Any of you guys ever seen or own one of these puppies? Sony Mini Disc recorder with a microphone input and it makes killer live recordings. I just bought one. Planning on getting a stereo microphone and using it to record demos and live gigs. A friend has had one for a couple of years and makes great recordings. He recorded one of my bands' gigs a couple of weeks ago and the quality is phenominal. He also played me a recording he made of Springsteen's "The Rising" show from the Compaq a couple of years ago that was just as good. You can hook it up to your PC to download and burn CDs. Anyways, just wondering if any of the other gearheads/musicians on this board have any experience with one of these Sony mini disc recorders and what you think of them.
From the website... "ATRAC technology compresses up to five hours of music onto an 80-minute disc without sacrificing sound quality...Up to 73 hours of playback with rechargeable battery" So I imagine each disc can record for 80 minutes, but then you can compress the hell out of it after you download it to your PC so that 5 hours of music can fit on one 80 minute disc.
They still make Mini Discs? Dang. Seriously, I try my best to stay away from proprietary stuff. Sony's BetaMax is another example.
ATRAC is Sony's proprietry music format. I had a Sony "mp3" player back in the day and I had to convert all my mp3s to ATRAC files. So I wasted time (lots of time) and hard drive space. So if the MD lets you record in mp3, by all means, use mp3 and don't waste your time with ATRAC. I like Sony's hardware, but their software is hard to use (by design).
From what I can tell, it records in ATRAC, and after you dump it down to your PC you can convert it to MP3, wav, etc. I'll have to check with my friend to see how easy or not their software is to use.
