For my birthday last year, my girlfriend eased my trepidation over turning 30 with an incredible gift – a brand new Sony NetMD MiniDisc player. Cobalt blue, if you’re wondering.
Although iPods may seem to be the way to go these days, they are still more expensive than MiniDiscs, you still have to charge them and need a computer to fill them up. As for me, I can record off any device using audio cables and when the rechargeable battery runs low I can simply swap it for another one. It doesn’t skip, and thanks to Sony’s new ATRAC format, I can record up to 320 minutes of music on Long Play 4 – and I think it sounds better than most compressed music formats, including the much heralded MP3.
That’s a lot of music. It’s about four to six regular CDs worth of music, and that’s enough to get me through most days.
My player never skips, and it’s easy and fast to load CDs onto MiniDiscs using the NetMD software.
Also, I confess that I’m something of a Luddite when it comes to technology. Although I like the idea of the Apple iPod with all of those gigs and gigs of music at my fingertips, I still like the physical presence of discs. I can’t explain why I like discs when I can store my entire CD collection on one iPod, but I do. One disc holds my interviews at work. Another has my Beastie Boys collection. Another is a punk mix that I like to take snowboarding and to the gym. Another has mellow music that I like to listen to while reading.
There is only one real benefit I can think of, other than cost, for not getting an iPod:
If my MiniDisc player should ever fall, or if I should ever fall on my MiniDisc player, and it should break, I’ll at least have my discs with all of my music intact. I won’t have to go through the whole process of recording them all over again when and if I buy a replacement player.
Yep, love the MiniDisc.
Still, I can’t help but feel a little hamstrung when I read a report that Sony has created a new line of mini discs that can hold 40 hours of music, rather than the current 80 minutes at regular play. With a compressed format, you could stretch that 40 hours to 160 – almost seven full days of continuous music.
It’s a fact of life that things become obsolete. The top desktop PC of two years ago can’t hold a candle to the low-end PC of today, in performance or price. But going from 80 minutes to 40 hours? That’s 30 times more music, which represents the kind of groundbreaking technological leap that only comes around once a generation. Imagine if your 2Ghz processor became a 60 Ghz processor overnight, or your 40 Gig hard drive could be replaced with a 1,200 GB drive.
According to the report Sony plans to start selling the mini-discs and new recorders/players capable of using them this year. The new players will also be able to read old discs, but old players won’t be able to read the new discs.
Sony had to have had this technology in development for years to be available later this year, yet there was no word of it back in June when I received my birthday present.
I still like my MiniDisc player, but I would have held off a year to get the new and vastly improved version. Obviously Sony wanted to keep sales going for players and discs until the technology was ready to be released. That’s always been the game, and why everyone gets burned when they buy technology these days. Things are moving fast. Maybe too fast.
While the landfills pile up with old VCRs and millions upon millions of tapes, I have to wonder what’s going to replace DVDs and can we count on that technology being at least a few years away? Why buy a middle of the road computer when you’re a few generations of software away from being incompatible and obsolete?
It didn’t use to be like this. In the last hundred years, people have gone from records to tapes to CDs to MP3s. Not counting 8-Trac players, that’s four major generations of music technology in a hundred years – not too hard to handle. The problem is that the technology is speeding up – it was pretty much records until the late ’70s, so we’re looking at three generations in 30 years, or one a decade.
When I buy technology, I expect to get five good years out of it. MiniDisc technology is old, yes, but I think they could have given us all a warning that something better was coming along. Right now I’m stuck with the latest, state-of-the-art version of a technology that is months away from being obsolete.
It almost makes you want to give up, dig the old Sony Walkman and black and white television out of the attic and avoid technology stores like the Norwalk Virus ward at your local hospital. We can’t win.
Get a iLife
If there’s one thing that Apple does well it’s to simplify the computing experience, with an operating system and software that’s easy to understand and operate.
The latest Apple release, iLife ’04, is being billed as "Microsoft Office for the rest of your life", and it includes five key components for just $49 US – GarageBand, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD.
GarageBand is a simple audio recording studio that makes it possible to perform, record, mix, and create music. There are pre-programmed rhythm sections, solos, and instruments that you can use to create music. You can also plug in your keyboard or MIDI player into your computer and let rip.
iTunes 4.2 is a digital music player that allows you to import music, organize music, synchronize with your iPod, and shop online at the iTunes music store. You can also share music on a local network and burn audio CDs.
iPhoto helps you to organize your digital photos, creating Smart Albums. You can also use iPhoto to export photos onto your memory card to take to the lab for processing, or send your pictures there via the Internet.
iMovie 4 is a video editing program that allows you to transfer footage to your computer, edit it, and add music and graphics.
iDVD 4 is a companion to iMovie, allowing you to add graphics, music, titles and other features to your movies and burn them to a recordable DVD disc.
For more on iLife 4, visit www.apple.com.
