the flexi disc made its first (and last) appearance in Spectrum, accompanying an article entitled “Voice signals: bit-by-bit,” written by Jon W. Bayless, S. Joseph Campanella, and A.J. Goldberg. The piece provided an overview of the emerging field of voice digitization, which the authors suggested might alleviate the stress placed on global telecommunications networks by increased demand for long-distance and overseas phone calls. It was a prescient prediction, given that analog telephones are close to becoming extinct today. //

Most of the article is devoted to technical descriptions of these competing methods, but the authors realized that a written summary could not fully convey the experience of listening to digitized voices. As a result, they collaborated with colleagues at academic, military, and industrial laboratories to record samples of various speech digitization techniques. The recording lasts just under six minutes and contains fourteen audio excerpts, each consisting of a few sentences that were generated using different methods and sampling rates. The resulting passages are frequently nonsensical, but the words themselves are less important than any noise or distortion resulting from the digitization process.

This flexi disc is, in effect, an audio time capsule preserving the state of speech digitization research in the early 1970s. //

There is something elegantly recursive about watching this flexi disc revolve on the turntable and hearing the resulting stream of sample sentences. After all, this is a digital video of an analog record that contains samples of digitized human speech. Variations of the PCM and vocoder techniques that are being demonstrated here are still used to encode audio signals today.

Beyond its significance as an artifact of the early days of digital audio, this flexi disc is also a reminder of the ongoing value of libraries and archives to 21st century researchers. Databases like IEEE Xplore allow users to review a vast amount of scientific and technical literature, but they are not comprehensive. There are still plenty of books and journals that have never been scanned, not to mention multimedia materials that might be more complicated to digitize or distribute. Whether one considers audio recordings or scarcely-held publications, sometimes there is just no substitute for consulting the original source.

UCA202 INTERNALS: The UCA202 uses a highly integrated Burr Brown/TI PCM29xx CODEC chip. As mentioned earlier, they’re nearly $6 each in 2000 piece quantities. With most everything integrated into a single chip, it makes the implementation harder to screw up. The chip has a delta-sigma DAC, oversampling digital filter, and is rated for 93 dB of dynamic range and 0.005% THD+N. The PCM2902 Datasheet has more info.  A classic 4558 op-amp is the headphone amp and another pair of op-amps handle line in/out duties. The power supply looks to be reasonably well filtered.

Search TOSLINK in outputs

Web MiniDisc is an online cross-platform web app based on a port of Linux-Minidisc to TypeScript (netmd-js on GitHub). Requires a Chromium-based browser.

• Click the icon next to the model number of your MD recorder to access
  • “Refresh” to refresh the list of tracks on the MiniDisc
  • “Rename Disc” to assign a title to your MiniDisc
  • “Wipe Disc” to erase the disc
  • “Exit” to exit Web MiniDisc
  • Drag MP3, FLAC, or WAV files to the web browser window to record them on the MiniDisc. When you do this, you'll be prompted to choose between SP, LP2, and LP4 modes for your recording. You'll probably want SP, which is the highest quality; LP2 and LP4 let you record more content at the expense of some audio quality. SP is also compatible with all MD-capable audio equipment.
  • Play, skip tracks, or stop playback of the currently inserted MiniDisc using the transport buttons along the bottom of the window.

Recording takes some time, but it does occur faster than audio to audio or optical to audio dubbing (The MZ-N910 or MZ-N920 seems to have the fastest recording time).

minidisc community portal
Tracking the format since 1995

Tenacity is an easy-to-use, cross-platform multi-track audio editor/recorder for Windows, macOS, Linux and other operating systems and is developed by a group of volunteers as open-source software. ///

[fork of Audacity]

No matter the file type, these free audio editors have you covered

1. Audacity

2. Ocenaudio

3. Ashampoo Music Studio

4. Audiotool

5. Acoustica

If you want to record or meter what you are hearing over your speakers/headset then you may not find the option not available. By default in Windows the ‘What U Hear’ or ‘Stereo Mix’ input is disabled.

You will need to un-hide and enable recording options. If you are using a Creative Sound Blaster sound card this option will be called "What U Hear" if you are using another audio device such as Realtek on-board or generic sound devices this option will be called "Stereo Mix".

Right-click over the speaker icon.

Click ‘Open Sound Settings’.

Click ‘Sound Control Panel’ as above.

On Windows 10 this takes you to Settings as above.

Click on "Sound Control Panel"

On older Windows you go straight to the original Sound Control Panel as below.

1. You should now have the old Sound Control Panel open.

2. Go to the "Recording" tab.

3. Right click over any source and check the ‘Show disabled devices’ option.

4. Now that the hidden options are visible, right click on each of them and click on enable.

5. Right click on the What U Hear or Stereo Mix source and click on ‘Set as default device’.

6. Once the device is set as default you will be able to use the "What U Hear"/"Stereo Mix" option in your recording or metering applications to record or monitor the audio you are currently hearing over your speakers or headset.

The brouhaha started just a few months ago when Audacity was bought by the Muse Group, the company behind equally popular music software like MuseScore, which is also open source, and Ultimate Guitar. So far, Audacity remains open source (and can’t really be changed into proprietary software in its current form), but that doesn’t mean that Muse Group can’t do some pretty damaging changes. Those changes come in the form of the new privacy policy that was just updated a few days ago, a policy that now allows it to collect user data.

As a desktop application with no core online functionality, Audacity never had any need to “phone home” in the first place. Now the privacy policy says that the new company does collect data and does so in a way that’s both over-arching and vague, most likely by design. For example, it says that it collects data necessary for law enforcement but doesn’t specify what kind of data is collected.

There are also questions regarding the storage of data, which is located in servers in the USA, Russia, and the European Economic Area. IP addresses, for example, are stored in an identifiable way for a day before being hashed and then stored in servers for a year. The new policy also disallows people under the age of 13 from using the software, which, as FOSS Post points out, is a violation of the GPL license that Audacity uses.

Larry Langford is owner and chief engineer of WGTO(AM/FM) in South Bend, Ind.

Larry Langford: I love the RCA 77-DX but let’s be real, who can afford that sweet but expensive and delicate broadcast icon? Aside from it making you feel like a “real broadcaster,” use of such expensive units like that are more emotionally based than technically necessary for great audio!

The more realistic answer? I like the newer cheaper mics, as the FET capsules do a great job for typical on-air voice, and the prices are very reasonable. I like the performance and pricing of the MXL imports, the MXL 770 goes for 80 bucks and the MXL 990 is about a hundred.

RW: How about for remotes and specialty applications?

Langford: For mics that are going outside, I want something that is a bit more rugged and does not need phantom power. The Electro-Voice 635 has always been my omni favorite in the street, and the Shure SM58 for cardioid. You can’t kill them and they are cost-effective.

RW: Tips to share or misconceptions to address?

Langford: I try to teach folks that no radio station ratings have ever been tied to the mic used in the studio.

Years ago some stations went way overboard on studio mics. NBC-owned stations used 77-DXs for all DJ operations, and I know WIND in Chicago used Neumann U 87s for AM announce work!

While certain mics can be tied to certain time periods as the “standard” — EV 666, Sennheiser 421 and EV RE20 —nowadays there are many inexpensive choices that will do very well in podcasts, broadcasts and general voice recording.

My advice: Put money into the mixer and processing. The MXLs are dirt-cheap, sound fine and if you want to change after a couple of years, you can toss them and not feel you have thrown out a piece of gold.

When the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul was built in the 6th century, it was the largest building in the world, an engineering marvel. And the unique acoustics inside inspired composers to write 10 centuries worth of religious music specifically to be sung there. Then the Ottoman Empire invaded in 1453, and the Hagia Sophia became a mosque. Choral music was banned, even the music of BJ Leiderman, who writes our theme music. And the sound of the Hagia Sophia was forgotten until now. Sam Harnett of The World According to Sound podcast has the story.

The hand-made microphones from our craft workshop are unlike anything else you've seen or heard. We combine state-of-the-art sound quality with playfully eclectic design– the perfect recipe for the creative performer.

Cassettes and vinyl are cool again, so what about MiniDisc? Sony’s pint-sized digital format hit the market in 1992, but failed to make much of a splash until around a decade later.

Despite ultimately losing market shares to flash-based MP3 players, MiniDisc has seen something of a revival. Transferring music from your computer to a MiniDisc recorder is also now easier than ever.
What Is MiniDisc?

Sony came up with the MiniDisc after the Digital Audio Tape (DAT) format failed to take off with consumers. The company went head-to-head with Philips’ Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) and won the initial battle (the DCC was discontinued in 1996).

MiniDisc was first conceived in the mid-1980s but wasn’t commercially available until a decade later. It took even longer for the format to see mainstream adoption outside of Japan. After Sony relaunched the format on the U.S. market in 1998, it finally became profitable around 2000.