* still under construction * all suggestions, hints and tips are appreciated *

Some opinions from other users about: 

MD 

"I have no experience recording bird sounds, but music and audio is one of my major interests, so I thought I'd give my view on this anyway. Birdsongs contain high-pitch sounds where the 'music' can be quite rapid and complex. MiniDisks are designed for 'human made' music, and the mainstream one too.
MiniDisk does, like the MP3 standard, compress the audio. This is a linear, quality-loss compression. While they claim 'you can't hear a difference', this is false, especially for high-pitched, complex wave as bird sounds may be.
I do not see MidiDisk as any alternative for the future. We will soon get media that can store way more, and compression will then not make any sense. A MiniDisk stores 120Mb of information, whereas a CD stores over 600Mb. The MiniDisk holds the same amount of music as CD. As you may understand, this will lead to quality loss.
The portable MiniDisk recorders are not cheap. Of course, they do not cost as much as the portable DAT recorders, but given that the DAT records uncompressed, and at 48Khz (CD offers 44.1), this may be a reason to look at a DAT recorder instead. Of course MiniDisk may offer 48Khz recording too, but you still have the quality loss, so the data on the disk does not represent a 48Khz frequency, but a 'good' encoding of it.
So, my advice would be: do not buy a MiniDisk until you know that it manages to give a representation of the wave that is good enough for your usage, and have a look at the portable DAT before you do anyway." 

"I do know that Dave Fisher uses a minidisc in the field and finds it very good for playback. It of course has the advantage of instant access to tracks. A track can be put on repeat mode and therefore only a short snippet of each bird sound needs to be on the disc. This greatly enhances storage capability.
I do believe that it is not so good for recording in the field and may need an amplifier to boost the mic.
As far as recording machines the sony pro walkman still must be the market leader." 

"I got more than 20 reactions on my question if MINIDISC is good for bird sound recording. Most reactions fall in two groups: 

A. Consists of professional (or nearly so) ornithologists. They have sincere objections against the minidisc technique, because of the digital compression during the recording. During this minimizing of the size of the recorded sound some things are lost, and for scientific analysis of the sound characteristics these recordings are outlawed. 

B. Consists of birders who don't use their recordings for that sort of scientific analysis. They make recordings with minidisc for some time now (up to some years), and are enthusiastic about the quality and about the ease of access to specific recordings. 

Before going into the details of these two opinions, I should mention a third opinion first. Compression of the recorded sound is only necessary because of disk space limitations: if minidisc would not use compression, then you could only store 15 minutes of sound in stead of 74. However, the technological developments in disk storage are fast, and it may be expected that in a few years there is no more need for (quality-loss) compression during recording. Then minidisc would only be a transient technique of the late nineties.... 

The compression technique is called ATRAC. It would assume that what you are recording is either music or human voice. So it would skip all sorts of noises that you don't really need when you playback the recorded sound. Now the opinions differ if you can hear this loss of detail in bird sound recordings. Some say they can hear it, others say they cannot, or scarcely hear it. So I have to find out the measure that I can hear it myself, and I have to find (actually asked) original minidisc recordings of critical bird sounds. It is important that these recordings be unfiltered afterwards, because filtering gives distortions that can interfere with quality aspects of the original minidisc recording. It would be nice if somebody would place examples of unaltered minidisc bird sound recordings on a web site, as .wav files. Would be even nicer when for comparison cassette field recordings of the same sounds would be added. 

Other questions in my RFI were about the ease of use, and the durability. The (Sony) minidisc recorder has easy direct access to recorded samples. On the other hand, they have made the recorder so tiny that it is not always easy to find the buttons when recording in the field. The durability in difficult outdoor circumstances proves to be good (the reports range from deserts to rainforests), and probably far better than the DAT-recorder (digital audio tape, which does not use compression). The discs themselves can also stand some outdoor handling, as they are cased in hard plastic. 

The fact that you have direct access to tracks on a minidisc is regarded as a great thing when using prepared recordings in the field, for identification of a sound you hear. You can store 199 numbered tracks. The same holds of course when in the field you want to go back to an earlier recording and see if it's the same species as the one you hear now ('that 25th antbird'). By the way, computer handling of the minidisc recordings still involves an analogous stage in between the digital of the minidisc and the digital (.wav) of the computer. 

Sony and Sharp are the only minidisc field recorders that I know of, and in the mails specific reference is only made to the Sony MZ-R30. This one is being replaced now by the even smaller R50, which is (according to info on www.minidisc.org) better for field recording because the batteries last longer, and the shock-proof memory is 40 in stead of 10 seconds. On that same minidisc website there is a comparison between the Sony and the Sharp. For our purposes an important drawback of the Sharp is that it is reported to have a delay (of seconds even) before it really starts recording. 

Many people stress that a good microphone is at least as important as the recording device. The speaker, for playback in the field, need not be sophisticated. 

Well, I know a lot more about minidisc now, but as stated above, first I want to hear some examples of original, unfiltered recordings before deciding for this (transient?) technique, or for one of the better cassette recorders." 

"Although I have been recording sounds for a couple of decades I am not specifically into bird recording, and I don't have a personal experience from mini-disc. Our technicians, however, recommend us not to use that system. I have used DAT recorders for more than 10 years and am happy with those. I can run the recorded sound right into a computer for further processing. I always record in stereo and have found that the quality of the microphone is much more important than that of the recorder - although digital recording gives better results than does analogue.
So why not try a DAT-recorder? They're not really bigger than the mini-discs."