Hi-MD Is Cool
This week's BDFL podcast was the first time I'd recorded using the Hi-MD Walkman I received for Christmas. It has a thick manual and does quite a bit more than the Walkman it's replacing. I have a pretty good handle on its interface and software now, and was able to record, edit, and encode the podcast in the following manner:
- Conducted my conversation with Scott via Skype, routed through my UB802 mixer; the Hi-MD was connected to the mixer output via its analog line in. It had a 1GB Hi-MD disc in and was set to record in PCM mode (which provides lossless CD-quality audio).
- Connected the Hi-MD unit to my computer via USB and used Sonicstage to bring the recording over to the computer digitally. About 820MB of data was transferred, and it took about 45 minutes. This is about 2x faster than the recording time of around 1.5 hours.
- The resulting file on the computer was wrapped with Sony's OpenMG DRM, but they recently released a WAV conversion tool that lets you convert original analog recordings to an unlocked WAV file. This worked pretty quickly.
- At this point, I edited and mastered the WAV file as I normally do in Sound Forge, and used the FB2K command-line converter with the LAME 3.96.1 DLL to create and tag a final 22KHz mono MP3 file for the podcast.
Even dealing with the DRM issue, this is still faster than transferring the recording over in real time in analog, and the quality of the recording is preserved in the process. The MZ-NHF800 has been enjoyable to use so far; I'm still scratching the surface of the NetMD-generation capabilities like group folders. It also supports a range of bitrates, so I'm testing different encoding & transcoding scenarios to see what I prefer. It gets a thumbs-up so far.