Korean Job Discussion Forums

itaewonguy · Joined: 25 Mar 2003

Just a curious thought.

ok so there I am driving in my car, I reach for my Cd collection of about 20 burnt cds and say to myself, damn I need to burn more cds..
Space is limited in the car and I cant be bothered carried around 200 cds like some of my friends have..
so I was thinking. DAMN the Apple IPOD can hold 30gigs of music..
thats about 7000 songs,, 300 albums..
just carry that small device with me connect it to my car stereo and BOBS my uncle!

so the question is people..
are we going to see an early end to CDR'S??

Walter Mitty · Joined: 27 Mar 2003 Location: Tokyo! ^.^

Gord · Joined: 25 Feb 2003

Plus CDRs can be moved around easily and easily replaced. Or what I have, a minidisc player in my truck. Easily moved, only a hell of a lot more durable.

An iPod lacks the durability you want in a vehicle as it could take many a tumble, as well as the convenience factor is gone as you have to pack it everywhere. Assuming you get a custom dashboard mount made for it, you've still got to haul it inside every time you want to add songs. Plus you can buy CD players that play MP3 files on a CD, so you can have 150 MP3 files on a CD to choose from, reducing those 200 CDs to 20.

The exact same thing would be what a friend of mine did, and what was mount an old computer in the car. Suddenly the care becomes a mobile MP3 player. Ba-Da-Boom, music problem solved.

Dan · Joined: 16 Jan 2003 Location: Sunny Glendale, CA

Not sure about SK, but in the US, MP3 CD players are becoming really popular for car stereos, so don't throw away them CDRs just yet

jaebea · Joined: 21 Sep 2003 Location: SYD

From what I can see, there seem to be more solid state (ie Persistent RAM, etc) players in personal MP3 in Korea. Mainly due to battery life (very very few or zero moving parts), size (no motors or big platters to deal with) and price (Korea manufactures a large percentage of the world's solid state gear if I remember. This fact could be outdated).

But with that in mind, I think for car audio, you'd want a headunit that can play these following formats.

a) CD-R : obvious
b) CD-RW : Not so obvious but a life saver. Say you have a CD full of your current favourite chart hits. On a regular CD-R, you can only write once, which means you'll have obsolete CD's in a matter of weeks, if not days. The current price of CD-R media (less than 40c AU if you buy sufficient bulk) sort of negates this, but CD-RW means you can just wipe clean and reburn with your current crop of fave tracks without juggling a zillion CD's. Convenience factor = 10.

You must note that CD-RW's use a darker dye on the writing surface, with less reflectivity than retail Audio CD's and CD-R's. Some players than can read CD-R cannot read CD-RW. *Most* current CD headunits will be able to read CD-R/RW but it would be worth checking.

c) MP3 : MP3 CD's (particularly MP3 CD-RW's) would be a great solution to your audio problems in the car. You can dump about 150 songs (depending on file size) per CD, and you can change the contents on the RW's for quite a long time. I don't know about 200 songs though.. my MP3's tend to be larger than 3.5 megabytes. I guess it depends on what you listen to. Overall you can fit approximately 700 megs of data onto a CD, so it equates to a lot of music.

Since you already have a CD burner, it would also be a lot cheaper than an iPod (as sexy as these things are). A decent head unit (with MP3/CD-R/RW) will cost around 250 000 won as a starting point. I recommend all the big brands besides Clarion. I haven't used these at all but I've heard some shifty reviews. Pioneer, JVC and Alpine are good bets.

Hope this post helps.

jae.

mack the knife · Joined: 16 Jan 2003 Location: standing right behind you...

Minidisc is still the way to go. If you haven't figured this out yet, hear me now and think about it later. You can fit the PERFECT amount of tunes on them, and they're yours forever (unlike MP3). And, you won't be dickin' around for hours trying to find that ONE song you want to hear.

Remember the dorks who bought those CD carousels back in the days that could hold like, 300 CD's or something? How retarded.

Dan · Joined: 16 Jan 2003 Location: Sunny Glendale, CA

anyone who thinks MDs are still viable has his nose too far up Japan's ass.

Gord · Joined: 25 Feb 2003

Dan · Joined: 16 Jan 2003 Location: Sunny Glendale, CA

MDs are NOT durable at all, very sensitive, and expensive. so much so that for the same price, you can buy 5 CD players for the price of one MD recorder.

MDs are a dead technology, time to switch over the dark side of music

Gord · Joined: 25 Feb 2003

The Lemon · Joined: 11 Jan 2003

CD/MP3 players are the way to go. Sure, they're a little bit bigger than MD players, but the 150+ songs on a CD thing can't be beat. When I go away on month-long trips, I only need to take one CD with me. I don't need to open the player the whole month, and the CD never gets scratched.

And when I get sick of the songs, I can erase the 1000w CD-RW and make a new compilation. To think that only four years ago I'd spend hours on hours making mix tapes..

SarcasmKills · Joined: 07 Apr 2003 Location: Seoul

I loves my iPOD... LOVES my iPOD...

jaebea · Joined: 21 Sep 2003 Location: SYD

The recent MDLP innovation and Sony's NetMD format have breathed a whole lot of new life into the MiniDisc format.

Up until MDLP, users could only fit 74/80 minutes of audio onto an MD. Remeber that MiniDisc uses ATRAC compression, which is a lossy compression technique like MP3. MDLP basically enabled people to downsample audio in order to fit more, which was great for a whole lot of applications. You could record 4 hours of lectures when quality could be sacrificed, or double the recording ability if you wanted to play music. It didn't sound perfect, but it's still better than 128kbps, which is what a lot of MP3's are in.

NetMD was the biggest draw card for me. I've been out of the MD loop since my MZR-55, but the ability to do fast recording at 2x MDLP is a very attractive prospect. NetMD enables users to dump their MP3 collection onto MD, with the PC application doing all the correct downsampling and titling. It also solved the biggest negative about MD (in my opinion), which was real time recording, like the cassette tapes of old.. :)

I still don't think you could beat CD-R/RW MP3 for in car audio however.

Just my 2c.

jae.

eamo · Joined: 08 Mar 2003 Location: Shepherd's Bush, 1964.

I've used MD for portable music since 1997.

My previous Sharp 702 and my current Sony MZ-N1 netMD have always worked perfectly.

netMD is sweet.

I just think MD is sexy and the ultimate flexible recording format. It's nice to call round to a friends house and record a couple of his CDs with nothing more than your MD portable and an optical cable.

I do burn some CDs now and then. Mostly for VCD though. Rarely music.

The iPOD looks good but I find people who use devices with big storage don't know what to listen to. Same goes for MP3-CD. Too many files on one disc is just bewildering.

mack the knife · Joined: 16 Jan 2003 Location: standing right behind you...

A buddy of mine who was a TOTAL CD advocate recently caved in after years of fighting the future and admitted that it was time to do the MD thing. Why?

a) portability

b) as I mentioned before...each disk stores the PERFECT amount of songs.

c) MDs are HIGHLY DURABLE. Whoever told you otherwise needs to have his/her head examined. I've dropped mine several times WHILE CYCLING, and it's no worse for wear. Try THAT with a CD player (NO, you'd better not, actually).

d) MP3 players are useless, unless you're the kind of dork who a) keeps gigs of songs on your hard drive or b) dyes his/her hair any of the colors of the rainbow

e) there is nothing better on the horizon....or is there? (queue twilight zone music)