Ewan's Musings

Sony Minidisc and Podcasting

Yeah I'm the Cassandra who shouts MiniDisc isn't dead, it's just misunderstood. And in the last few weeks as I put in place things with TPN, and listening to podcasts from around the globe, I've found (unsurprisingly, with hindsight) that the whole MiniDisc system is almost perfect for Podcasting - not just listening, but the whole listening, recording, and making your own Podcast. Read on...

Live Recording
One of the unsung advantages of MiniDisc, is that (apart from some of the low end players) they all have recording facilities built in. And it's of broadcast quality. Not just for 'casting, but its used by mainstream media as well. I've picked up two high quality mics from Ebay, one tie-pin clip mic, and a second which is housed on a jack plug. Both of them give crystal clear quality sound.

Sony's updated to the MiniDisc range (Hi-MD support) has one headline feature, that of 1 gigabyte discs (so up to 45 hours playback or recording on one disc), but it's a second feature that's of most use to 'cast Authors. Sonic Stage has (since the NetMD machines) been able to download tracks to a MiniDisc over USB - cutting out the 'record real time' that you previously had to do. You could import your MP3's, or rip CD's nativly to the Sony ATRAC format and dump them onto your discs. With the Hi-MD machines, you can now upload tracks you have recorded on the MiniDisc. Sony have a second tool that sits along side Sonic Stage 2.3 that converts these uptrackedloaded tracks into a full fat wave file. And while an hour long wave file is huge, the quality is amazing.

Where 'casting looses the quality is scrunch a talk show down to a 48kbps MP3 file, so keeping the quality as high as possible at the top of the audio chain is very important. I also have the advantage that each interview is stored on a single disc (80p per disc), so everything is archived "Off-PC" as well.

Skype Recording
Just google for "recording a Skype call" and you'll see that the one tool that's really allowed cheap 'casting to take off is also the one tool holding a lot of people back. Recording an interview over Skype is non-trivial. Sure you'd think it'd be easy, but unless you've got a Mac, you're going to have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get a balanced recording, with both conversation sides at the same volume.

Well, forget recording the call on the PC, you've got a MiniDisc with a Line In socket. So all I do is re-route my speaker output cable from the big speakers into the MiniDisc. I then slap on a pair of headphones to monitor the recording (and hear both sides of the conversation) and hit record.

You do need to max the PC Microphone volume here, and have the wave output down at around 15%-20% to get the levels balanced, but that takes only a few minutes, and most people are happy to recite the alphabet to you as you set the levels.

Now just see the above to get the wave file on your PC.

Listening
It goes without saying that having Sonic Stage able to import a folder of MP3 files and then upload them to MiniDisc makes it a good 'cast listening machine. Of course it's not an Ipod so perhaps I should call it MiniDisCasting. In any case, a little hint. Don't upload at the maximum compression of ATRAC3 48K, go for ATRAC3 64K. The decoding MP3 and re-encoding as ATRAC is happy going to 64, but theres just too much loss in the MP3 when you go to 48K for ATRAC to fill in the gaps (ATRAC is a 'lossless' format).

Using ATRAC3 at 64K, you'll get 35 hours or so on one Hi-MD disc, or about 11 hours on a regular MiniDisc formatted in the Hi-MD format.

Now if only someone would convince Sony to give us command line control of the Sonic Stage transfer so we can make a plug-in to the RSS tools for an automatic transfer / sync. Sonic Stage 3 is debuting in April, it's not too late.