VHD decode project

[Mike Watterson]

Mini-disc was crippled by Sony DRM. Too late they brought out a higher quality DRM free version.

Are you sure about this?

The only form of DRM that I'm aware of for MD is SCMS, which was present on all domestic digital audio formats. It permits one digital copy to be made, but not subsequent generations. So perfectly fine for making digital copies of CDs to MDs, for example. You just can't make a digital copy of the MD. Not that you'd want to, because you'd be cascading a lossy data-rate reduction codec that is designed for single-pass use.

They deliberately made digital transfer one way for years. Even a minidisc drive in a 2002 laptop couldn't read audio back.

You had to use a Sony program to digitally copy a file (or CD?) to a player's disk and delete that via the program to be allowed to write it to a fresh disc. If you made your own recording you could only copy it to PC via analogue. However it was popular with journalists and radio stations despite the artificial limitations.

The last models removed all the restrictions and offered better quality modes. But it was too late. I still have a Sony Net-MD somewhere. I looked at a philips DCC heavily discounted because discontinued, but it was still x2 price of a decent cassette portable and strangely was a playback only model (for Digital).

CDR wasn't very portable compared to Minidisc and no use as a portable live recorder. It was really Flash and portable 1.8" HDD players that saw the end of portable cassette and Minidisc. Even CDR MP3 players in cars seemed to get little use (I still have a Kenwood Car Radio/CD that plays MP3 on CD, but the CD bit never used, instead the 3.5mm aux jack).

Most use of minidisc was either portable replacing cassette mix tapes, (hardly anyone bought the pressed commercial disc) or journalists on local papers or local radio. Portable HDD (1.8", a few 2.5") and Flash replaced minidisc for those. Minidisc was 1992 to early 21st C. The CD-R came out earlier than minidisc and the writing drives gradually fell in price and almost standard on PCs and laptops by 1999. It was a different use and only had a brief window on cheap portable CD players before those were eclipsed by HDD PMP and Flash. Both Creative and iRiver had players before the iPod. The iPod succeeded due to iTunes having the 99c / 99p per track deal. MS Zune (a week after November 2006 Vista) was never going to make it. The iPod was well established due to iTunes and then in 2007 the iPhone succeeded due to the Carrier data pricing deals.

I used the NetMD Minidisc till I got an Archos PMP in February 2006 with 160 G HDD and video screen (which did audio recording, I never had the video camera for it), it's dead, but I've had a 256G SD card in my phone and a 32G SD card 3 phones before that (A Sony-Ericsson Z1 with Android 5).

I have a Zoom N4n Handy Recorder now for 4 ch loss-free recordings for maybe 6 hours on AA Alkaline. Just an 8G SD card as startup is x4 slower with 32G! I pop the SD card into the laptop or workstation and edit with Audacity. Beats the razor blade, block and slicing tape I started with in the late 1960s. The time code editing with VCRs was in Belfast BBC before they had it with audio. Analogue Audio days; cut up original or a degraded copy?
Then in 1990s I got my first PAL NLE (Adobe Premiere SW) but only enough storage for about 10 minutes of source. Analogue overlay on looped through VGA on the card, with PAL composite and Y/C inputs and outputs. Next level was SD WS digital camcorder and Firewire. Now my DSLR works as an HD camcorder with an edit-friendly mode and the 256 G SD card.

[Mike Watterson]

SonicStage and  OpenMG Jukebox were horrible. I'm sure the version of NetMD SW I had would only read direct from CD to MD and didn't allow HDD files of any type to be recorded. You'd have to use the Analogue audio in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SonicStage

Even the proprietary Flash card on the Sony Digital 8 uses the evil OpenMG DRM system (MG = Magic Gate). Being a Media as well as HW company crippled Sony, culminating in the CD root kit fiasco (avoided if you had no Auto Run, which was the stupidest thing MS put in Win95),

Sony OpenMG DRM used on many Sony Products: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMG

Side effects include user complaints of being locked out of their own original recordings, unable to transfer them to the computer.
…
A Wall Street Journal article that reviewed the Sony VAIO Music Clip player in 2000 noted that the OpenMG and MagicGate technologies "treats users like criminals"

[Mark Hennessy]

Yes, as I said, no DRM with MD apart from SCMS, which was used for all consumer recoding products with an S/PDIF interface and definitely not unique to MD.

SCMS is not really DRM at all. Remember - DRM is to provide a mechanism for a license to be associated with the content. SCMS does not provide that mechanism. It's too simplistic to count as true DRM.

DRM only came about with products using SonicStage. By that time, the writing was on the wall for MD, and they sold in tiny numbers to people who must have been in denial about the future of MD. I've never seen anything NetMD in the flesh - as I say, it was just too late, plus the fact you couldn't play the discs on earlier machines was a bad mistake given the ratio of original ATRAC to ATRAC3 machines out there. As for data drives, they sold in absolutely tiny numbers. Something else I've never seen in the flesh. What was the point when you had Zip discs, followed by solid state flash? As for reading the audio off an MD, you'd need a software ATRAC decoder, which Sony chose not to provide. As with SCMS, that's not DRM.

If you recorded an MD via analogue, you could then make a copy of that via S/PDIF. I think the copyright flag was set, so you couldn't make subsequent copies. I don't think all SCMS-enabled machines did that - without access to a digital stream, how could the recorder know if it was a commercial recording or something you'd made yourself, so why assume it was copyrighted? So that was a bit naughty. I don't know if all MD machines did that. To be honest, there was no real advantage to digital over analogue - it's still a real-time transfer, and as I said, the quality of the converters was more than good enough by the mid/late '90s.

Ultimately, it's no wonder Sony were cautious about all this given that they sell content. They've definitely made mistakes over the years, but most of those were in a whole different league compared to the minor operational limitations of MD.

I didn't say that CD-R was portable. But then portable MD recorders weren't brilliant either - it was far too easy to knock the laser off when writing. Journos were forever losing material. MD was best suited as a cassette deck replacement in a home hi-fi setup, and playback only for portable or car use.

Yes, I have a Zoom too. The H5.

Yes, CD-R might've come about at the end of the '80s, but it wasn't until the mid 90s that the price fell below $1000, and perhaps the early 2000s that they were a reliable proposition. I ignored CD-R during the late '90s while all my friends made at least 1 coaster with literally every attempt to write a disc (and then battle to get the drive replaced under warranty because the lasers failed within months). These were people who knew what they were doing, not random non-technical types. CD-R needed PCs to reach a certain level (plus other factors in the drives themselves) before the dreaded "buffer under-runs" were banished to history. Even when drives were cheap, I only rarely bothered to burn discs - USB memory sticks were now bigger than CD-R so apart from piracy, there was no need to use them. I have no affinity or affection for CD-R. I just got on with making MDs with 100% success.

But talk about CD-R and Zooms is getting away from the point about DRM on MD, and to be honest, that's so far away from the thread topic that I wish I hadn't posted it. But it's simply not accurate to say "MD was crippled by DRM". I did refresh my memory about MD - although that wasn't hard, as I was a big fan of it back in the day and still use it today - before posting.

[Mike Watterson]

The portable players and NETMD only had analogue out, deliberately. I've never seen other than portable MD and NetMD and none had digital out.
I've only seen S/PDIF used on TV/DVD/BD surround sound decoders/ amps in the home. Pointless with stereo in the home. No doubt studios might be different.

MD was most used as portable. It was pointless on home HiFi as CDs were better quality. People used mix tapes in car and portable and MD replaced the portable cassette only for very few people.
The MD as a non-portable in the living room was a tiny proportion. I've only seen those in magazines, yet I saw a home 8-track once! But at one time every local radio, student campus radio and local paper had folk with portable MD. Seriously better than cassette. Few would have used the reel to reels in BBC etc, like Uhers or similar. Much bigger anyway. The original version of the Walkman was not called a Walkman, made for journalists. Wikipedia omits that. But the MD was smaller, less obtrusive and better quality.

I never had an issue recording with mic and NetMD in pocket, I never heard of the student station or local radio guys I knew having an issue.

Anyway, CD-R MP3 and MD were both doomed.

[Mark Hennessy]

For full-size (430mm) non-portables:

Every MD recorder I've seen has S/PDIF in/out in some form. No-doubt there are exceptions, but I've yet to see one.

For CD players, the cheaper models omitted S/PDIF outputs, but once you'd moved up the range you'd get it. Usually with a gaudy logo on the front panel in the early days.

Every DVD player - even the very cheap ones IME - had S/PDIF out.

Likewise, going back in time, all DAT machines came with S/PDIF in/out. At least, I've yet to see one that didn't. I think the same applies to DCC, although there weren't a huge number of those.

So-called "outboard" DACs were all the rage for a good while, and most of those had multiple inputs. In a way, S/PDIF was a gift to manufacturers, as they now had a new product they could sell at quite a premium. At the time, DACs were not the mature product we take for granted today, and there were variations in sound quality between CD players as a result. So it definitely made some sense - for a while. By the mid '90s, DACs were considered mature, and they had to go chasing other unicorns in the pursuit of sales, hence upsampling (not oversampling) DACs and other such exotica.

As for AV receivers, that's obviously about multichannel. The S/PDIF interface has a bit to signify linear PCM audio or something else. That "something else" is most often Dolby Digital, which has to be compressed because the S/PDIF interface continues to run at the same throughput. DVD players will have the option to choose whether the S/PDIF outputs linear stereo or DD (or DTS).

So anyway, given that, of course you'd expect to hook up your digital gear, well, digitally. And that's why SCMS was invented, to allow legitimate/legal copying for personal use, but to hopefully deter digital quality distribution, which isn't legal.

Some early equipment, including Sony's first DAT machine - the DTC-1000ES from 1987 - didn't have SCMS. So while it saw and paid attention to the copyright flag, it didn't know about the generation flag. So you couldn't even make the 1 digital copy that SCMS allows, meaning you were forced to use analogue for pretty much everything. Unfortunately, that machine had a less-than-perfect ADC that did noticeably degrade the sound quality (they were a bit variable from sample to sample). I gave mine away via the forums over a decade ago.

I said "in some form" earlier, meaning either S/PDIF or TOSLINK. The same thing apart from the physical layer, obviously. My first MD machine only had a TOSLINK input and my CD player only had S/PDIF, so I couldn't record digitally unless I'd bought a media converter (easy and cheap today, not so back then). I did buy another deck which had both inputs which solved that. It was second-hand, and it cost less than a media converter did back then.

MD was most definitely not pointless at home (it might have been for you, but obviously that isn't true for everyone). It was meant to be a cassette replacement, and it did that job admirably. And while CD is technically better, clearly, by the time ATRAC got to version 4 (e.g. MDS-JE500, etc), I couldn't hear a difference between the CD and the MD. It really was that good. Though earlier generations were not so transparent, especially the first-gen machine I heard at launch. I probably played MDs at home about as much as I played CDs back in the day.

I also had an MD head unit in the car for many years. I did have a portable player, but hardly ever used it. So portable MD was pointless - for me. Amongst my friends and colleagues, I saw hardly any portables, nearly all were hi-fi decks. One friend used a portable MZ-R35 (I remember the model as I have one up in the attic) to record the gigs he did, but like the ones the journos used, it didn't cope well with vibration. That's reminded me - some in local radio did go back to Uhers until the Nagras came along. One poor lady couldn't because after years of carrying Uhers around, she had terrible problems with her shoulders. Just the thought of all those D cells makes mine ache in sympathy!

For a while I had a DAC which allowed me to remove all variables from the comparison. So by making a digital recording, then playing back digitally both the original CD and the MD copy, I could switch between them on the DAC, thus removing the converters in the MD and CD machines, and hearing just the effects of ATRAC. V4 and V4.5 never ceased to amaze me. Sometimes I'd think that I'd noticed an ATRAC artefact, only to discover that it was on the original recording but I'd simply never noticed it before. In a way, this subtracted from my enjoyment of MD. I had to learn to stop over-listening and just enjoy it.

Sorry, Jeffrey. I'd split these posts out, but I'm not sure how best to do it. The original topic is definitely an interesting one, but I guess it was never going to stay on topic.

[ppppenguin]

Mark, don't worry about it. We can come vaguely back to topic by wondering how much material there is out there on obsolete formats and whether there are enough machine hours available to recover it all.

If any big stashes of Quadruplex tapes turn up, possibly in Russia, (they made copies of the machines) it's unlikely that enough head hours exist. It's unlikely that anything like that will turn up in the UK. I know of a "sleeping" pile of 300+ quad tapes but understand that they should all have been previously recovered and wiped. They aren't stored in good conditions and I doubt it's worth the effort and head hours of even sampling them.

[Mike Watterson]

Mark, don't worry about it. We can come vaguely back to topic by wondering how much material there is out there on obsolete formats and whether there are enough machine hours available to recover it all.

Certainly a problem. I found you can't trust the labels and also viewing just the start and thinking, content I don't care for, doesn't reveal anything about the rest of the tape.

I guess replacement heads for most drums are unavailable and I seem to remember someone breaking heads in the workshop. Some drums used a cunning optical tool/microscope that viewed both heads at the same time for alignment. Makers of later machines supplied a top half of the drum with heads pre-mounted. I'd imagine the special tools and expertise to fit bare heads to drums 40 to 60 years later is rare even if heads are found. Soon be the 70th Anniversary of Quadruplex (2026?) and Helical maybe 4 years later? Makes me feel old.

[ppppenguin]

There may be one company in the USA still rebuilding Quadruplex heads and drums. At a price.

Since Quadruplex was first shown at NAB 1956 we are indeed approaching the 70th anniversary. I think the first helical scan VTR was in 1959 but not 100% certain.