Nobody using minidisc I see

[A Reel Person]

Yeah, starting with...

zero tape hiss!.... but you're welcome to pick up hiss in any other part of the signal chain!

 

[jacobmyers]

I'm going to have to ship my 564 out for service one of these days. Maybe they can make it work properly. It quit reading discs so I've just been using it as a mixer for recording to the computer. I have no idea what it'll cost but I do think it's well worth it to have this thing in "factory fresh" working order...

 

[A Reel Person]

I did that.

Tascam in LA won't mess with it. They'll probably swap the whole minidisc mech for any type of read/write problem, then ship the mechanism to be component repaired in Japan.

 

[mojorisen74]

lot of minidisc/md8 users out there just bored of hearing how people respond to atrack and that notorious compression thats not noticeable to people who dont believe what they read

I had an MD8 and unfortunatley the compression is noticable. My Bass drum sounded great in the monitors before recording them, after they were recorded during playback they lost alot umph because of the compression. Cymbals as well, nice and crisp through monitors, not as crisp during playback. Bought a fostex vf160 and couldn't beleive the difference in sound quality. What I heard before recording was there during playback.

 

[jorgyboy]

I used a Yamaha MD for quite a while. I think the mini disc format was quick, easy to use and sounded pretty good. It's too bad they've disappeared!

 

[TinNedd]

Im under the impression that the Yamaha MD8 does not record as well as the Yamaha MD4s because of something do whith the machines recording compression.

Iv not got around to using my MD4s in recent times cause of computer. I did pick up a few more used MD disc's just in case, they can be hard to come by. I would think the re-sale value of an multi track MD machine would not be too high when compared to what the lastest offerings are. But, if you got one by all means make use of it. Some of the features I did like were the MD4s's pitch control and the seperate outputs on the back.

 

[A Reel Person]

Im under the impression that the Yamaha MD8 does not record as well as the Yamaha MD4s because of something do whith the machines recording compression.

I'm not sure I've ever heard that theory.

 

[famous beagle]

I owned a Yamaha MD8, a Tascam 564, and a Sony MDM-X4 all at one point or another.

My favorite was the Yamaha, but not just because of the 8 tracks. If I remember correctly, the 564 was kind of clumbsy when it came to bouncing. You had to something like "bounce forward" or something, and I just remember it being more troublesome than on the Yamaha.

I can't really remember much about the Sony one.

And ... maybe this was something in all MD recorders, but the fact that once you recorded the first track of a song, you couldn't record past that point? That was kind of a pain.

Anyway, they were neat little machines --- kind of the middle ground between the cassette portastudios and the newer hard disk recorders with built-in effects.


Nothing beats those ol' cassette 4-track days though! What memories!

 

[A Reel Person]

Yeah,...

The Tascam 564 had the "bounce forward" function, an ingenious and exclusive feature where your 4-track bounce operation would create a new song, leaving the source tracks intact. I, for one, thought this was genious. It enabled you to go back to the source tracks and remix the bounce, if necessary.

The Yamaha MD8 would allow you to take 8 tracks full of data and bounce them down to either 1 or 2 target tracks on the same song, despite if the 2 target tracks already have data on them. This was a destructive bounce operation, but 8x2 bounce was part of the minidisc "magic", an exclusive MD8 feature. On the standard analog system you'd need to have 2 target tracks "empty", and they could not be part of the bounce-down operation, only to receive the bounced data off the other tracks.

The Sony I can't comment on. It looked comparable to the Yamaha MD4.

The Minidisc's 1st recorded track "time" delimiting the times of the entire song and other adjacent tracks was a quirk with minidisc. Earlier HD recorders had the same issue, in the likes of the Fostex FD4 and FD8, IIRC.

My PS5 and DP02CF memory recorders don't care about the length of the 1st track. They'll record any track to any length, despite the others. That's progress for'ya!

 

[famous beagle]

The Tascam 564 had the "bounce forward" function, an ingenious and exclusive feature where your 4-track bounce operation would create a new song, leaving the source tracks intact. I, for one, thought this was genious. It enabled you to go back to the source tracks and remix the bounce, if necessary.

The Yamaha MD8 would allow you to take 8 tracks full of data and bounce them down to either 1 or 2 target tracks on the same song, despite if the 2 target tracks already have data on them. This was a destructive bounce operation, but 8x2 bounce was part of the minidisc "magic", an exclusive MD8 feature. On the standard analog system you'd need to have 2 target tracks "empty", and they could not be part of the bounce-down operation, only to receive the bounced data off the other tracks.

The Sony I can't comment on. It looked comparable to the Yamaha MD4.

The Minidisc's 1st recorded track "time" delimiting the times of the entire song and other adjacent tracks was a quirk with minidisc. Earlier HD recorders had the same issue, in the likes of the Fostex FD4 and FD8, IIRC.

My PS5 and DP02CF memory recorders don't care about the length of the 1st track. They'll record any track to any length, despite the others. That's progress for'ya!

That's weird ... I don't remember the Yamaha's bounce as being destructive. I know you could record up to 99 takes of something. I thought you could that with bounces as well. Well .. I guess it would end up being destructive at some point, when you actually decided on the take you liked.

On the 564 though, you could only bounce forward 4 or 5 times though, correct? Because that was the song capacity of the unit, right?

 

[A Reel Person]

Yeah, true.

The Tascam 564 limited discs to 5 songs each, which made no sense. IIRC a later revision boosted that to 9, but I could be mistaken. It's been a while.

The Yamaha MD8 could fill up all 8 tracks, then bounce down all 8 to either 1 or 2 target tracks in the same song, thus rendering 2 of your source tracks destroyed by the bounce, which in the process become the destination tracks. If you chose to bounce 6 primary tracks to 2 target tracks, no tracks were destroyed in the process.

 

[famous beagle]

The Tascam 564 limited discs to 5 songs each, which made no sense. IIRC a later revision boosted that to 9, but I could be mistaken. It's been a while.

The Yamaha MD8 could fill up all 8 tracks, then bounce down all 8 to either 1 or 2 target tracks in the same song, thus rendering 2 of your source tracks destroyed by the bounce, which in the process become the destination tracks. If you chose to bounce 6 primary tracks to 2 target tracks, no tracks were destroyed in the process.

Yeah I think that's what I must have done (bounce 6 tracks to two empty ones), because I don't remember ever having to destroy tracks.

Or maybe I copied the source tracks to another song before bouncing, so I had them stored? I can't remember if that was possible on the Yamaha or not.

 

[Grayo]

Hi,

Sorry to butt in on this topic but you lads seem to know what you are talking about so perhaps you can give me soom advice if you don't mind.
I have a friend who uses a minidisk with backing tracks on as he's an entertainer in Benidorm. He has asked me how to transfer the backing tracks from his minidisk and install them on to his ipod. I would be grateful for any advice.

Thanks

Grayo

 

[A Reel Person]

No easy method.

If your minidisc player has the optical connector, find a CD recorder with the same input and transfer to CDR over optical. Then transfer the CDR audio into the 'puter to render mp3's.

Otherwise, use the minidisc's analog output and cable it up to your 'puter soundcard and record to wav (16/44.1/stero) files. Then use any number of utilities to convert wav files to mp3 files.

 

[Grayo]

Thanks for the advice i'll give it a go.

Cheers

Grayo

 

[Freya]

Whats really, really, annoying is that the minidisc data discs were just ordinary minidiscs formatted differently.

At one point there was such a thing as a mini disc computer drive and it was possible to copy minidisc data discs over the top of ordinary audio minidiscs and then they would work just fine as data discs.

If they had just put a format option in the multitrackers the second hand value would be a lot higher now I expect...

...but no doubt they wanted to keep their premium on data discs.

love

Freya

 

[A Reel Person]

Yeah, good point. You're probably right.

No Format function on MD multitrackers.

 

[niklasthedolphi]

Mini Disc is an inferior format.
Inferior to all analog and even inferior to RedBook.

It is, though, user-friendly and easy on editing for an end-user.

"dolph"

 

[pehjott]

bought a yamaha md8 a few days ago...compared to my tascam 488 II cassette recorder it wins and sounds more brilliant.the biggest advantages are the bouncing using all 8 tracks and of course recording 8 tracks at once, a thing i missed with my 488 II.

 

[A Reel Person]

Congrats!

.............