Minidisc players...any love for these?

Ted CTed C Posts: 11,730
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Anyone have fond memories of these little bits of kit from the 90's?

I only had the portable Walkman ones, not a home system.

Fair enough, they were relatively short lived because pre recorded albums were almost non existent, seems the industry, record companies and the public never really got behind them.

However, their saving grace for me was the recording facility...back then I used to go to a lot of live gigs, and did reviews for various websites, and having a recording of the gig was a very useful reference for writing the reviews afterwards.

I liked the idea they were very small, easy to put in a trouser pocket, attach a small mike to your clothes, and you could set it to record (they had a facility to record mono for 4 hours), lock the unit so you would not accidentally turn it off, and then simply forget about it and enjoy the gig.

Downsides? Annoyingly, they could sometimes be very finicky and not save any data at all. And were also known to randomly wipe themselves clean of your precious recordings. Plus...with live recordings,you had to manually mark tracks (you could separate by numbers), and then enter song titles by hand...very laborious. (When transferring from a PC it would name tracks automatically, if I recall).

I also remember that at that time there was no way to transfer the data from minidisc to PC, though you could do it the other way round. I think there was some sort of data protection in place.

Granted...my memory may be hazy on some of this.

However...recently I found my old Walkman, and was intrigued to see if it still worked...it does. And I have a large selection of live gig recordings going back to 2001. So over the next few days or so during the hols I am looking forward to re discovering some of these old recordings.

One more slight...disadvantage. The notion of having it in your pocket and forgetting about it got more interesting when you needed to attend a call of nature...it was very disconcerting listening back to the recording, and in the middle of a song suddenly realising the music seemed to fade, you heard footsteps, voices, doors opening...and a distinct whooshing sound, followed by sundry other bodily noises and comments from 'blokes' in the bog...yes, you may say your could have turned it off, but these things were so finicky you dared not pause or stop them, for fear of it not saving what you had recorded.
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Comments

  • [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 36,630
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    It was a great idea back in the early 90s, but the record industries did their usual foot stamping, and in the end it was hampered by the Serial Copy Management System and DRM.

    Minidisc killed of Philips DCC rival very quickly, and became the only lowish (it still wasn't cheap) cost means of high quality digital recording. DAT was superior, but it was vastly more expensive and never really made it out of the studios.

    Minidisc was relatively low cost (the discs were reasonably cheap but the players/recorders were quite expensive) and to most people the recordings were pretty much indistinguishable from CD.

    It was moderately successful in Europe, very successful in Japan but something of a niche product in the US.

    But it had one major flaw, Sony's god awful Sonicstage software. It was a resource hog, idiosyncratic and prone to crashing. Later versions were much better but by then CD-R had arrived, followed quickly by MP3 players.

    Although standalone consumer HIFI CD recorders never really took off it was adopted very quickly by PC users, who could just rip their bought CDs to their PC and create their own compilation CDs playable on almost any CD player, or just copy their bought CDs to another blank disc. Blank CD prices pretty soon became a lot cheaper than blank minidiscs.

    Then the double whammy arrived in the form of MP3 players.

    Sony's Atrac Codec was, and still is I think, superior to MP3 but the average consumer couldn't really tell the difference, and the ability to have all of your music on the one device was highly appealing to consumers.

    SDony's Sonicstage would at first only allow you to rip a CD to the mindisc recorder digitally. It wouldn't allow you to copy those recordings back to a PC, which caused major problems if a disc became faulty for example. Later versions allowed you to check tracks in and out, in that you could move a file to a mindisc recorder and then move it back. But moving it back removed it from the disc.

    Later minidisc players/recorders could also handle MP3, but by then it was too late.

    I still have a few hundred minidiscs, but my two players gave up the ghost a while ago and second hand units are relatively expensive, especially the HiMD format player/recorders which still go for around £100 or more on Ebay often.

    It did however, become very popular with some radio stations and recording studios as a cheap means of making very high quality demos, storing jingles and such like. These professional recorders often turn up on Ebay too.
  • [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 6,848
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    Great format, very good for portability and editing
  • AddisonianAddisonian Posts: 16,377
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    I had one and loved it. But they really didn't catch on at all.
  • koantemplationkoantemplation Posts: 101,293
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    I'm glad I just missed out on the Minidisc.

    I agree that the Sonic stage software was almost as bad as Itunes.

    Thankfully I got the MP3 CD player first and then usb mp3 players.

    The CD player was bulky but you could put 100s of songs on one CD and without DRM problems.
  • OvalteenieOvalteenie Posts: 24,169
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    I've got one :blush: a MD Walkman
  • [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 36,630
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    I have a Sharp portable that no longer works, but then it is old, bought in around 1996. Earlier models seemed a little fragile compared to later models, but then bumping around in a pocket, dumped in a drawer, constantly having the charger and headphones connected and disconnected is going to take it's toll.

    There's also a Sony portable, that works intermittently and a Panasonic that wont hold a charge, uses a slightly different battery I can't find anywhere and the charger has long since been lost in a house move anyway. Not sure if it works at all.

    I also have a Sharp MD-R3 which has 3 cd players on one side and a minidisc deck on the other. The minidisc side no longer works correctly, constantly displays TOC ERR with recorded discs, pre-recorded discs or blank discs. It's apparently a fairly common problem with Sharp MD players. It's been sitting in the spare room for years, but recently I dug it out, stripped it down, cleaned it all and got it working again..for about two months.

    I also owned a Sony HiMD recorder but sold it a few years ago, intending to replace it with a newer model but lost my job at the time. I never got round to buying a new one and now they have all been discontinued.
  • ChickenWingsChickenWings Posts: 2,057
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    My sister is a singer and still uses them.
  • ArcanaArcana Posts: 37,521
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    I had a portable (with a great remote control I remember) and a full-sized deck.

    The portable broke after a few years of heavy use and the deck I stopped using after succumbing to the mp3 revolution. Actually I still use the deck but only as a digitial-to-analogue converter.
  • Luner13Luner13 Posts: 2,968
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    I still have mine haha never us it though. I remember buying loads of blank mini discs and plugging my player into the TV and recording the sound from music videos lol early illegal mp3s haha
  • [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 7,341
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    One of the major flaws was thath they couldn't be backed up at all.
    Still they were great but mine fell apart. I only got into MP3s when I started using Pcoket PCs (ANOTHER great but short lived piece of technology which was superceded by smartphones and
    Android.
  • EnglishspinnerEnglishspinner Posts: 6,132
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    Paid around £190 for my first Panasonic around 1995. I've still got a selection of (Sony and Sharp) MD players, both portable and deck-based, mostly picked up dirt cheap on eBay around 10 years ago when the iPod was in its first phase of world domination. Rarely use them to record nowadays, but I have a good number of discs with radio programmes, concerts etc from the era which are brilliant quality (I was also an early adopter of DAB). Never got on with the Hi-MD machines, displays were awful and controls fiddly.

    They really aren't viable for Walkman-type use, I long ago abandoned the Nick Hornbyesque compilation disc, as pointed out the tx software was always pretty awful, even before iTunes became the standard.

    I'm pretty much a 20th century guy so there is something magical about the electro-mechanical whirs and clicks from a minidisc, whose ancestry is out of the earlier analogue age. Totally solid-state is soulless.

    The other sadness for a Sony afficianado is how they failed to sort the software and flunked evolving a viable MP3 alternative to Apple. I now have some excellent Sony MP3 players but they don't dock to (iPod compatible) Sony hifi systems. Madness!
  • farmer bobfarmer bob Posts: 27,595
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    I still have a portable MD player and also a Deck. Neither have been used in ages, after reading this thread I might have a listen to them again, if they still work. Fingers crossed :-). Saying that I played a cassette tape the other evening and reminisced with the KLF :-D:-D
  • taskertasker Posts: 4,048
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    i have a full size Sony 520 still use it and had 2 portables as well, a Sony and a Panasonic.

    Love Mini Disc always have done, i will keep using it till it stops working.
  • [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 139
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    I liked MiniDisc but it was a complete flop commercially.

    I remember it being launched the first time round and while they made a big play of the recording quality, which whole not truly digital was far in advance of what was available to the home hi-fi buff at the time, the problem was the price of blank discs, which was more than they were charging for CDs.

    Compared to cassettes MD had a far superior sound quality and the broadcasting community liked the ease of editing.

    I still use my Sony hi-fi deck sometimes, I've got a couple of hundred discs I made from CDs I took out the library.
  • koantemplationkoantemplation Posts: 101,293
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    I liked MiniDisc but it was a complete flop commercially.

    I remember it being launched the first time round and while they made a big play of the recording quality, which whole not truly digital was far in advance of what was available to the home hi-fi buff at the time, the problem was the price of blank discs, which was more than they were charging for CDs.

    Compared to cassettes MD had a far superior sound quality and the broadcasting community liked the ease of editing.

    I still use my Sony hi-fi deck sometimes, I've got a couple of hundred discs I made from CDs I took out the library.

    Wasn't the price of blank discs artificially high to either discourage piracy or to cover the cost of piracy?
  • Molly BloomMolly Bloom Posts: 2,318
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    I remember them being horrifically overpriced, but I was a teenager at the time so maybe they seemed more expensive than they were. VERY few people I knew had one though, and most of those who did were part of my theatre group.
  • [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 7,341
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    You can still buy blank MDs. Your local offy might have some.

    I had some right weird names for my first comps based on the colours of the MDs and my works of fiction.
    Once my pocket PCs die on me, I'm well and truly ****ed for keeping my writng notes and gaming codes in order unless anybody here can help me out by suggesting some free apps that let you put your notes in order and into different lists?
  • OvalteenieOvalteenie Posts: 24,169
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    Does anyone else think Sony has sort of lost its way and fallen from its pedestal over the last 20 years? They keep backing the wrong horses :( MD being an example

    Whereas Samsung was once seen as a cheap Korean brand but is now seen as market-leading and rather :cool:
  • farmer bobfarmer bob Posts: 27,595
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    motsy wrote: »
    You can still buy blank MDs. Your local offy might have some.

    I had some right weird names for my first comps based on the colours of the MDs and my works of fiction.
    Once my pocket PCs die on me, I'm well and truly ****ed for keeping my writng notes and gaming codes in order unless anybody here can help me out by suggesting some free apps that let you put your notes in order and into different lists?

    I recall buying a variety of different coloured blank MDs, red,blue,gold etc. What names did you conjure up?
  • farmer bobfarmer bob Posts: 27,595
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    Ovalteenie wrote: »
    Does anyone else think Sony has sort of lost its way and fallen from its pedestal over the last 20 years? They keep backing the wrong horses :( MD being an example

    Whereas Samsung was once seen as a cheap Korean brand but is now seen as market-leading and rather :cool:

    Sony has perhaps had some Ups & Downs, but I'm still using a Hi-Fi system I got 23 years ago. Quality build has been their forte'
  • Si_CreweSi_Crewe Posts: 40,202
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    I guess Minidiscs were sort of a first stab at digital media but struggled because of lack of standardisation.
    They had lots of clever features which took advantage of digital technology but there was no real "standardised feature set" which gave them any properly unique selling point.
    It's as if the developers were just sort of "dabbling" with digital capabilities rather than properly exploring it and exploiting it.

    In the UK there was (and is, I think) a voluntary code of conduct by manufacturers to prevent gadgets from having any kind of digital input so you couldn't use them to make digital copies of anything.
    AFAIK, UK models of stuff like camcorders and MP3 players still don't have a digital input for this reason.
    Which makes import models more desirable.

    There is, of course, a reason why a CD is 5" across while a MD is only 2" across and that's cos they made extensive use of antialiasing technology with the result that music often sounded slightly "hollow", because the waveforms produced were a "composite" which didn't always reproduce sounds terribly well.
    If you were listening to a MD in a car or on a portable MD player then you might not notice but I recall that a friend of mine was considering building a recording studio using MD technology and he gave up on the idea because he found that mixing down from multiple tracks didn't give satisfactory results.
  • [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 36,630
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    Ovalteenie wrote: »
    Does anyone else think Sony has sort of lost its way and fallen from its pedestal over the last 20 years? They keep backing the wrong horses :( MD being an example

    Whereas Samsung was once seen as a cheap Korean brand but is now seen as market-leading and rather :cool:

    Sony were one of the main partners in the invention of DVD, they also were the inventors of BluRay and let's not forget the Playstation which completely reignited the console market. The first console that actually made gaming a cool thing to do, and made it mainstream rather than the rather geeky pastime it was seen as before.

    They certainly backed a few formats that were overall flops, but they were at least innovative.

    MD wasn't mass market mainstream, but it wasn't a flop given it lasted around 20 years overall.

    And they aren't the only company to have it's share of flops, Philips had more than a few with V2000, CD-I and Digital Compact Cassette being amongst them.
  • OvalteenieOvalteenie Posts: 24,169
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    Do you get skipping with tape or optical media? I'm thinking Milli Vanilli... :blush:
  • [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 36,630
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    Ovalteenie wrote: »
    Do you get skipping with tape or optical media? I'm thinking Milli Vanilli... :blush:

    You don't get skipping with tape, but tapes can suffer from degradation and even stretching of the tape, which usually affects playback. If they are badly stored they can also suffer from mould.

    Yes you can get skipping with optical media, usually if the player is subject to a shock which makes the laser jump. Portable players/recorders usually got round this with a buffer. When playing back a few seconds is stored in the buffer, if the player is subject to shock that causes the laser to skip the buffer is enough to usually ensure smooth playback while the laser refocuses. Many recorders, especially portable ones, have a much longer buffer to try and ensure recording isn't interrupted when subjected to a shock. But scratched CDs (and MDs) can suffer skips too as the laser can't focus onto the pits due to the scratch.
  • Ted CTed C Posts: 11,730
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    OK...managed to get the player charged up and running.

    For the record, the player I have is a Sony MZ-N10 Net MD Walkman.

    I have been reading a few old reviews online to familiarize myself with the unit. Seems the built-in battery has a life of around 8 - 10 years, well mine is still going. Thankfully it has an add-on compartment so you can attach an AA battery as well.

    One very frustrating thing was not being able to transfer files from the unit to a PC, there was software called sonic stage you had to download, but it only worked for transferring music from PC to the unit.

    I also remember it coming with a very nice remote that had a visual display and lots of functions...it was a bit plasticky though.

    Apparently it also has a six band EQ...don't even remember that!

    One thing I notice is that the display on the unit itself seems somewhat faint...not sure if it was always like that, or if it's a sign the battery is on the way out.

    Currently listening to one of my live recordings...Tangerine Dream from London Astoria (R.I.P) from 2002. Pretty awesome!
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