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MiniDisc Drives for the PC? 31

Posted by Cliff from the I-must-have-blinked-and-missed-these dept.
scHarvey asks: "I recently purchased a portable MD player so that I can take mp3s with me where ever I go. I know that the MD format had almost died out until the popularity of MP3s and the cheapness of MD discs brought it back pretty strong. My curiousity was sparked though by the thought of having an internal MD-RW1 in a 3.5 drive on my PC. Has anyone else ever thought of this, and is there a product out there that one can buy off the shelf? I know the discs are a little more expensive than standard CD-RWs, but they are also smaller and in a permanent protective case, and I thought this might be a cool idea."
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MiniDisc Drives for the PC? More

MiniDisc Drives for the PC?

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  • EDL [demon.co.uk] has hacked the firmware of the Sony SCSI MD-Data drive, allowing to also use MD-audio discs on it, and not only MD-Data discs as Sony wants it. I heard they do NOT have good relations with Sony. This is quite expensive, but I guess intensive users, like radio stations for instance are customers for this. See also the great minidisc.org [minidisc.org]
  • So about $2.75US?

    - A.P. (lameness filter encountered!)

    --
    Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?

  • This discussion has been going on for close to a full decade now. Sony, Sharp and others don't seem to be interested in making MDs work this way. It seems like a really stupid move considering that they could have cleaned up against Zip drives and even jaz (with the 700MB version of MD) back in the old days, and about a year ago, they could have cleaned up against the MP3 players considering the cost of flash memory a year ago.

    It would be really simple to put a USB port on one of those players and write a small driver and end this sillyness once and for all. An external, portable drive/music player that can record music at better than 1x speeds.

    I strongly suspect that the technology agreements between companies for MD prevent the use of the technology in a computer. There are products that use MD as storage, but only Sony has one that can actually allows a computer to read the disk (via PCMCIA no less) as a data only media and costs big bucks.

    - Mike

  • Yes, I remember when MD's first came out, I was really excited because I pictured these little tiny drives that you would be able to carry around listening to entire CDs in, and then plop it down next to a computer and copy files off and on from (like a USB drive of today). I was quickly disillusioned when I went to Japan, looked for a drive, and found 1 drive, made by Sony, that was huge, and didn't even use the same disks. I believe it only stored 250 meg or so, and as people have pointed out, it's on a different media. I'm pretty sure this came out after MO discs, and these are the standard that won out before CDRs were popular, at least in Japan (especially in publishing circles). Ah, I still have the dream, I think the closest thing now would be an MP3 player that you can use as a straight USB drive as well. I know that a few do that, I think one even does it with native Winblows USB drivers, so you just plug it in to someones machine, grab what you want, and run. Woo-hoo! If anyone has recommendations for an mp3 player like this, post a reply! Lacoste
    --
    Vidi Vici Veni
  • Of course, Sony thought it was suicidal to invest in an unsecure market that already went for Zip drives and CD-R's.

    IIRC, I saw my first MiniDisc data drive as an external SCSI device in a MacWarehouse catalog in 1995-- right when the Zip first came out, and CD-R was too expensive to be more than a fantasy for the average computer user. What I'm trying to say it, the de-facto successor to the 1.4MB floppy disk was nowhere near being decided by market forces.

    The MD-Data drive was horrifically expensive, which is what doomed it, IMHO. The Zip, on the other hand, was priced much more reasonably and was something that would be so useful to me, the first time I happened upon it in a catalog, I ordered it before turning to the next page.

    ~Philly

  • MD-Data (Score:1)

    by hyc ( 241590 )
    Sony originally made two MD-Data drives, the MDH-10 (portable, external) and the MDM-111 (internal), both SCSI-2. There was a version of the MDM-111 available for the IBM Thinkpad Dock II docking station. While the MDH-10 was discontinued in 1995, there have been reports of MDM-111s being made and sold as late as April 2000. This site still lists new units for $280 each http://www.ce-s.com/sohsm.htm As someone mentioned above, you could always use modem techniques to record data as audio. It would take you 75 minutes to record 140MB worth of data this way, though, and you practically have to reverse-engineer the ATRAC encoding method to reliably modulate your data so that it can be demodulated intact. re: USB MD interface: note that Sony is now selling a Firewire MD deck in Europe, the MDS-LSA1. This sounds like the Right Thing to me... Of course, any enterprising hacker can just order the service manual for their favorite Sony MD deck with full schematics, and glue on the USB controller of their choice. The MD-specific ICs communicate with each other over a two-wire serial bus after all.
  • In a Galaxy Far Far Away... Princess Leia used a Mini Disc drive and had her hair dried while she copied a dozen files onto her Mini Disc. She was quite happy witht the computer developers agreeing to use the Mini Disc standard.

    ;) Ofcoz this is not the reality. Making new standards is so hard nowadays, I guess only Microsoft is up to the job. Of corse, Sony thought it was suicidal to invest in an unsecure market that allready went for zipdrives and CD-R's.

  • I remember back in the mid '90s Sony was selling an external MD drive for computers. I believe the storage capacity of a 74m MD was listed at 120MB. Oh yeah, the drive was expensive, not beige and looked a little frumpy. ;-)
  • Unfortunately MiniDiscs are no good for anything other than music. Ignoring Zip disks because they are magnetic is not the best argument in the world as MiniDiscs are also magnetic. If you ignore Zips for this reason you also exclude MD. In addition MD have a MUCH lower data capacity than CDs. They both store 74 minutes of music but the CD stores it at a higher quality without anything other than the simplest and crudest compression (i.e. removal of frequecies outside human hearing range). On the other hand MD has compression that is superior to MP3. You could easily fit 74 mins of audio into less than 75MB and as MD compression achieves higher rates than this you can conclude that data capacity is going to be no more than 50-60MB thus reducing their usefulness. This then makes CD-RW (650MB) and Zip (100/250MB) much more appealing (and cheaper, I can buy good quality CDRW individually for only £1($1.40 US).
  • Minor point but a SAMPLE rate of 44KHz (as used on CD) can only reproduce sound at 22KHz as above as it requires TWO samples per cycle in order to define a wave. For this reason any frequencies above 22KHz are filtered out during CD encoding...This is a very simple form of compression and is what I was referring to when I mentioned the low compression rates of CD. It is a simple type of compression that does not require decompression and thus does not increase the load on the 1980s processors it was designed to run on. In a similar way sounds of low volumes are removed if they occur immediately before or after or at the same time as louder sounds as they are completely obliterated and the human ear can't detect them...hence no need to store them. If you don't believe me on this feel free to check the original "Red book" holy bible of CDs, which defines the encoding of audio CD as developed by Sony and Philips in the 80s. ATRAC-3 certainly compresses much more than 2:1 and so there is no way on earth that you would get 360MB. p.s. Microwaves are electromagnetic waves and not vibrations travelling through air and so if you could detect them yourself you would detect them with your eyes not your ears.
  • Forgive my ingnorance, but I heard a rumour when MD was in the startup phase, that MDs, though digital, intentionally degraded sound quality just a little when copying. Appparently it was to combat "piracy". Now it may all be just a rumour, and even if it's true it may have no implications for using MDs as data storage .... may. I would appreciate if anyone could give some verified information on this topic.
  • Got to forgive my ignorance on this one but did MO drives ever make it to the states? Up to 1.3gb of storage, all totally re-writable, not terribly fast and very popular over here in Japan. Bought one for $200 and wouldn't even look at a CDR/W or zip after using it. Think the basic idea was to create a mini disc for data storage although MD and MO are not compatible. If all of this is old news, just write it off to not having left Japan for the last three years. Is the outside world still out there?
  • Non of those devices are like what I was describing in my original post.
  • The only people to do this as far as I know are HHB [hhb.co.uk]. They have a Pro MD recorder with an audio USB interface... no data though :-(.
  • The audio on the disc is in Sony's propratory ATRAC format and they usually like people to buy a piece of hardware with the ATRAC chips in it. While there's software from Sony to rename and reorder tracks on the disc, software methods of getting at the audio have always had to reverse engineer Sony's encoding method. That's not to say it can't be done, just it costs a bit. Take a look at the Electronic Design Lab [demon.co.uk] home page. For a little more info on the Sony MDH-10 drive mentioned, look here [minidisc.org]....
  • AFAIK from discussions with Sony engineering, although every attempt was made to give Minidisc high fidelity, the fact that its use of audio compression made it inherently impossible to create a perfect copy was viewed by some as a subtle benefit. In launching the MD format, Sony needed to address recording industry concerns over content protection -- DAT had just suffered its fatal blow as a consumer format due to RIAA litigation (or threats of same) over exactly this issue.

    As long as the MD firewall remains intact (preventing direct access to the compressed audio data) the lossy, assymetric nature of each decompression and recompression generation makes it a perfect copy protection scheme (in that no external signal hacking can defeat it).

    Note that with special care, an audio codec can be designed to minimize generational loss (see Frank Kurth's paper [minidisc.org] (PDF)). See also a discussion of the MD generational loss problem [minidisc.org] and Minidisc.org [minidisc.org] for further general coverage of the Minidisc format.

  • Not true Hansendc there is something called Winremote made by Martin Danek which is very nice for minidisc text input via IR check it out at the following URL: http://www.czechin.com/minidisc/
  • Good call on that one, I had looked into this at one point, and I think it was on sony's website that arrived at that very same 150mb number. When I looked at this post I immediately wanted to add the results of my searches, but it seems that you all have done very well at answering the questions. But I do have to ask, did you arrive at these numbers by your own calculation or did you find them somewhere (perhaps the same place as I did?)
  • Just purchased a JVC XM-EX90, which is a little bookshelf-add-on Minidisc recorder unit, it's as high as a minidisc is wide, 7 3/4" wide, and 11 1/2" deep... fits *perfectly* on my computer desk's little side shelf bit.

    I've got a 6' Monster Digital TOSLink cable going to my 'puter, and the remote control that comes with the recorder has a built-in QWERTY keyboard for titling.

    The 'puter has an 80gb RAID array with my entire CD collection ripped at VBR using GoGo. I was on the RIMPS team (check sourceforge for a copy), so I use that as my web interface to do the jukeboxing / streaming.

    Cost:
    'puter: You already have it. DOesn't count.
    Minidisc recorder: $199 CDN
    Long cable: $50 CDN
    Minidisc blanks: $4 CDN
    (in any Chinatown) for 74
    minutes of storage
    Sony MZ-F40 AM/FM Player: $199 CDN

    Total: Under $500 CDN!

    Still sounds a *heck* of a lot cheaper than MP3, doesn't it!

    mindslip
  • You could always modulate data just like a modem does and then record that on the disc.

    It won't fit alot of data on the disc this way though. Some 20kB/s would perhaps, but then you might encounter problem with that lossy ATRAC compression.

    20kB/s *1024kB/MB * 74min/disc * 60s/min = 86.7MB/disc

    Add stereorecording to that and you could fit som 150MB on one disc. Would take 74min to store/retrieve though.

    ___
  • It's not an mp3 player, but I have a Fuji Finepix digicam that works like this. It uses the USB mass storage driver which mounts up the smart media card just like a scsi disk. I have used it with complete success in Win98, MacOS 8.6 and Linux 2.4 (I got 2.2 to work, but it took some kernel compiling and stuff like that).

    ________________________
  • A quick calculation, using a CD quality sound data and the fact that ATRAC compression ratio is about 1:5, gives

    74 min * 60 s/min * 44100 samples/s * 2 bytes/sample * 2 channels * 1/5 = 150MB

    just as you suggest. In fact this should be slightly bigger because of additional data such as timestamps and titles (Audio CDs use 1/4 of the data capacity for time codes and such). But you'll get some errors because of the lossy compression. I did this calculation back in '93 or so when I first heard of MD. 150MB on something smaller than a floppy would have been pretty cool at that time.

    --

  • What I've seen with some of the portible mini-disk players, is that they doubble as data drives.

    I bought my sister a portable MD player for her birthday last year, compleete with a usb cable to transfer mp3's and other computer formats to the drive. It said it could play mp3's, really what it ment was that the software translated mp3's to uncompressed audio tracks and wrote it to the disk. That was the only thing that pissed me off. I digress however.

    The cool thing was when I read through the docs, it said that the driver-disk contained drivers that could read and write data to the disk!
    I've looked up a few other ones since then, even some parralell port versions, and lots of them do this. The only problem is that I can't find linux drivers for any. I would love to use one of these little things as a replacement for my usb cdrom. here's a link to the MD player I was dealing with, good luck! Maybe an older one with a parrlell port interface would be easier to hack drivers for?

    http://www.sel.sony.com/SEL/consumer/ss5/portabl e/ mdwalkmanrtm/pctomd/mz-r37sppc_specs.shtml

  • MiniDisc audio uses a 140MB disc to hold 74 minutes of audio. On a CD, you'd be using 650MB to do the same thing. In order to fit the same amount of audio on a smaller disc, the MiniDisc standard calls for a psychoacoustic compression scheme called ATRAC (Adaptive TRansform Acoustic Coding). This format works a bit like MP3. It uses strategies like critical bands (you hear certain frequency ranges better, so the encoder focuses on details there, and ignores details in other bands), and masking (if you drop a pin and blow up dynamite at the same time, both sounds are recorded; the encoder removes audio detail from the pin drop).

    Of course, anything that removes detail from the sound will degrade its quality. As time has passed, the algorithims employed in the compression have improved, allowing for higher quality.

    So, while the compression system does degrade the sound quality, it isn't for anti-piracy reasons. In fact, the first portable Sony unit, the MZ-R1 was one of the few portable MiniDIsc recorders featuring a digital output. There is a MiniDisc technology working against piracy (or fair use): SCMS. The Serial Copy Management System is designed to record in the disc's TOC information on each track's origin. In conjunction with compliant players, SCMS prevents digital copies being made from MiniDisc tracks that were themselves digital copies. Its implementation is essentially the same (and interoperable with) the copy protection system on home audio CD recorders.

  • MD recorders compress the audio data when recording, so there's obviously some quality degredation there (I've had an argument with someone once about whether MP3s or MDs had higher quality). But I'm not sure if it's for anti-piracy reasons. I think the MD specs include two formats: rewritable formats for recording, and ROMs. ROMs are for commercial MDs where music is sold recorded on to them, like CD's (I've only seen this in Japan though). I've also heard that such ROM disks had some kind of copy-protection scheme, but that's pretty much the extent of my knowledge...

  • A quick search on google (Score:3)

    by z4ce ( 67861 ) on Saturday May 19, 2001 @09:35AM (#212121)
    And I found this web site http://www.maya.cz/minidisc/minidisc/equipment_bro wser.html [www.maya.cz] It lists 6 different minidisc drives from Sony and Sharp.

    Perhaps MD will be CD-Rs as 3.5" floppies are to 5" in floppies.

    Ian Zink

  • Re:Intentional degrading (Score:3)

    by lizrd ( 69275 ) <(adam) (at) (bump.us)> on Monday May 21, 2001 @06:32AM (#212122) Homepage
    There is a MiniDisc technology working against piracy (or fair use)

    Unlike some other technologies (*ack*DVD Region Coding*ack* CSS *ack*) SCMS is in line with fair use. You can make as many copies as you like of a piece of digital media that you have purchased (or borrowed, or traded or whatever), what it prevents you from doing is making copies of those copies. Second generation copies generally aren't within the realm of fair use rights anyway.

    SCMS is also a technology that it fair to musicians. Compliant players do not add copy protection to recordings made from an analog source (microphones, guitar amps, etc.) so the musician is free to make all the digital copies that they need for distribution. You still probably wouldn't want to do mass duplication on consumer grade equipment, but you could if you wanted to.

    Another bonus to SCMS is that it doesn't impact the quality of the sound. The only way in which the sound fidelity of a recording is reduced by doing a digital transfer to minidisc is in the compression used to get the small form factor. I find the ATRAC compression scheme to be quite good, CDs copied digitally to minidisc sound much better than (so called "CD quality") 128kb/s .mp3s or FM radio. I generally can't tell the difference between CDs and MDs in a moving vehicle while I really can tell the difference between a minidisc and FM radio (this is mostly due to the fact that radio stations boost the bass signal to make music sound good on shitty radios. It adds a bunch of noise and distortion that makes it sound awful with a good amp).

    Overall, I would say that SCMS is a good and fair compromise between citizens and content owners. I don't object at all to being prevented from making copies of copies since that isn't fair use anyway. The only thing that I do object to is that DVDs set the no copy bit on their soundtrack so that you can't make a digital recording of a DVD soundtrack onto a minidisc. Then again, that's the fault of the DVD producers and we already know all about them.

    ________________________

  • I'm a huge fan of Minidisc. Now that the new MDLP format is out people can store 320 minutes of music on an 80-minute Minidisc. However, the method that is used to write the audio data to a minidisc is *not* the same as writing to an Audio CD. An Audio CD can have file references to the audio data itself (CDA, anyone?). However the TOC on a Minidisc is just an offset to a point on the disc containing the audio datastream. It's not compatbile with FAT, or any other file storage format, so storing MP3's on a minidisc simply isn't possible in their native format.

    Yes, MD Data used to be available (as others have said here it was called a MO disk) but the disks were a different format (not compatbile with audio MD discs) and the drives were 750 dollars each. Combine that with the fact that MD data only holds 170MB of information and you can see why the format isn't around anymore (Sony doesn't even service the drives anymore, IIRC).

    However, with a soundcard and a digital output, it *is* possible to record your MP3's into any decent portable Minidisc recorder. I have a Sony MZ-R900 and I can record up to 5 hours and 20 minutes of MP3s for about 1.50 USD a disc. Try getting 5 hours of MP3 on an MP3 player for only a buck and a half... :-) And if you want to play MD's in your car, there is an FM audio adapter you can plug most (if not all) MD decks into and listen to the player via your car radio.

    Hope someone finds this information helpful.




    perl -le '$_="6110>374086;2064208213:90<307;55";tr[0- >][ LEOR!AUBGNSTY];print'

  • Re:A long long time ago.... (Score:3)

    by OmegaDan ( 101255 ) on Saturday May 19, 2001 @09:36PM (#212124) Homepage
    You know, alot of audio equiptment uses mindisc data stuff as well ... the 150 megs they store is just about enuf to do a song on on 8 track with.

    http://www.sweetwater.com/store/results.tpl?acti on =full&cart=9903370874831392&--eqskudatarq=MD8&Crit eria=Results

  • If you want smnall discs... (Score:4)

    by hatless ( 8275 ) on Saturday May 19, 2001 @04:35AM (#212125)
    I haven't seen any MD drives for computers, at least not ones compatible with the audio format. However, you can get smaller CD-R media in 3-inch and business-card sizes [yahoo.com]. The looming problem there is that slot-loading CD drives have started to catch on.

  • A long long time ago.... (Score:4)

    by hansendc ( 95162 ) on Saturday May 19, 2001 @10:56AM (#212126) Homepage
    When Minidisc first came out, there was a data version. However (get this) the audio and data disks were different and not interoperable. You can still go buy a MD Data disk, if you want, at Minidisco [minidisco.com]. However, they're $13.49 each!

    I remember seeing MD data drives a LONG time ago. But I haven't seen one marketed in years. There is still no really easy way to title audio disks without buying one of the expensive decks. Bah humbug.

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