This looks to me like the last gasp from the Mini-Disc department at Sony. The company claims they are moving the MiniDisc™ a big step forward, with a new range of Hi-MD™ Walkman® digital music players.
With Hi-MD technology, users can record up to 45 hours of music at up to 100 times transfer speed on one disc, while still enjoying the extensive battery life, compact design and robustness for which MD players are recognized. Removable, re-recordable Hi-MD media provides music lovers with unlimited storage capacity to build an infinite library of their favorite songs.
The Hi-MD Walkman recorders incorporate the ATRAC3plus™ codec. The ATRAC3plus format is a high-quality audio compression technology that Sony developed to effectively reduce the size of audio files while preserving more of the sound quality. With ATRAC3plus compression, more audio files can be burned to Hi-MD media or for that matter, to a standard MiniDisc. Music can be compressed to 132, 105, 66, 64 or 48 kbps (kilobits per second), so you can store more music or record at higher fidelity. By compressing at 48 kbps, users can enjoy 45 hours of music on one Hi-MD disc or 13 hours of music on one standard, 80-minute MiniDisc.
Unless there is an excellent indexing system, and the system is reliable (not my experience with MiniDisc recordings), then you would be crazy putting 45 hours of music on one disc.
There is an excellent site for Mini Disc users at www.minidisc.org. Recommended
