MiniDiscs: The Future Is Now!

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

You should get a CED player.

HA!





I prefer my music and films on large, fragile, obsolete platters.

LD and Vinyl 4 life.

Vynil movies... The 70's were freaking crazy.

LD and Vinyl on the other hand were genius ideas.

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

Wasn't MiniDisc finally popular and affordable in late 1990s/early 2000s? I remember people were deciding MD or MP3. If that was the matchup, there really is no question to go MP3, with their small player size and lack of discs to carry. If they were more affordable or popular in the cassette era, then no question there would have been a MD preferred media period of time. I remember seeing Minidisc players and they just looked so cool though, even today, minidiscs are cooler than regular CDs haha

Btw, just wondering, do Minidisc players skip like old CD players when say, running?I actually never had a CD player that didn't skip. But those things were just too big for convenience.

Nope, all MD player must have at least 6 seconds of anti-skip to prevent any skipping issues and gain MD format approval, even home decks.

MD's could hold massive amounts of music by 2002, though; 13.5 hours of music (In Atrac format) on one disc is nothing to laugh at. But the compatibility with MP3 wasn't added until around 2004-ish and by then MP3 players had killed the market.

Later Hi-MD players could hold a few hundred hours of music per disc (Using Hi-MD discs) and were natively compatible with MP3 format files but it was too little too late on Sony's part.

EDIT!: Also don't forget MP3 players from around 1999-2004 were MASSIVE and only held 100MB-256MB on average, only Apple had seen fit to put a Hard Drive into their machines which when coupled with Windows compatibility starting circa 2004 gave iPods the massive lead they still have today.

[classicgamer5]

I'll check my local Best Buy. I see you finally got your avatar back

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

I'll check my local Best Buy. I see you finally got your avatar back

Thanks! I've got my fingers crossed hoping that they do!

And yeah, photobucket was nice enough to have my bandwidth limit run out two days before it resets back to zero so it's like nothing happened and I just ninja-ed my way around here anonymously for the past few days.

[Weekend_Warrior]

Minidisc cons (versus compact disc):
- features "near cd quality sound" using ATRAC 5:1 compression rather than standard cd's (no compression)
- a very small library of commercially available music MD's were produced versus compact disc.
- to record onto an MD, you have to stream it in like a cassette (you can burn audio or MP3 data onto cd).
- re-recording on MD produces audible artifacts over time due to the ATRAC compression method used, thus you can only re-record so many times (You can record only once on a standard CD-R. But CD-RW's can be re-recorded roughly 1,000 times with little or no audio degradation)

[t0yrobo]

Minidisc cons (versus compact disc):
- features "near cd quality sound" using ATRAC 5:1 compression rather than standard cd's (no compression)
- a very small library of commercially available music MD's were produced versus compact disc.
- to record onto an MD, you have to stream it in like a cassette (you can burn audio or MP3 data onto cd).
- re-recording on MD produces audible artifacts over time due to the ATRAC compression method used, thus you can only re-record so many times (You can record only once on a standard CD-R. But CD-RW's can be re-recorded roughly 1,000 times with little or no audio degradation)

Here's my biggest con from having a MD player. SonicStage, god that program was fucking awful. Overall I really liked my md player though, it was way ahead of ts time in a lot ways.

[Droid party]

Congrats on the find. I still have 4 portable players but never got around to buying a deck so I'm a little envious .

Sadly I don't use my players much anymore because of how easy it is to use my ipod instead, however the Quality of MD is still superior.

[noiseredux]

Had when when I was in college. This was before iPods really blew up. I used to use them for mixes of my 7" singles and stuff like that. And also to record shows I went to. Haha.

[Limewater]

Wasn't MiniDisc finally popular and affordable in late 1990s/early 2000s? I remember people were deciding MD or MP3. If that was the matchup, there really is no question to go MP3, with their small player size and lack of discs to carry.

I don't know, man. Back in '99-2000, IIRC, the portable MP3 players that didn't cost a fortune only held, like, 64MB. Maybe 128.

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

Minidisc cons (versus compact disc):
- features "near cd quality sound" using ATRAC 5:1 compression rather than standard cd's (no compression)
- a very small library of commercially available music MD's were produced versus compact disc.
- to record onto an MD, you have to stream it in like a cassette (you can burn audio or MP3 data onto cd).
- re-recording on MD produces audible artifacts over time due to the ATRAC compression method used, thus you can only re-record so many times (You can record only once on a standard CD-R. But CD-RW's can be re-recorded roughly 1,000 times with little or no audio degradation)

-Actuallly, Minidiscs are opto-magnetic discs and can be written to 100,000 times before any degradation to the sound quality occurs.

-Recording to MD's from your PC is completely possible and actually very easy to do with whole discs able to be made in under a minute.

-All MD players since the Net-MD series which launched in 1998-1999 have the ability to record/playback 74-80 minutes of Linear PCM audio or WAV, and are fully compatible with the MP3 format.