If MD is to survive as a format, I think it's essential that it offers some
of the features becoming commonly available. It's good to see ATRAC bitrates
are becoming scalable - something MP3 has always had. For the spoken word,
high bitrate stereo is unnecessary.
I think MP3 at comparable bitrates to ATRAC offers similar audio quality.
LP2 and LP4 is nice but it may be too little, too late.
I'd like to see a MD that has these features:
High disk capacity. 640Mb maybe, backwardly compatible with the current
140Mb.
Multiple codecs in flash memory so they can be upgraded when necessary.
Provision for codecs to be loaded automatically from disk so disks would not
be dependent on codecs already in the player.
USB interface.
Capacities of some low bitrate codecs suitable for speech on a 140Mb disk
are:
Voxware RT24 at 8kHz Mono, at 300 bytes/sec - about 135 hours.
ACELP at 8kHz Mono, at 605 bytes/sec - about 67 hours.
ACELP at 11kHz Mono, at 1110 bytes/sec - about 35 hours.
MP3 at 16kbps Mono - about 20 hours.
David Smith
http://www.powerup.com.au/~dssmith
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