minidiscs!

[Frost Sheridan]

there's been some good discussion here lately about mp3 players and cassettes, so i thought i'd bring up my personal favorite media format - minidisc!

minidisc is a magneto-optical music format that combines the best parts of CDs (high-quality digital audio and random access) and cassettes (small, re-recordable, and virtually indestructible) into a tiny, beautiful package that still feels just as futuristic today as it did 30 years ago. i've recently started a small collection of MD walkmans (walkmen??) and some cool discs, and it's become my favorite method to listen to music both at home and on the go.


one of my favorite things about the format is just how cool the discs and players look! it seems like everyone who designed MD stuff knew just how cool it is and went all-out to show it. who wouldn't want to be a member of the BIT CLUB?


so is anyone else here into minidiscs (or just curious about it)? show off your favorite players and discs here!!

[SilkSkull]

I've never had mini discs but that is possibly the coolest thing I have ever seen. Is there a good place to get them? Shall I search the depths of Ebay?

[Kutan]

Ooh, my partner has a bunch of minidisc stuff! He's done some videos, too; I should ask if he wants to sign up and show off his collection...



I wish minidisc had caught on here in the US! By the time NetMD came along, it would have been exactly what I was looking for. I never got an MP3 player because I couldn't really justify the expense, but MD seems like the perfect mix of affordability, form factor, and audio quality that I would have gone for. Instead I was just burning tons of single-write CD-Rs and throwing them in a binder...

Is there a good place to get them? Shall I search the depths of Ebay?

If you buy them from Yahoo Auctions Japan and use a proxy service (my partner uses Jauce), the prices are super affordable! Not so much on Ebay. There's that video Techmoan did where he's opening those big bags of loose, untested MD players he ordered from Japan... and then he shows he's got 3 more bags like it. There's just so many to go around if you look there

[Melooon]

I remember them being advertised in 2001 but by then my family already had an iPod so they seemed kinda outdated at the time.

However, I got into them back in 2017 when I got my first player! (after seeing a bunch of youtubers into them) However it ended up having a fault and I stopped using it pretty soon. After that I got really into them again in 2020 during the pandemic.. but BOTH my players from then also have faults now.. so I have no reliable players Ugh minidiscs are hard, but I love the format.

(This is me recording the soundtrack from SSX tricky to minidisc via the PS2 optical output - also thats my custom made 2 tone ps2!)



Ozwomp Online had cosmic minidiscs you could visit to learn about the galaxy and Ozwomps Voyage used them for level progression. Mostly I'm a Sony fanboy

Techmoan has a BUNCH on Minidisc and so does Ms Mad Lemon on youtube!
(EDIT omg you beat me too it Kutan )

Ms Mad Lemon has a nice lil documentary on them:

They are very cute, but I think the tech is just too fiddly, it does not survive unless the players are kept in perfect conditions.. so Im not sure its the best format to get into unless your ready to burn through players like polaroid film. If you can get NetMD recorders then there's plenty of new software to let you upload modern music though which is cool! I just wish the players were a bit more sturdy...

[Frost Sheridan]

There's that video Techmoan did where he's opening those big bags of loose, untested MD players he ordered from Japan... and then he shows he's got 3 more bags like it. There's just so many to go around if you look there

earlier this year a friend and i also ordered a few of those junk MD lots from japan! mostly all of the sony units worked fine (except for the ones that looked like they were sat on), a couple of the sharps worked, and none of the panasonics or kenwoods worked. unsurprisingly, it seems like sony is the only way to go for reliable MD players.

sadly, as melon pointed out, the tech is just so fiddly that it can be hard to keep players functional. my friend and i were able to revive some of the dead sharp units with some basic maintenance (lubricating the mechanisms and cleaning the lens), but most of the dead ones were just lost causes. fortunately, all of our sony units have been working fine so far!

Ozwomp Online had cosmic minidiscs you could visit to learn about the galaxy and Ozwomps Voyage used them for level progression. Mostly I'm a Sony fanboy

as another sony fanboy, i quite enjoyed the minidiscs featured in ozwomps voyage when i played through it.

[Dequake]

wow! This is the first time I've ever seen any discussion online about Mini Disks! As a kid I would rummage around my dads old stuff and found a player and a few disks in our attic. Apparently his university had bought them for all the faucalty to use when teaching. Judging by how he talked about it it seemed like it never caught on, and it was just forgotten. It seems fun but I've really not gotten into learning how you're even supposed to use the damn thing or how to burn music on the discs, etc. Maybe one day I will.

But yeah, the one I have is in silver grey, mint condition with the bag and everything. My dad never used it basically. All the stuff was left back home so I don't have any pictures of it for the moment.

[Dan Q]

MiniDiscs were the hotness among my circle of friends in the late 90s.

I never had one: I made the jump to MP3 early, and bought one of the very first portable CD players with MP3 support, which turned out to be a terrible investment because this was before RAM got cheap and so it had barely enough memory to buffer a second or so of audio, which meant that any bump sufficient to make the CD skip would result in half a second to two seconds of silence while it caught-up with itself, which made it useless to jog or run with or to use in a car: you could walk with it fine, but mostly it was a static piece of kit.

Anyway, I looked like a fool in the short term, but of course MP3 won in the long term once flash memory (for storage) become accessible and fast RAM (for buffering) got cheaper.

But for a while there, I envied every one of my friends with a shiny MiniDisc player. The recording was so effortless, too! They could just plug their device into a headphone jack and record a track from a CD, while I'd still be ripping and compressing audio to write to some future CD-R once I'd collected enough "similar" material to fill it and justify the effort.

A quick diversion while I gush about the scientific and technological marvel that is the MiniDisc

My favourite thing about MiniDiscs, though, was the way they actually work.

A lot of people who owned and used them never knew, but MiniDiscs are magneto-optical media, a magical category that sits somehow between magnetic media (like cassette tapes) and optical media (like CDs). They data on a MiniDisc is recorded magnetically, but they achieve their excellent size-efficiency through a fascinating physics trick.

Unlike magnetic tape which is highly-volatile and can be remagnetised easily, a MiniDisc is made of a material whose magnetic polarity is locked into the structure of a solid. To record a MiniDisc, a laser shines on a tiny point of the medium, heating it just hot enough to become paramagnetic - capable of having its magnetic orientation changed... and then that hot spot is exposed to the magnet of the writing head, flipping just that tiny spot to the correct magnetic orientation. And the whole thing happens so fast!

And reading the disk... is fundamentally optical: you shine a (cooler, lower-powered) laser at the disc's surface and observe the polarisation of the reflected light to determine which way the magnetic field at that point is facing. Freaking magical technology!