MD suffers significantly from generational degradation. By the the third generation, it's easy to hear the degradation, in the form of warble and smeared dynamic attack. Remember, each generation discards 80% of the information! I advise against even a second-generation copy, unless the source is very hard to find. You'll just end up re-doing the work later, until you finally have a first-generation copy. Don't waste your time handling second-rate copies. Instead, get better at tracking down traders or CD distributors.
I have gotten rid of almost all my tapes, and practically all of my records. My tape deck actually broke, for the last time, and I threw it away. I have a lot of home studio cassettes to mix down to MD, and some special compilations from a friend, that I need to mix down. And I'm keeping some radio shows on cassette, as backup master tapes. I need to find how to store these safely, shielded magnetically.
>My problem is that I like to support local musicians, and they almost always have stuff on cassette, and almost never on CD (though that's slowly changing). I suppose I can just buy a tape and make one MD copy and store away the cassette.
Yes, I recommend that. MD has enormous advantages in ergonomics, and in sound, too: a major problem with tapes is *unreliable* sound; a tape might sound good one day on one machine, but sound bad another day on another machine (especially after pressing the tape against a speaker!) This is because tape sound quality shifts depending on the combination of azimuth (playback head alignment), dynamic noise reduction setting, and equalization. I'm serious about the last set of variables; my MDs always sound like the best-case playback of the tape. The copy literally sounds better than the master, during most playback sessions, because it captures the best-case playback conditions. When copying a tape to MD, I check the azimuth to get maximum treble (*huge, huge* difference!), I make sure the Dolby setting is correct (to balance hiss, noise pumping, and treble dynamics), and I send the signal through a 10-band equalizer to normalize the response. This makes the MD sound better than the tape typically sounds, as well as far more ergonomic.
I got rid of my vinyl copy of Hendrix: Cry of Love. I made a great MD copy first. What a great album! I put the MD on Repeat in my MD player on my belt, and listened to it with bass boost and Sony 817 earbuds all during a trip, until my ears suddenly hurt (fatigued not from volume or peakiness, but sheer duration). MDs enable you to capture an ideal playback of a tape or record, then have extremely ergonomic, portable playback of that ideal recording session.
Yes, local bands and friends etc. are still using tape... it's crazy. One current music magazine issue comes with a tape. But the news is out that tape is dead; just look in any record store. Everyone has a tape deck but I don't think anyone really likes tape anymore; it's on the chopping block and everyone is starting to become conscious of this. CDs are so much better sounding, ergonomic, and reliable, and "digital recording" is starting to enter people's consciousness at least in a vague way. Tape is getting totally slammed in the home studio magazines, I mean really slammed! Reviewers report that the expo floor is remarkably devoid of *any* tape-based recording gear, for pro and home studios! This is a major shift; all new studio gear is digital disk based, no longer tape based.
A major reason I turned against tape is home 4-track decks: I poured lots of *time* into home studio recordings, and the results were sonically low-quality though I am really good at managing tape recording. Between dropouts, hiss, and splash/distortion, I firmly decided: either use better, high-fidelity recording gear, or don't waste your time (concentrate on other aspects of musicianship instead, and use a genuine recording studio).
I think today we are hitting critical point where tape takes a big dive. Reality check: when boomboxes at the chain drugstore have MD rather than tape decks, then I would say that tape is dead. I can't believe how many new car head units and boomboxes have tape decks. With dropping MD equipment prices, and blanks prices, and with increasing CD prices, we're all set for a sudden shift from tape to MD and maybe to CD-R. (But CD-R is not nearly as ergonomic to record as MD, and CD-R blanks' prices have been deliberately inflated, and CD-R's aren't nearly so portable as MD.)
I will be transferring some good mix tapes and good, rare vinyl albums to MiniDisc. I will eq them to normalize them and get good results in typical headphones or speakers. I will edit, reduce, and label the tracks. I will keep my tape deck and turntable, but I will store them in the closet, for use only as 1-time source extractors for creating MD copies. The only playback media I will use are CD and MD; I won't actually listen to cassette tapes or vinyl records.
I have doubts about spending time trading MD recordings. It's fun, but it takes too much time. I continue to buy many CDs, especially now that I've found how to track down any album via special ordering, mail ordering, Web sites, and international CD catalogs and databases.
The price-setting conspirator big 6 record labels met and did price-setting and all agreed to raise U.S. prices by $1. For example, Rolling Stones' _Satanic Majasty's Request_ now costs $18, which we Americans consider outrageously overpriced. This is good news for MD promotors, in a way: the higher CD prices are, the greater will be the interest in making unauthorized digital copies of CD's, thus we will see an increase of interest, in the U.S., in MD, due to these jacked-up prices. Some older albums are still only $9.99 (new) in the U.S. There are no rental stores in the U.S., unlike Japan. In Japan and Europe, CDs cost $30-$50 US dollars, which is why MD succeeded there but not in America, yet. Americans have never heard of CD rental.
If my time is worth $30-$50 per hour, with CD's priced at only $10-$18 here in the U.S., it's most effective for me to buy CD's rather than record and label and mail MD's. Hard-to-find CD's are more justifiable, for trading MD copies.
Tower Records (Seattle area) carries blank MiniDiscs for the purpose of scaring people away from them. The price: $14.50 U.S.