking and third in e-government. …

Many Estonians who now rely on wireless phones never had a landline phone. And most who now use the Internet to pay bills have never used a Western-style checkbook.”

This interests me primarily because my ancestry is Estonian (my paternal grandparents both immigrated after WWII), and it’s not a country you hear much about, even though it survived the collapse of the Soviet Union better than most. I’ve never been there, though I do want to go.

It’s also interesting to note that Estonia’s banks are mostly foreign owned, which is why they brought Internet technology so easily. Estonia is also where the popular file sharing program Kazaa was coded (hence the double vowel — Estonian is full of long double vowels, like in my last name, Riismandel).

Continue Reading

DIY DVD ASAP

Last night I made a 22minute DVD is less than an hour, from capture to final burn. And I am amazed.

This experience serves as another reminder to me that it’s important to have good entry-level media creation tools if we’re seriously going to democratize the media. A person shouldn’t have to spend weeks in a classroom or reading manuals to communicate effectively. Any tool that makes the process of communicating through media easier and more intuitive is a good thing.

For some time now I’ve been saying that true DIY DVD creation isn’t ready for prime time. Burning DVDs isn’t new to me. I got a burner at work last year and I’ve struggled along with learning the ropes of MPEG2 compression (which takes forever on a dual P-III machine), authoring, making menus, etc. etc. On the whole it’s been a frustrating pain-in-the-ass experience. Especially when you wait 20+ hours for your video to compress only to find out that it ended up being a few megabytes over the size limit of a DVD-R.

But a few weeks ago I got a new computer, an off-the-shelf HP from Best Buy (24 months of 0% financing, woo hoo!), that got my attention because it includes a DVD+RW drive. …

Continue Reading

Geek Gear Tidbits

p>Although it has absolutely nothing to do with X-Mas, a load of electronics has arrived at work in the last few weeks, with some interesting items in the mix. I have no inclination to do a full review of anyting, but would like to record some impressions. Here’s the first shot:

JVC DV/VHS Combi-VCR (SR-VS30V) — this just arrived today and will be installed in a multimedia classroom so that students and instructors can view VHS tapes or DV tapes that were just shot on a video projector. At $1100 this is not a cheap piece of equipment, but it is cheaper than almost any other DV VCR out there, made all the better by the addition of a S-VHS deck. …

Continue Reading

Powered by WordPress. Designed by Woo Themes