HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ fleddr

Interesting how so many people comment on the aesthetic but not on the unique capability of MiniDisc: the TOC.

You can delete and reorder tracks and this new state is written back to the disc. There's nothing else that does this.

You can't delete a song from a cassette. You can overwrite it with noise but that's not the same thing as skipping it. It's not random access.

You can't delete a track from a CD either, as they were not writable back then. Even today with a re-writable you can't easily delete a track, you'd need to rewrite the entire disc.

You can't reorder a song on a cassette, obviously. You can't really do this with a CD either, other than rewriting it fully with the new order. You can program a CD player to play songs in a particular order but this is not persisted across players.

MiniDisc can do all of the above and will do it instantly. This allows a music buff to constantly tweak and optimize their playlist. You can quite compare it to your current Spotify playlist, but now physical. No other physical media allows you to manage a playlist like a MiniDisc can.

The reason I know this is my dad's 30 year (and ongoing) denial in this not being a more widespread standard. He has this cute little box with 8 MiniDiscs in it. Each crafted to perfection in personal meaning, genre, order of songs. He plays it every day.

I look at it with admiration. Because it works. It worked when I was a teenager and now that I'm middle-aged, it still does. It didn't get outdated, get 17 trillion UI updates, require a password or have ever-changing terms and conditions. It just plays. For 25+ years in a row.

Long may it keep playing.

⬐ hcs

You can keep recording multiple sessions until a CD-R is filled, the TOC of the last session is used and can refer to data in the previous sessions. I don't know how widespread support for this is, it wasn't in the original CD specs so I expect audio-only players couldn't handle it. And probably can't be used to reorder tracks, just append them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_(optical_disc)#Session...

⬐ trompetenaccoun

What killed it is that they weren't really portable the same way flash memory is. An obvious improvement over CD players but the disk would still jump. Plus the disk swapping! Don't know how large your music library is but but having 8 discs for nostalgic reasons is different from having hundreds of them because it's your primary source.

⬐ aidenn0

Just because HN is the home of pedantry...

> You can't reorder a song on a cassette, obviously.

I've reordered songs on reel-to-reel magnetic tape with a knife and special tape; I don't see why you couldn't do something similar with a cassette...

⬐ s1mon

The reason you wouldn't do it with a normal cassette is that there's a side A and a side B. You could reorder one side with enough time and skill, but the other side would now be screwed up. Maybe you could develop a taste for songs that are all about the same length and/or put a lot of buffer between songs, and then this would kinda sorta work.

The other reason is that cassettes sound like shit, even if you have metal tape and a Nakamichi Dragon.

⬐ aidenn0

A friend of mine had a deck that could record 4 tracks on a standard cassette instead of using them as two sides. That's getting pretty niche though.

⬐ aquova

> You can delete and reorder tracks and this new state is written back to the disc. There's nothing else that does this.

This may be a naive question, but did they suffer from fragmentation? Reordering tracks via the TOC is a simple operation, but after adding and removing and re-adding songs, I would imagine the writer would need to eventually re-write the entire disc to fragmentation issues, or else have a very complex set of metadata.

⬐ fleddr

I can't really say, at that age I had no idea what fragmentation means so any issues with it would not register.

Statistically though, I imagine reordering to be the most frequent operation. Deletion should be rare since it's a purposeful decision to put the song on the disc in the first place. You might rarely delete one when you get tired of it.

⬐ LeoPanthera

Fragmentation is possible, but unlikely. You'd have to do a lot of cutting and deleting and reordering. And most tracks are reasonably long, so, this wasn't a huge issue.

⬐ TheNewAndy

From memory, you could end up fragmenting things, and I think this would typically result in losing some of the capacity of a disk.

I think people would do a disk to disk dub in these situations as a form of "defrag" operation.

You could also get an 80 minute disk, put it in a recorder and get it to read it, then sneakily swap it with a 74 minute disk without letting the recorder's eject switch trip, then force a TOC write, and you would be able to upgrade a 74 minute disk to an 80 minute version.

⬐ ace2358

That’s so sick. I have been into minidisc for about 4 years and never knew this :)

⬐ ronancremin

I’m surprised that nobody has mentioned Web MiniDisc yet. This combines the best of web (WASM) and MiniDisc, allowing you to write content to discs from the comfort of your web browser and dispense with all of the awful Sony software.

https://stefano.brilli.me/blog/web-minidisc/

⬐ starik36

I legit thought this was a parody.

⬐ ronancremin

I forgot to mention that it supports MP3, FLAC, or WAV files.

⬐ metadat

I wish this was available as a normal text/image written article instead of a video. The content looks cool but the format doesn't work for me; 30 minutes is wayyy too long for this one!

⬐ RajT88

That is how I feel about a lot of youtube videos.

Perhaps some clever person will write something to transcribe and screenshot videos automatically.

⬐ RedShift1

He talks relatively slow, set the speed to 1.5x

⬐ dexterdog

1.5x is the speed I use for very fast talkers. If they are slow I'm starting at 2x and increasing from there.

⬐ physhster

It's near impossible to monetize an article these days, unfortunately. This is a pretty heavy production so it's only fair.

⬐ ansgri

How are videos better?

⬐ pineconewarrior

Youtube $. Longer videos are a good source of revenue from Premium viewers.

⬐ TedDoesntTalk

I always thought the reason was because a lot of people do not like to read. But your explanation makes more sense.

⬐ ngcc_hk

It is the truth unfortunately

⬐ layer8

In general I also prefer a written article with pictures, but you can skip-fast-forward through the video in ~5 minutes and still get most of the gist of it.

⬐ Synaesthesia

I often use the auto transcript feature.

⬐ dylan604

haha, if you can skip in 5 minute chunks and still get the gist, then something tells me that there's a lot of unnecessary cruft in that video.

⬐ layer8

No, not skipping 5 minutes at a time, more like 10 seconds at a time (YouTube double-tap), reducing the total runtime to ~5 minutes. That way you still get most of the talking points and can listen in to the couple more interesting parts.

⬐ technofiend

Minidisc proved very useful for dubbing an audio copy off the front of house mixing board. Sure you could run it to CD but that usually requires a much larger device that takes AC. The minidisc recorder was far smaller, more discreet and able to run from battery. I heard anecdotally it was the bootlegger's device of choice for a while.

⬐ aphroz

I am very happy to see MD on the first page of HN, I can feel it's making a comeback! There's even new pre-recorded MD coming out. But don't look into it or you will end doing like me. I recently bought 3 different players and it's a bit absurd to pay that much for a lower quality of sound, but it does look cool.

⬐ autoexec

I hope it does make a comeback, because I'd love to see some cheap players become available. I've got boxes of minidiscs sitting around, but all my old players have stop working.

⬐ mdmdmd

There are a few comments comparing Minidiscs to CDs, I think that's the wrong way to look at the format.

My mental model for Minidiscs is much more similar to tape, it was so easy to use them to record. As a teenager this was the most exciting thing about them -- you could record ~CD quality audio from CDs (I had so many MD mixtapes!) or the radio. On top of that, you could make your copy feel polished by adding track markers and names, giving you information about the track playing when listening and letting you skip back and forth between songs.

This was a huge upgrade from cassettes and an upgrade from CDs because you didn't need to go through the rigamarole of burning.

Of course, this doesn't even touch upon industrial design of the units which has already been well covered in this thread. If you'd like to browse through some old units and get a sense of that, I recommend minidisc.org.

⬐ Synaesthesia

Minidisc is really a cool format. Another format which was consider too cool for consumers was DAT. Basically the notion that you could make CD quality digital recordings on a simple mini tape was terrifying to the recording industry.

⬐ RedShift1

I'm kind of sad that MD didn't get more broadly adopted. Had MD data been more of a thing and allow for more flexibility (no dedicated audio and data discs), MD would probably have been everywhere.

⬐ aphroz

Actually MD was everywhere, except in the US. There was a Vaio computer with integrated MD drive and you could store data and audio on it.

⬐ dwringer

There was a small window between heyday of Tascam 4-track cassette recorders and the emergence of modern digital recorders/PC interfaces when Yamaha's 4- and 8-track Minidisc recording consoles were a great and relatively affordable home/amateur recording option, fairly popular in the US. Sadly there is no digital out(!) so when I recently transferred my old tracks to digital I had to send each channel with a separate unbalanced(!) analog line. It's also prohibitively expensive to track down new MD Data discs (the MD audio discs which were far more common would only support 2-track recording instead of the full 8).

⬐ gizajob

I thought those minidisc 4 tracks were great, but the compression on them could be a bit nasty

⬐ dwringer

That explains why, looking back, I never got a satisfactory distorted guitar tone, but those were also the days of listening to 128kbps MP3's so half the time we didn't know any better.

⬐ zoomablemind

> ...Sadly there is no digital out(!) so when I recently transferred my old tracks to digital I had to send each channel with a separate unbalanced(!) analog line.

MD audio was compressed with proprietary ATRAC, so sending it out would only make sense if the other end supported it. On the other hand the analog audio would clearly be more compatible.

However, those MD decks supported TOS link for input, but had some bits flipped to disallow CD digital recopy.

⬐ awiesenhofer

Ah yes, the mysterious Sony Vaio PCV-MX2 - I still want one of these even though it would probably be completely useless nowadays.

LGR has a nice video about it:

https://youtu.be/UQSKWOw-sZc

There was also a Vaio laptop that had an MD drive, it didnt support data though:

https://www.zdnet.com/product/sony-vaio-pcg-nv109m/

⬐ jagermo

direct mp3 to minidisc would have been a killer application. mostly for sony's music business which got pummeld back then by napster, audiogalaxy, etc

⬐ LeoPanthera

As other comments have said, it was almost uniquely rejected in the USA, and enjoyed a healthy long lifespan in almost every other country. They are still, in fact, making blank MDs. Those in the USA can type "mdw80t" into eBay if they'd like some.

MiniDisc is my favorite example of "History is written by the USA" - younger people in many countries believe it was a failure, even though it was successful in their own country, just because it failed in the USA, and it's mostly the USA who write blogs, make YouTube videos, post to social media.

⬐ giantrobot

MiniDisc was a failure compared to its contemporary competition, namely CDs. I doubt you could find any country where MiniDisc sold even half as well as CD/CD-related products. IIRC in its total lifetime only a few tens of millions of units were sold. That's not an abject failure but those are rookie numbers compared to CD players and CDs.

They were rare in the US in part because they were very expensive. A portable MD player was hundreds of dollars where a portable cassette player with an AM/FM radio built in was $20-30. They stayed expensive even as CDs and CD players (including portables) got less and less expensive. Very few albums were released on MD in the US so even if you invested all the money in the format you were paying $30-50 for "import" discs.

⬐ LeoPanthera

You're comparing different markets. Virtually everyone who used MD had both. They didn't compete.

CDs were high quality but large and worked well at home. MiniDiscs were small, portable, and recordable, and mostly replaced tapes, not CDs.

Pre-recorded MDs didn't sell well because that wasn't the point. You'd buy the CD album and then copy it onto MD yourself.

⬐ giantrobot

> Pre-recorded MDs didn't sell well because that wasn't the point. You'd buy the CD album and then copy it onto MD yourself.

And my point is that model doomed MDs in the US. Everyone* in the US had a cassette player. Every car radio shipped with one, every stereo unit had one, and portable units were cheap and plentiful by the beginning of the 90s. There were also a huge number of pre-recorded albums available on cassette including stuff like books on tape. In the 80s and the first half of the 90s portable music meant a cassette deck.

When MDs came out in the US they were incredibly expensive, more expensive than CD players of the time. If you had a CD player at home you could make a tape off it with a ubiquitous tape deck then play it in the same.

A MiniDisc player was in the best case just a sound quality improvement over cassettes with a huge price premium. By the mid-90s portable CD players could be had for $100 while MD players were still several hundred dollars. In 1995 you could spend a hundred dollars and take your CD collection with you without spending hours transferring them to MiniDisc.

At least in Europe and Japan a MD owner could go to the store and buy pre-recorded albums for their players. I don't know if cassettes skipped those regions in the 80s but the US was lousy with them.

* for some values of everyone

⬐ fomine3

Car culture vs public transport culture, isn't it? CD is (somewhat) fine on car, but a bit big to carry. Anyway I feel the US don't like any "mini" thing.

⬐ acchow

> younger people in many countries believe it was a failure, even though it was successful in their own country

I guess it depends on how you measure it. iPod felt like a true success - it was a rebirth for Apple, proliferated iTunes across millions of computers, built up sensational excitement for an iPod phone, which ultimately became the iPhone which is still a success today.

⬐ gizajob

I was listening to my minidisc player on a train in Italy in the early 2000s and got chatting to an American girl, and she had absolutely no idea what I had in my hand. I was like "see, there's these little discs, and you record your music onto them" and she couldn't even compute what I was showing her. I was pretty stunned too, because all my friends in the UK (I'm British) knew what they were and lots of us had them. It was like we were in two completely different worlds, somehow.

Also, the main advantage not well discussed following the rise of the iPod and smartphones, was that virtually all minidisc players were RECORDERS. We really lost something, culturally and creatively, when audio devices lost their record-ins. I used to love plugging my headphones into the stereo-in on my minidisc, and walking around capturing the sounds around me. Later playing back through those same headphones would transport you directly to wherever you were at the time. Amazing for field recording and dumping mixes and tracks onto them. Technology progresses, but it seems like the past few decades it hasn't necessary improved a great deal as it does, and much gets lost.

⬐ Melatonic

How good was that recording though? I mean I am sure if you plugged in a decent microphone it would be good. But through the headphones?

These days most phones are awesome recorders so I am not sure we really lost that much - I totally get what you are saying for that brief period where ipods were the norm (before phones).

⬐ layer8

Most MiniDisc recorders had digital inputs, which means you could record your CDs or output from a PC sound card losslessly (before ATRAC encoding, which of course is lossy). While you could also do microphone recordings (I think), that wasn’t the primary use case of the recording feature, at least in my experience. There were various MiniDisc-based dictation machines targeted at business users though (simpler ones than in TFA).

⬐ gizajob

The recording was really almost perfect. It was compressed with ATRAC3, which was Sony's codec akin to MP3, and probably about 160kbps CBR, I think. The quality was pretty high, anyway. They did some clever stuff to hide the artefacts, and I think some minidisc recorders even recorded to .wav by the end of the format's life. Nevertheless, you could record digital stereo audio live on a device smaller than a smartphone. I knew some electronic musicians at the time who would play gigs live running sounds off of a couple of minidisc's, and a lot of laptop artists would have a minidisc plugged in as reserve in case of some sort of technical failure with their laptop in a club, which happened frequently back in those heady days around the turn of the millennium.

⬐ tablespoon

> Also, the main advantage not well discussed following the rise of the iPod and smartphones, was that virtually all minidisc players were RECORDERS. I used to love plugging my headphones into the stereo-in on my minidisc, and walking around capturing the sounds around me.

I agree that technological change as resulted in a regrettable loss of common-man recording capability (e.g. streaming and disc-players vs VCRs), but did that actually happen for your use case? Smartphones all have mics, and you can certainly download a recording app even if your phone doesn't ship with one.

I know you can kind of abuse headphones into a microphone (I used to do it all the time as a kid), but would they actually work well with good quality? Did you have some special headphones for this use case? I knew a guy who said he had some special earbuds designed for recording concerts: they had a microphone pointing outward from each ear, and he'd plug them into his MiniDisc recorder.

⬐ gizajob

The minidisc I had, and there were lots like them, had a stereo-in that automatically switched between line-level and mic-level. Really amazing considering how small those devices were, because the unit wasn't much bigger than the minidisc itself. The cheap units from Sony and Panasonic (etc) virtually always did this, even though lower budget ones without the recording facility were available. Really a genius move to put a stereo microphone preamplifier into such a tiny unit. The line/mic in was also an optical in at the same time.

"Abusing" headphones isn't really the right word to use – headphones and dynamic microphones are almost identical technology. One way, signals go in an drive the diaphragm into producing sound, the other way, audio hits the diaphragm and can then be amplified by a preamplifier, making a microphone. Hence it's really easy to put the earbuds into your ear and walk around recording, and when you play back it's like a perfect binaural recording of what your ears were hearing at the time. I've heard of those earbuds with microphones on the outside, that's a bit more pro.

Yes you're correct, smartphones can record really easily, there was just something really aesthetically pleasing about how the minidisc was a device just built to record and playback really well. It was a beautiful way of having a recording device, without the need for dongles or doodads like you need to do it well on a smartphone. I should have also made the point that a piece of technology being limited also encourages one to find ways of transcending the limitation and doing new things with it (see the Gescom album 'Minidisc' that was designed to be played on shuffle). Having a portable field recorder that was affordable to be a birthday or Christmas present endowed one with something more valuable than a mere smartphone with a recording app, for some reason.

P.s. try and record something at high volume, like a band playing, on your smartphone with the built-in microphone. You'll basically get a square-wave with interludes. The variable level of the mic preamp on the minidisc made it so you could make decent quality recordings of anything...

⬐ layer8

I just love that kind of design with dedicated physical buttons and connectors for all the important (and less important) use cases. I would love to live in a world where such devices were ubiquitous, instead of everything just being a touch screen with inconsistent and half-baked UI.

⬐ schwartzworld

We gave up a lot when we traded physical media for mp3s. I wish it would make a comeback.

⬐ dpitkin

There is a link to the service manual on minidisc.org https://www.minidisc.org/part_Sony_MDCC-2000.html

⬐ asah

wow, this device is incredibly well designed, with lots and lots of thoughtful design details. Masterclass in product design.

⬐ WalterBright

I bought a minidisc player to replace my reel-to-reel. I was very satisfied with the sound quality, but the copy protection on it (even for my home made recordings) killed my interest in it.

⬐ retox

Is there any technical reason that the MD format cannot be used to store arbitrary data and not just audio?

⬐ layer8

MD Data exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc#MD_Data

⬐ atourgates

I can't explain why I thought MiniDisc was such a cool format. Maybe it was just its appearance in the Matrix. Maybe it was the Japanese "strangeness" of the format, and the difficulty of getting one in the United States.

I was finally able to afford one near the end of the format's life, around the time that MP3 players were becoming endemic. I honestly couldn't make any case for why it was better, and it was significantly less convenient. But I still loved using it.

I need to dig through my "big attic box of outdated electronics" and see if I can still dig it up and see if it works.

I recently imported a Japanese Kei (mini) Truck. A minidisc stereo would be a great theme-appropriate fit for it, if I can find one at a reasonable price.

⬐ numpad0

I think in the end it was just another example of Sony's proprietary, slightly miniaturized media. Sony had done it over and over and it is not cool at all in that regard.

But the aesthetic design of and the experience of handling it was superb. The discs were often transparent and had just the right amount of internal reflections. Loading mechanism was partially motorized and would make a nice intricate sequence of scratching sounds. A lot of MD devices also used a slightly higher tone than were typical of machine beeps. Everything was figuratively "mint flavored".

And then the new goodness of white plastic and stainless steel, scented with purified industrial alcohols, came in and wiped them all off.

⬐ TedDoesntTalk

> it was just another example of Sony's proprietary

This pattern predates MemoryStick and even BetaMax (yes, Sony created BetaMax). I have several dictation tape recorders from the early and mid 70s. Norelco, Philips, GE, and Sony. All of them use the same size mini cassettes except… Sony.

⬐ brudgers

It is older and not unique to Sony among Japanese manufacturers.

Nikon, Canon, Minolta, Olympus, and Pentax camera lenses…and Mamiya and Bronica too now that I think about it.

And Kodak color film might be the prototype of vendor lock in for consumer products.

Black and white Kodak roll film formats, now that I think of it, are even older still.

⬐ TedDoesntTalk

> And Kodak color film might be the prototype of vendor lock

How? Those film cartridges were standard. There were many companies selling 110 film cartridges, 35mm film, etc.

⬐ frxx

"35mm" film is called the 135 standard. As in 110/120/135/220, etc.

⬐ ngcc_hk

Invented by leica

⬐ brudgers

In the early days of color film, the only way to get Kodak color film processed was by Kodak. Kodak as the only processing option goes all the way back to the Kodak No. 1 camera in the 19th century.

Kodak produced a lot of roll film cameras that took unusual formats that practically speaking only Kodak sold.

https://www.brownie-camera.com/film.shtml

This continued into the 1970’s with with the Kodamatic instant film formats.

While there were technically speaking other manufacturers of disc film and disc cameras, practically speaking they were synonymous with Kodak brand. That near exclusive film format only ceased manufacture in 1999.

⬐ TedDoesntTalk

Even APS film canisters were made by Agfa and Fuji. I think you have selective memory. If disc film was the only format made by Kodak, that’s not really a pattern. there were many others (APS, 110, 124, Polaroid instant, etc) that were not.

In any case even if Kodak did something like this 100 years ago, that does not preclude Sony from taking it to a new level in more modern times.

⬐ frosted-flakes

Kodak's early cameras functioned like disposable cameras. You took your pictures, then you sent or brought your camera to Kodak to be developed. They would refill the camera with new film and send it back to you.

⬐ TedDoesntTalk

Hm, when was that? Even the Kodak Brownie from 1900 used rolls of film:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_Brownie

⬐ brudgers

Back when George Eastman was in his prime and Kodak was a plucky startup.

⬐ frosted-flakes

Yes, but the camera had to be opened in a darkroom and the film manually cut up and developed. I'm sure you could acquire your own film and do it yourself, but it wasn't exactly approachable. But I expect that it was primarily a technological limitation, and not meant to be a form of vendor lock-in.

"You Press the Button, We Do the Rest" was Kodak's marketing slogan.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Press_the_Button,_We_Do_...

⬐ brudgers

It’s not selective memory.

Formats such as 101, 102, etc. we’re discontinued long before I was born.

On the other hand, my grandparents had a Kodak instant camera instead of a Polaroid, I am in some of those pictures, and it was a proprietary format.

Technicolor is another Kodak only film format, and Kodak was in the business of leasing the cameras to movie studios.

Not that I have hate for Kodak or love for Sony or vice versa. I don’t have many strong emotions around brands.

Ring, Nest, Alexa, Siri, Windows, NEF, CR3 etc etc the world is full of proprietary systems.

Even John Deere combines.

BTW, the Kodak business model for APS was selling new equipment to photo labs. Existing machines could not process it in a way that did what consumers were told APS would do.

⬐ TedDoesntTalk

> It’s not selective memory. Formats such as 101, 102, etc. we’re discontinued long before I was born.

> On the other hand, my grandparents had a Kodak instant camera instead of a Polaroid, I am in some of those pictures, and it was a proprietary format.

I think I must be a lot older than you. I used 110 and 124 for years. I can tell you firsthand these were not proprietary. Regarding Kodak instant, I never even heard of it until you wrote about it. Anyone who wanted instant photos bought Polaroid. I do not know if their cartridges were proprietary since I never owned one (the photo quality was not very good compared to traditional film). Anyway, I’m glad to learn Kodak had one proprietary format. I just do not think that makes a pattern. Sony dominated this field — make the media proprietary (by patent i assume), but let anyone create devices that use the format. Make the money on selling the media. They did this countless times; I’ve often thought about compiling a list - there are several failed media formats that never became popular. I thought Sony was behind HD-DVD (the blu-ray alternative), but it looks like that was Toshiba primarily (with Sony also backing it).

⬐ brudgers

Until this sentence I have not mentioned 110 film.

Kodak made 101 format from 1895 to 1956.

124 until 1962.

Speaking of Polaroid, very much proprietary.

⬐ jonjon10002

I jumped to MD in 1997 because I was still using cassette for mobile music consumption. Because of the media size, there wasn't a pocketable portable CD player, and skipping was a problem (that got fixed later) so I never switched to CD for mobile use.

Compared to tapes, MiniDisc was a godsend: no eaten tapes, random access playback, smaller size, better sound, song titles, and it was just so cool looking. I also used a MiniDisc a lot to record and transcribe meetings at work. The live audio recording was excellent.

The main disadvantage I ran into was that even with an optical digital connection, recording a 60-minute album from CD to MD took 60 minutes. I seldom ran into recordable media or prerecorded titles in the wild, even in New York (although Tower carried them), but there were lots of good online stores back then to buy blanks and new players.

I stuck with it until 2002, when the second-generation iPods showed up. It was easier to carry one thing, and not a player and a bunch of loose discs. I still have a giant anvil road case with a few hundred of them in storage, although who knows if they delaminate or turn into oil over the decades.

⬐ throwanem

A few years back I bought a couple of assorted batch lots off eBay from people selling out of an old collection, or just selling an old collection wholesale. Some new discs still in the cellophane, too - mostly Neige, but I have a couple of Color Club ones in there somewhere. I still have my own small collection bought with high school summer-job money, too. And I have exactly one Hi-MD disc, that came with the MZ-RH1 I bought for ripping - an accident, I think that must have been, since the price I paid matched other player-only sales and didn't include the $60 or so that Hi-MD discs were going for around the same time.

Most failures I've seen have been mechanical, whether due to mistreatment by a prior owner or, with a couple of the TDK ones I bought as a kid, the glue that holds the case window in growing brittle with age.

The media itself, like flash memory, is perishable with enough write cycles, and I think I've run into two discs so far that were mechanically sound but unreadable. Certainly I never had that kind of failure back in the day, and I must've rewritten some of those discs a few dozen times - they weren't cheap then, and summer-job money only stretches so far. Certainly if there are any common failure modes comparable to sticky-shed syndrome, I haven't run into them.

Granted, it's been a couple of years; I wrapped most of the really intensive research once I got my ripping setup in place a little while before the pandemic kicked off. (For unencumbered full-quality digital ripping, you need an MZ-RH1 specifically, plus SonicStage iirc 3.4.3 and some drivers I had to dig a bit to find. I keep meaning to rehost that stuff somewhere along with a howto, but there's lots of other ways I have to spend my time of late - I'd be happy to hand the whole package off as a zipfile with my notes, if someone were interested.)

So I might be overlooking something at this point, especially without referring to notes, but my overall impression is entirely that, given a working recorder or player, all or nearly all of your discs should still be perfectly usable.

⬐ gernb

Mini-disc players had up to 240hrs of play time on a single charge. No MP3 player has ever had more than about 30hrs of play. Not that I want to go back to mini-disc but it's always been surprising to me that a device with moving parts would perform better than one without.

⬐ None

None

⬐ layer8

The moving parts of a MiniDisc are extremely lightweight, and I’m pretty sure the whole electronics of portable MD players were optimized end-to-end to consume as little power as possible. The ATRAC codec was also designed to be implemented directly in silicon and to use minimal energy. MP3 hardware was likely significantly less power-efficient.

⬐ dafelst

Interestingly Sony hardware and software to this day (even the PS5) still support ATRAC decoding.

⬐ Wistar

I have perhaps the only 110V Sony LISSA stereo system that exists. Sony modified it to 110V for me for a special project. I have all of the components, including the CDP-LSA1 CD player, MDS-LSA1 MiniDisc recorder/player, STR-LSA1 receiver, and Sony speakers but not the new-age modern-looking 2.1 speakers that some later sets shipped with. All of the components interconnect with 1394 (Sony's i.Link), except for the speakers which are conventional analog connections. In about 2002, I used it for a single demo for a few days and, since then, it has sat, unused in my storage shelves. I need to send it to a museum or something.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Lissa

(edit: fix date. 2002, not 1982.)

⬐ krallja

Isn’t Japan already 110V?

⬐ frosted-flakes

Japan is 100v. North America is 120v, not 110v.

⬐ Wistar

I probably should have written something such as "converted to the North American standard," although my memory is that they converted it from 220V Euro.

⬐ gonesilent

you should take a picture for the wiki link.

⬐ Wistar

Good idea.

⬐ TheCondor

The smaller disc size than a CD. The built in protection for the disc (I had a shitty car at the time and I think discs got scratched up by the player itself, eventually they were all unplayable). Recording built in. It scratched all the itches of the early 1990s.

The devices themselves were pretty sexy too, portable, full featured.

⬐ flir

It's the affordances, in my opinion. Whoever designed the physical hardware was an unsung genius.

⬐ eastbound

The killer for me was that it had a direct USB CD-to-MiniDisc cable to transfer CDs, with original quality, proper tracks and all. I would have loved to use it!

Unfortunately once opened, the user manual said something along the lines of “Press he record button, plug the USB-to-jack wire, and in 45 minutes, done! It will recognize the tracks by noticing the silence between them, hopefully you don’t have silences in the music, right? Also don’t fuss too much about the white noise due to impedance, it’s a high-quality transfer we pinky-swear.”

I swore never to buy anything from Sony since 1999. I relapsed in 2016 for ONE purchase. And swore again:

Never - buy - SONY.

EVER.

⬐ fuzzy2

Was? It is cool. Magneto-optic storage for the masses. What's not to like?

Also, of course, wired remotes with displays.

⬐ KerrAvon

I still have a beautiful MD player from Panasonic not much bigger than a Minidisc in any dimension. I think the iPod really killed Minidisc, because the user experience was simply that much better than other MP3 players, which were generally janky designs from unknown brands.

⬐ Melatonic

I thought only Sony could make MD players? Looking up the Panasonic now - in general I love Panasonic - never had anything from them that was not awesome.

⬐ giantrobot

MiniDisc's killer was none other than Sony itself. Sony's own competing divisions hobbled, crippled, then killed the MiniDisc.

The first issue was cost of the media. MiniDiscs we're just never going to be as cheap to manufacture as CDs. So record companies would have far tighter margins on MiniDiscs than they would for the same album pressed on CD. Unsurprisingly not a lot of record companies bothered producing pre-recorded MiniDiscs outside Japan.

Without pre-recorded albums readily available the only way to get music onto a disc was to record it yourself. So you had your MD player that cost hundreds of dollars you had to plug into some other audio player to record music to take with you. There was no high speed dubbing unless you had an expensive console recorder so your hour long CD took an hour to copy to the MiniDisc.

As the 90s went on Sony also refused to allow MDs to connect to a PC. So you couldn't rip music off a CD (which Sony considered unforgivable piracy) to your PC and then digitally load onto your MiniDisc. That is until they relented and released the NetMD players. But those were crippled in that they would only encode low resolution files but padded them so you only got 80 minutes of play time on a disc (despite the low resolution allowing 160 minutes). Sony also didn't allow their MD data drives to write audio MDs. But no one even had those drives because they were stupid expensive.

All of this inconvenience was happening in a time when portable CD players were dropping in price (and getting audio buffers for skip protection) and coming standard in cars. CD-R drives were also coming down significantly in price along with CD-R media itself. So if you did want to make mixtapes or just make CDs from files you got from the budding MP3 scene you could do so cheaply. Sony was even themselves manufacturing these devices, the DiscMan was a really popular portable CD player!

The MiniDisc was essentially dead by the time the first portable MP3 players came out. Even the iPod wasn't competing against MiniDisc so much as it was CD players which by then added MP3 playback. The iPod didn't really take off until the third generation one was released in 2003.

I say all this loving the aesthetic of MiniDiscs. They look super cool and could have actually been an interesting technology. Unfortunately Sony really likes their proprietary media formats.

⬐ jagermo

I remember searching for (and finding!) a winamp plugin* that added a few seconds of silence to my minidisc recording so that my player could index the song. It was such a cool hardware and felt really sci-fi. But it was annoying that you couldn't add title and artist while playing the song, at least on my panasonic player.

*I think it was this one. https://winampheritage.com/plugin/minidisc-track-pauser-vers...

⬐ Melatonic

Makes me want to buy the coolest looking minidisc player and rip out of the internals and replace with something else. You could probably embed a small NVME SSD or mSATA into the old mini disc itself or maybe even turn the minidiscs into removeable batteries.

⬐ flir

Internally they had mp3-on-minidisc ready to go, apparently. Engineering wanted to release it, the dark forces you allude to did not.

⬐ giantrobot

One of the other boneheaded aspects of NetMD was music was "checked out". If you put a track on an MD it was "checked out" and after some limited number of checkouts (2 or 3 IIRC) you couldn't put that track on another MD.

Sony seemed obsessed over anti-piracy measures to the detriment of MD's success. You couldn't encode SP quality tracks on a PC you only got that recording real-time on a player. The check out stupidity. And then not supporting MP3s on MD. Sony almost seemed to go out of the way to kill the format.

⬐ gizajob

I've a lot of respect for Sony, partly because I loved the minidisc. This issue arose because you had one monolithic company on one hand making minidiscs - total piracy-friendly devices, and on the other hand, running a huge record label, justifiably scared of MP3 because it seemed like it was going to kill the music industry, and indeed did kill the form it was in at the time. Hence the label's panic caused the minidisc's extra features to become borked and it killed it. Minidisc really was the best format around though, for a time. They held 80 minutes of music / hundreds of megs of audio, at a time when even a 32mb solid-state card, like smartmedia, was really expensive.

Apple didn't have that problem – they just had to build a better MP3 player, and succeeded. It was only after the initial gunfire had died down that Apple saw fit to get the labels on-side, once everyone's iPods were full of pirated music.

⬐ giantrobot

> Minidisc really was the best format around though, for a time. They held 80 minutes of music / hundreds of megs of audio, at a time when even a 32mb solid-state card, like smartmedia, was really expensive.

MiniDiscs compared compared favorably to early solid state MP3 players but those weren't their main competition, CD players were. By the time MP3 players were available portable CD players were inexpensive and had enough skip protection to listen to while walking. Even down market cars can standard with them. If you bought a CD from a store there were good odds you could listen into it on the way home.

Compared to CDs I don't think MiniDiscs offered much of an advantage in the general case. MD players had some cool features if you were really into making discs but I think most people just wanted to listen to music.

I find your point about Sony being afraid a little funny considering they let a great opportunity slip through their fingers. If MD data and MD audio were interchangeable and MD drives for computers were cheap they could have made tons of money off them. Inexpensive 140MB rewritable data discs that could also store 80 minutes of audio ripped from your CDs.

MiniDisc could have been the removable media of the 90s and well into the 00s. They would have sucked the oxygen out of the room for Fujitsu's M/O drives, Iomega Zip, and all the other removable disk drives. The audio players would have just been icing on the data storage cake.

⬐ glial

The primary alternative at the time was CDs. MiniDiscs were like cool CDs that wouldn't scratch if you threw them on the desk or in the glove compartment. Also the aesthetics of the players were great...

Too bad the accompanying software was so terrible.

⬐ foobarian

I wonder if the analog side of it was also designed superbly. More modern players happened to succeed not because the creators worked harder, or designed better, but purely by stupid luck of riding the Moore's law curve. But the analog side of things was not subject to Moore's law, and since modern players are cheap, there is no budget for a careful analog design. Hence I would expect older products like MiniDisc to have excellent performance there.

All this without having used one, just some fun armchair speculation.

⬐ tqi

Man i loved my MD player, i remember thinking in-line remote with the shirt clip was so cool.

Looking back, it was pretty hilarious that transferring songs to the disc was real time (ie 70 minutes to transfer 70 minutes of audio). I really had nothing better to do...

⬐ joecool1029

They fixed it in later hardware revisions with NetMD allowing faster than realtime digital downloading, but the software was terrible. There's amazingly been an opensource project slowly iterating and adding functionality to do so in the current age: https://wiki.physik.fu-berlin.de/linux-minidisc/

⬐ tqi

amazing. if only i remembered where my mini disc was...

⬐ woodrowbarlow

> I recently imported a Japanese Kei (mini) Truck.

the subaru sambar? i adore that thing. someone in my neighborhood has one and i get a big ol' grin every time i see it on the road.

⬐ jonpurdy

I would love to import a Honda Acty. A neighbour had one when living in Toronto but seems like they're really difficult/impossible to import to California.

⬐ lttlrck

You could make "mix tapes"!

⬐ rsync

I feel exactly the same way about PCMCIA.

It is my all-time favorite form factor.

⬐ Melatonic

The card format connector?

It was cool in a few laptops to be able to add stuff on but I'm not sure it was anything all that special?

⬐ jjkaczor

Yeah - it just "felt right" in the hand. I had a modem, with a serial connector dongle that would let my Motorola flip be used with my Newton 120... Dial-up internet in the "palms of your hands" while hanging around in coffee shops circa 1995/6.

⬐ cogman10

> the difficulty of getting one in the United States.

I had never even HEARD of the minidisc before I worked abroad in england from 2004-2006. Then seeing it being both ubiquitous, common, and cheap (and nearing it's EOL) was stunning.

It's just a fun little format. The discs were just the right size and could store a boatload of info for the time. It was back when a 64mb mp3 player was pretty expensive.

⬐ spinny

I owned a mzr700 at the time cd/mp3 players started to come to the market. It looked like something from the future when compared with the cd/mp3 players at the time. audio quality was amazing and minidisks always worked, no skipping or disk damages, and longer battery life than the cd/mp3 readers

⬐ fomine3

I feel similar for DVD-RAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-RAM#/media/File:DVD-RAM_FU...

⬐ acchow

I remember loving the infinite storage capability on a cheap medium.

⬐ roughly

It was definitely the aesthetics of it. It was _incredibly_ cyberpunk - this great combination of digital storage format, small-size tech-looking disk, the way the players looked and opened - the whole thing was straight out of an anime. It's this artifact from the last moment before tech swerved off that cyberpunk mixture of physical and digital to just straight digital - after that, everything became ephemeral bits, and increasingly the hardware "existed to not exist," as it were - the iPhone, iPad, etc. were all designed as "blank slates" for the software, which was where all the action was.

I think that's why the original Motorola Droid is so loved - it's not just that the hardware was useful and interesting, but it "existed to exist" - it had an aesthetic and was trying to be something by itself, not just to disappear.

⬐ jolmg

> straight out of an anime

I remember seeing something like it in the first episode of Ghost in the Shell S.A.C. where Motoko was handing some footage on the geisha incident to the chief. Though, he inserted it into a cellphone, so I think it was smaller.

⬐ MontyCarloHall

>It's this artifact from the last moment before tech swerved off that cyberpunk mixture of physical and digital

This perfectly fits with the best definition of cyberpunk I’ve ever heard: “the future, but the 80s never ended.”

(Incidentally, I’ve heard Japan described this way as well.)

⬐ reaperducer

Incidentally, I’ve heard Japan described this way as well

While I won't pretend to know as much about Japan as someone who lives there full-time, I've visited 14 times, often for several weeks at a stretch, and in real life, modern Japan is very different from the cyberpunk fantasies spread around the internet by people who have never been, and never will.

It's still my favorite country to visit, so I watch NHK World every day. But it's not the cartoon/tech/ninja cliché world promulgated online. It's actually much better.