PRS and Mystery Shops and Other Boring Things

 More PRS allcoations received and hence back at The Casablanca Club for another live jazz night at the end of this month. This time a Wednesday night bash. 

PRS  DJ night this Friday at the Ocean Rooms (first time) -  late start finishing at 3am -  I wonder if any more young ladies want to...( leave it to the imagination).

Mystery shop-wise a pub visit and Pret on Thursday, upcoming visits to Pizza Express,Grosvenor Casino, and Wickes (well it was a higher fee this time).

Car survey from EMS after a two month gap as well. 

Loads of instore  jobs at Tesco Express via Margaret Wallace who is retiring this year. Official letter came in the post confirming it. I was the first to know about it but can now make it official. Will miss her as i always had good work from her. Friday in Croydon, then next week Hove, Polegate, Storrington and East Witttering.

Still no news from the solicitor about the property of our recently deceased Aunt. It was going to be put up for auction including all the furnishings. It has been months and not a word about what is happenig  and it is very frustrating. 

Nothing exciting as you can see!

Latest Set Up with an MD Player/Recorder

I hve now plugged my old Mini Disc player (a Sony) into my Pc set up so that i can record from loads of old mini discs (remember these, and the old DAC - diigtal audio casstette) into mp3 format. The mini disc is a totally encased 3" size disc that was meant to supercede cassettes,and i found them very useful transferring from old viny to this format ,and transferred cassettes to the format as well. As the player has a pre-amp it was simple to connect to the PC and now i have plugged the Bush MT1 turntable into the Mini Disc player as i can still directly record from vinyl to disc. I still have plenty of spare mini dsics at home anyway. Eventually all my old mini discs and casstetes will be digitised and anyone with a portable mini disc player still can have my mini discs once converted to mp3 format.



in essence,  MiniDisc (MD) is a magneto-optical disc-based storage device initially intended for storage of up to 80 minutes of digitalized audio. Today, in the form of Hi-MD, it has developed into a general-purpose storage medium in addition to greatly expanding its audio roots.

MiniDisc was announced by Sony in 1991 and introduced January 12,1992. The music format was originally based exclusively on ATRAC (which is mine) audio compression. Recently, the option of linear PCM recording was introduced to attain truly CD-quality recordings. MiniDiscs are popular in Japan as a digital upgrade to cassette tapes, but have not been as popular world-wide. CDR and mp3 seems to have supeceded this format elsewhere.

Why it lost
Like Betamax before it, MiniDisc is another proprietary Sony product, which meant that it didn't have widespread industry support and only a few manufacturers ever made hardware. CD was also well established by the time MiniDisc arrived, so there was very little interest in pre-recorded MiniDisc music.

Why it should have won
MiniDisc was fantastically versatile. You could buy pre-recorded music on the format or simply use your hi-fi to copy a CD to a blank disc. MiniDisc's hard outer case meant the surface of the disc was far less likely to become scratched and damaged over time.

One of the best things about the format is the size of the players and the media. Initially the hardware was quite bulky, but as time went on, portable player/recorders were developed that were just a little bit larger than a MiniDisc, which made them ideal portable music players.

The single factor that enabled MiniDiscs to be so small was the use of a lossy compression system developed by Sony called ATRAC. On MiniDisc it operated at 292Kbps, which is a considerable saving on the CD rate of 1,411.2Kbps, but music still sounded great. MiniDiscs also contained track information that allowed the player to display the artist name and song title on the built-in display.

Later on, further innovation came with the NetMD range, which allowed you to copy music on your computer to a MiniDisc at high speeds. MP3s would be transcoded in Sony's ATRAC format before being copied over to the MD recorder, and it was possible to use long-play modes to squeeze even more music on to the diminutive discs.

 Anyway so there you have it -  MD's in a nutshell!