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Audio Palm

Podcasts to Minidiscs

I’m making another trans-Pacific flight in two weeks’ time, and I’ll want to have a lot of podcasts to listen to for the long trip. The problem is, the 256-MB SD card in my Palm Tungsten E isn’t large enough to hold the all of the mp3s that I need. So, I decided I could record a bunch of them onto minidisc. My minidisc recorder knows nothing about mp3s. It’s just an audio device. So I have to get my computer to play the mp3 files so that the minidisc recorder can record the resulting audio in real time. I do this while I sleep, so it’s not a problem.

The discs hold 74 minutes of audio in stereo mode, or twice that in mono mode. That’s 2 hours and 30 minutes, approximately. (The newer MDLP minidisc standard can hold 2X and 4X in stereo, but my recorder is too old to do that.)

I’ve already prepared the 2-hour long, four-episode series Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Future by Douglas Adams from the BBC. I’m not sure what will be next in my backlog of podcasts. But I’ve got about 37 episodes from the back catalogue of Evil Genius Chronicles from September to December 2004, that I haven’t listened to yet. In total, they take up 18 hours of playback time. I’ve been listening to these early shows of Dave’s (from August 2004) to track the evolution of podcasting. Where I’m at in the stack, he still hasn’t used the word “podcast”—it hadn’t been invented yet. I love the Evil Genius.

I’ll close by saying that, even though it’s limited to real-time transfer, I continue to love the minidisc format. It rocks!

One reply on “Podcasts to Minidiscs”

I do the same thing with many of my podcasts. I use real player to transfer them via USB connection. I do enjoy my minidiscs and the greatness of podcasts.

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