Posted by
justin++
on from the books-on-tape dept.
egnarts writes "Drag and drop mp3's to your minidisc, and better still generate voice overs from text. See zdnet for the story " Interesting. Every time I start thinking MD is dead, something happens to it. I wonder how successful this will be. Text-to-Voice could be quite useful.
Easy for manufacturers to make?
by
mOdQuArK!
·
· Score: 2
This sounds like it could be a very popular MP3 player - the manufacturers already have many different styles of Minidisc hardware available, so their engineering cost should be much smaller & be more refined than if they were starting from scratch.
How many minutes of MP3 can a Minidisc hold, anyway?
Before you say that MD is dead, try a day as a sound technician. MiniDisc is your friend. One small disc, not hundreds of CDs all over the place. Ability to edit at 1/75 sec resolution (anything more, and it just becomes too clumsy -- try to do editing on any PC program...) and good enough sound quality (yeah, yeah, it sounds different for classical music -- I don't care) -- in short, MD isn't dead. It's wonderful.
Funny that they would write about in the UK when it's supposedly only available in the US.
--
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Re:Nah, MD really is dead...
by
AugstWest
·
· Score: 2
MD is far from dead. The media's getting cheaper and more people are using it every day. Check out minidisc.org for info.
I can't begin to tell you how convenient it is to have a portable digital recording device. Yes, that's right RECORDING device. It amazes me that noone ever mentions this in their comparisons to the MP3 players. Show me an MP3 player that you can take to a concert, or into the studio, or out into the world to record with. Uh, they don't exist? Right.
And FYI, MD data discs have existed for a very long time. We use them in our 4-track Tascam minidisc recording deck. They're available in any decent music store.
Text-to-speech for Linux
by
Ledge+Kindred
·
· Score: 3
It's something of a hassle to get set up (there are a few software dependencies that you might have to get working first) but once it's going, it's unbelievable. It does stuff like real-time text-to-speech that lets you decide to either have the software "speak" the text directly or write it out as a sound file, "pluggable" voice databases so you can plug in your own phoneme samples that the software will speak with, a scheme-based scripting language and all kinds of other nifty things. Oh yeah, and it is distributed under an X11-style license.
It does a remarkably good job of figuring out how to pronounce words. It's obviously computer-generated, but nonetheless very understandable. The pluggable voice databases is possibly the coolest part, but I've not yet put the effort into figuring out how difficult a new database would be to create/set up.
I think somewhere out there is even a Festival script that gets and speaks the latest/. headlines. Now if only we could get a CmdrTaco voice database for it....
I've been doing this for the last month since I picked up a Sharp 722 for $200 bucks from minidisco.com. There is no end of the advantages to having MD over plain old mp3 player.
* everytime you want a new song or want to tweak the contents of your MD, you have to reload the whole thing. I feel like a new playlist, I just pop in a new disk.
*Easily dump cd's, mp3s, voice, or mic to the MD. Everything you can dump to a mp3 player.
* MD is standardized. No worries about what nastiness the RIAA can cook up.
* similar battery capacity and size of current mp3 players.
Now that the price for portables has dropped quite a bit, I really think MD's gonna start heading into the mainstream in america. They're insanely popular in japan, and have been for awhile.
As the proud owner of a Sony MZ-R50 portable MD recorder and a Sony MDS JE510 home MD deck, and someone with a 3GB+ collection of MP3s and over 220 CDs, I can say that MD rocks!
Find me a portable MP3 player that fits in your jeans pocket and holds 74 minutes of CD quality music. I haven't yet.
CDs portables are too bulky to transport and you can get a MD recorder for the price of a good anti-skip portable CD player.
Not only are MD recorders getting smaller and better battery life, they have a standard media that you can swap any time. I can carry my MD player in one pocket and 4 MD in the other. And with the battery life on just the rechargeable, I can listen to all of those MDs a couple times before my battery dies.
If I want to listen to MP3s I just copy them onto a MD via my JE510. Excellent. Get a sound card with an optical out and your talking digital copying to your MD.(Xitel Storm Platinum is an example)
MD is far from dead. Get your mind out of the US centric world and take a look at Europe and Japan. More MD units are sold in Japan than any where else in the world and they obviously sell, other wise why would new units be made? Check out the new Sony MZ-R90. It's only millimetres larger than an MD and only two MDs thick. And it has a battery life of something like 30 hours.
MD is much more versatile than MP3 and until MP3 units are able to store in the region of 128MB, I won't be buying one.
MD is much more versatile than MP3 and until MP3 units are able to store in the region of 128MB, I won't be buying one.
Heh, if you are waiting for 128, then go ahead and by one, most 2nd generation players have 128 megs chips or flash cards...but the cool stuff is the multi-gig stuff. Like the Empeg and the HanGo Player
I have used both, and both rock. -Davidu
--
# Hack the planet, it's important.
As a sound engineer, it's crap.
by
YuppieScum
·
· Score: 2
Nasty, lossy, horrid little thing. Great if sound quality is not the primary concern, but otherwise...still, it's a new toy, so maybe...
What I can't understand is why there was never (and AFAIK is still not) a PC-type MiniDisk drive - approx 300Mb of re-writable storage for 10 quid a throw, they'd have walked all over Iomega.
-- This sig left unintentionally blank.
MDs rock, but I doubt they'll be that big
by
joeytsai
·
· Score: 2
Don't get me wrong, I love my MD. It's far better than a wimpy Rio and there's some advantages that nothing can compare with:
Even if you had discman that didn't skip, it'd still be pretty large. An MD player and a few MDs is nothing in your pocket.
You CANNOT beat the versatility of recording on a MD. Add, Delete, Combine, Seperate, Move... even the fact that the tracks have name is nice change from CDs where you have to listen to listen to a second or two.
I record easily from CD or MP3, all digitally; the only source of loss is from the ATRAC compression of the MD recorder. And although it only compresses to 1/5 of the size (opposed to 1/12 or whatever with MP3s) even my audiophile friends can't tell the difference (ATRAC has come a long way). The only problem is that MDs have some silly protection that only allow one generation of digital copying (SCMS). I've never had that problem with my MP3s, though.
MDs are cheap! I get 10 packs for $25. I'm sure if I was really stingy I could find 'em cheaper on the net too.
Finally, MDs just look cool! Holding a MD makes me feel like I'm Tom Cruise guarding the NOC files or something high-tech and futuristic. Okay, okay, I'm a geek.
But, especially with that 4.3 GB MP3 player coming out soon, I kinda doubt MD players will go past being a novelty toy. It's only a matter of time before MP3 players shrink to comparable size and incomparable storage. I hope I'm wrong, but I have a feeling I'm not. But until then, I most definitely am enjoying my MD player (A Sharp 722, BTW).
Sharp's Press Release has all the spin-doctored details. They've also has a web page dedicated to it. You can buy it now. (Anyone know if they're actually shipping?)
Apparently the Voquette software is the key to all of this. It will allow you to easily put mp3s and Internet audio streams onto any recording medium. They're selling a cassette recorder deal very similar to Sharp's offering. A salvation for those of you without a CD player in your car and no CD-R burner.;)
Sony already makes a MD player recorder that uses a serial port interface(IIRC). It costs $300 and supports drag and drop from your cd-rom drive. Very cool IMHO and a lot better than this piece of crap that sharp is pushing. I would be able to tell you exactly how cool it is, but I'm too broke.
-- This life is a test; it is only a test. If it were a real life, you would receive instructions on where to go and what
Software Audio Workshop. When I used it, it was a 16-bit Win3.1 (please don't shoot, it was a long time ago) stereo HD-recording tool.
I know there is are many tools like this out there now - some must be available for Linux - but unfortunately (at the behest of my GF) I have a real job now:(
Slashdot Mirror
This sounds like it could be a very popular MP3 player - the manufacturers already have many different styles of Minidisc hardware available, so their engineering cost should be much smaller & be more refined than if they were starting from scratch.
How many minutes of MP3 can a Minidisc hold, anyway?
http://www.sharp-usa.com/new/index.html
15 hours or 7.5 hrs record with AA, 12 hr playback with NiMH rechargable.
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
Before you say that MD is dead, try a day as a sound technician. MiniDisc is your friend. One small disc, not hundreds of CDs all over the place. Ability to edit at 1/75 sec resolution (anything more, and it just becomes too clumsy -- try to do editing on any PC program...) and good enough sound quality (yeah, yeah, it sounds different for classical music -- I don't care) -- in short, MD isn't dead. It's wonderful.
/* Steinar */
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
Product Info From Sharp
Funny that they would write about in the UK when it's supposedly only available in the US.
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
MD is far from dead. The media's getting cheaper and more people are using it every day. Check out minidisc.org for info.
I can't begin to tell you how convenient it is to have a portable digital recording device. Yes, that's right RECORDING device. It amazes me that noone ever mentions this in their comparisons to the MP3 players. Show me an MP3 player that you can take to a concert, or into the studio, or out into the world to record with. Uh, they don't exist? Right.
And FYI, MD data discs have existed for a very long time. We use them in our 4-track Tascam minidisc recording deck. They're available in any decent music store.
Festival
It's something of a hassle to get set up (there are a few software dependencies that you might have to get working first) but once it's going, it's unbelievable. It does stuff like real-time text-to-speech that lets you decide to either have the software "speak" the text directly or write it out as a sound file, "pluggable" voice databases so you can plug in your own phoneme samples that the software will speak with, a scheme-based scripting language and all kinds of other nifty things. Oh yeah, and it is distributed under an X11-style license.
It does a remarkably good job of figuring out how to pronounce words. It's obviously computer-generated, but nonetheless very understandable. The pluggable voice databases is possibly the coolest part, but I've not yet put the effort into figuring out how difficult a new database would be to create/set up.
I think somewhere out there is even a Festival script that gets and speaks the latest
-=-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-=-
My mom's going to kick you in the face!
I've been doing this for the last month since I picked up a Sharp 722 for $200 bucks from minidisco.com. There is no end of the advantages to having MD over plain old mp3 player.
* everytime you want a new song or want to tweak the contents of your MD, you have to reload the whole thing. I feel like a new playlist, I just pop in a new disk.
*Easily dump cd's, mp3s, voice, or mic to the MD. Everything you can dump to a mp3 player.
* MD is standardized. No worries about what nastiness the RIAA can cook up.
* similar battery capacity and size of current mp3 players.
Now that the price for portables has dropped quite a bit, I really think MD's gonna start heading into the mainstream in america. They're insanely popular in japan, and have been for awhile.
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
As the proud owner of a Sony MZ-R50 portable MD recorder and a Sony MDS JE510 home MD deck, and someone with a 3GB+ collection of MP3s and over 220 CDs, I can say that MD rocks!
Find me a portable MP3 player that fits in your jeans pocket and holds 74 minutes of CD quality music. I haven't yet.
CDs portables are too bulky to transport and you can get a MD recorder for the price of a good anti-skip portable CD player.
Not only are MD recorders getting smaller and better battery life, they have a standard media that you can swap any time. I can carry my MD player in one pocket and 4 MD in the other. And with the battery life on just the rechargeable, I can listen to all of those MDs a couple times before my battery dies.
If I want to listen to MP3s I just copy them onto a MD via my JE510. Excellent. Get a sound card with an optical out and your talking digital copying to your MD.(Xitel Storm Platinum is an example)
MD is far from dead. Get your mind out of the US centric world and take a look at Europe and Japan. More MD units are sold in Japan than any where else in the world and they obviously sell, other wise why would new units be made? Check out the new Sony MZ-R90. It's only millimetres larger than an MD and only two MDs thick. And it has a battery life of something like 30 hours.
MD is much more versatile than MP3 and until MP3 units are able to store in the region of 128MB, I won't be buying one.
Really Bored?? http://ivany.org
Nasty, lossy, horrid little thing. Great if sound quality is not the primary concern, but otherwise...still, it's a new toy, so maybe...
What I can't understand is why there was never (and AFAIK is still not) a PC-type MiniDisk drive - approx 300Mb of re-writable storage for 10 quid a throw, they'd have walked all over Iomega.
This sig left unintentionally blank.
Don't get me wrong, I love my MD. It's far better than a wimpy Rio and there's some advantages that nothing can compare with:
Even if you had discman that didn't skip, it'd still be pretty large. An MD player and a few MDs is nothing in your pocket.
You CANNOT beat the versatility of recording on a MD. Add, Delete, Combine, Seperate, Move... even the fact that the tracks have name is nice change from CDs where you have to listen to listen to a second or two.
I record easily from CD or MP3, all digitally; the only source of loss is from the ATRAC compression of the MD recorder. And although it only compresses to 1/5 of the size (opposed to 1/12 or whatever with MP3s) even my audiophile friends can't tell the difference (ATRAC has come a long way). The only problem is that MDs have some silly protection that only allow one generation of digital copying (SCMS). I've never had that problem with my MP3s, though.
MDs are cheap! I get 10 packs for $25. I'm sure if I was really stingy I could find 'em cheaper on the net too.
Finally, MDs just look cool! Holding a MD makes me feel like I'm Tom Cruise guarding the NOC files or something high-tech and futuristic. Okay, okay, I'm a geek.
But, especially with that 4.3 GB MP3 player coming out soon, I kinda doubt MD players will go past being a novelty toy. It's only a matter of time before MP3 players shrink to comparable size and incomparable storage. I hope I'm wrong, but I have a feeling I'm not. But until then, I most definitely am enjoying my MD player (A Sharp 722, BTW).
http://www.talknerdy.org
Sharp's Press Release has all the spin-doctored details. They've also has a web page dedicated to it. You can buy it now. (Anyone know if they're actually shipping?)
;)
Apparently the Voquette software is the key to all of this. It will allow you to easily put mp3s and Internet audio streams onto any recording medium. They're selling a cassette recorder deal very similar to Sharp's offering. A salvation for those of you without a CD player in your car and no CD-R burner.
Actually there was a MiniDisc drive for the PC and mac. There's a page on it at Minidisc.org
Photos of bits of the past hiding in the present: afiler.com
You can buy a MD data recorder for PCs if you look rather hard.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
Sony already makes a MD player recorder that uses a serial port interface(IIRC). It costs $300 and supports drag and drop from your cd-rom drive. Very cool IMHO and a lot better than this piece of crap that sharp is pushing. I would be able to tell you exactly how cool it is, but I'm too broke.
This life is a test; it is only a test. If it were a real life, you would receive instructions on where to go and what
Software Audio Workshop. When I used it, it was a 16-bit Win3.1 (please don't shoot, it was a long time ago) stereo HD-recording tool.
:(
I know there is are many tools like this out there now - some must be available for Linux - but unfortunately (at the behest of my GF) I have a real job now
This sig left unintentionally blank.