Minidisc and hiMD review

[Nicholas Thieberger]

Lots of people are asking  about the use of minidisc recorders. For
producing recordings that will endure and be useful for various kinds
of analysis, it seems that the proprietary compression of minidisc is
not appropriate. However, there is a new type of minidisc called HI
MD that appears to record in wav form, that is, in an uncompressed
format. This would be good. BUT, it is not so simple. In the
following review, forwarded from Linda Barwick, some of the issues
with HI MD are outlined.

http://www5.head-fi.org/forums/showthread.php?t=78472

of particular concern:

UPLOADING
  One of the biggest questions about Hi-MD is the upload capability.
Let me outline what it is:
  - Uploads are simply carried out through the same transfer window in
Sonicstage that you use to transfer music to Hi-MD.
  - All uploaded files, be they Hi-LP, Hi-SP or PCM are encrypted with
the OpenMG digital rights management.
  - You cannot burn uploaded files to Audio CD. You can burn them to
ATRAC-encoded CD's for playback in ATRAC Discmen.
  - No third-party programs to edit OpenMG encrypted files are
available at this time.
  - You cannot email the resulting .OMG file to other people as they
do not have the rights to play the file back.
  - You CAN create copies of your own recorded material to other
Hi-MD/MD discs, and of course you can listen to the files on your PC.
  The end result is that the upload facility is of diminished
usefulness in a practical context, and will be of a particular
disappointment to one of the major niche users of Minidisc... amateur
musicians. The only way you'll get recordings into Cubase et al will
be to play the sound in via analog in the old way, or to grab the WAV
stream internally on the PC as you play the sound back in real time.
This MAY change in future versions of Sonicstage, but it's not
guaranteed.