From marmoset Sent Sun, Jun 14th 1998, 01:54
On Sat, 13 Jun 1998 19:33:57 -0400 xxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx.xxx (Christopher Fahey) wrote: >Let me try to understand this: Mini Discs have some kind of encoding on them >which tells the playermachine the sequence the tracks are to be played? And >Gescom constructed this sequence in such a way that the head has to move a >lot between songs? OK, I'm going to give you a drastic oversimplification, but I'm lazy and facile and have places to go, so it'll have to do. ;) Recordable minidiscs are random access devices, like hard drives. As such, they store data in blocks and keep track of the location of blocks of data (in this case ATRAC encoded sound) in a central index. The practical upshot of this is that a single musical recording can be spread all over an MD (in the same way that a large file on your hard drive can be in noncontiguous sectors all over the platters) You can achieve fragmentation on a recordable minidisc the same way you do on a hard drive -- by doing lots of saving and deleting and editing. Minidisc recorders make this particularly easy, since you can divide and combine bits of various songs right from the front panel. Mastering from a disc like this would give you the effect Gescom seem to have acheived. BTW, I take it this means the Gescom MD has actually been released. Does anyone know of an online shop that has it in stock? >That's cool. Sure is. :) -d.w.