I then bought a table-model, the Sony JE500. This MD unit had an IR remote control, with a keypad. This was a large improvement. Only thing is, they arranged the rather small buttons like ABCDEF in stead of QWERTY.
I started using a MD some years ago when I bought a little pocketmodel, the Sony Walkman MZ R3.
Do you know the MiniDisk system? It uses small disks, somewhat
smaller then the common 3½" floppys (about 7x7cm), but you use it like a CDROM.
You can record (digital)
up to 74 minutes of music on it, and trackmarks where ever you like.
The main advantages are the easy editing facilities and the
short 'seek' time. You can jump to any track in under seconds. You can put trackmarks easily
with a very high precision (127 parts of 0.06 sec) before and after a bad recording. Press de DEL button,
and even if the removed section is an hour playing time, afterwards you cannot hear
the transition. That would be an hour of silence when you do the same trick
with a tape or cassette player! In the same way you can move (parts of) tracks and
rearrange as you like. So I copy my cassettes first to a MD. Rearrange the usefull parts
and write that to another MD.
Another very handy use of a MD is when learning a foreign language. You can put trackmarks on
the beginning of individual lessons, or parts. You then are able to 'jump' instantly to
a certain part fast. Or repeat the lesson indefinitely.....
The tracks are numbered (default), as on a CD, but you can give them a description too.
Any player I know of, will display the tracknumber together with the (song)title.
The little 'walkman' was able to do this already, but I was not very happy with the way it
had to be done.
It was like working with an old 'dymo' labeler. The kind you turn a knob until you see the
right character, then press. And so on.
I then bought a table-model, the Sony JE500. This MD unit had an IR
remote control, with a keypad.
This was a large improvement. Only thing is, they arranged the rather small buttons like
ABCDEF in stead of QWERTY.
Having two units now I, can make digital copies of the walkman to the JE500. There is
absolutely no loss of quality. It is easy using an optic cable.
Of the many nice features, Autopause is very important when using the MD to add sound to a
slide show. The MD will stop at the end of each track. To continue
playback press the Start or Pause button.
A lot of reading about the MiniDisk, features & FAQ's can be found on the
MiniDisk Community Page
You also can join the ALT.AUDIO.MINIDISK newsgroup. It was there that
I found the description of a very handy little gadget you can build yourself.
After I build the IR transmitter, I wrote a small program which formats the textfile. Because I sometimes receive the text from a third party, or by scanning in a description in a magazine. My program adds tracknumbers and takes care of upper/lowercase characters. So you may type your ascii file all in lowercase characters, like:
title of your disk first track second trackand my program will format your text so it can be uploaded with the TitleMD program.
TITLE OF YOUR DISK 1) First track 2) Second track
Click here to download my program.
Back to my home page
Have fun!