Minidiscs were quite popular for a while in Hong Kong - still are with me. Not sure they ever took off elsewhere, though.
Anyone out there still use 'em/ ever used 'em?
In the US, they were a crushing failure. My a/v receiver (purchased a year or two ago) has an input jack labeled “CD/Minisdisc,” but I’ve never used minidiscs and neither has anyone I know. In fact, I can’t remember ever seeing a minidisc player for sale in a store, even in stores that sell tape decks and record players.
They achieved some degree of popularity in Canada, but like many things are being swept away by the MP3 tide.
Yeah, MDs were popular in Europe - search for your favorite artist on eBay and you might find a European “official” record company release of one of their albums. As has been mentioned, MD was a huge failure in the US. I’m not sure why - perhaps the CD format had already taken too much of a hold in the States?
In any event, MDs were somewhat popular with audiophiles and also used for illicit recordings (a.k.a. bootlegs). Other than that, I can’t think of many people that wereu into them. I actually bought a Sony NetMD player a year or two ago, but Sony’s software sucks so badly and their DRM is so poorly thoght out that it’s sitting in my junk drawer gathering dust.
I have one. It’s neat, but I don’t use it anymore. The Sharp one I have is bulky, the Sony ones are tiny but really expensive. Mine only does the basic Minidisc format so the only way to get music on is to hook it up to your CD player and copy at 1x. It has a digital connection so the copy is pretty flawless (since it’s a rather high bitrate codec). The blank disks aren’t that cheap either, though you can resuse them.
It makes no sense to get one now. One of the various forms of MP3 players will be better for most anybody’s use. ( Except maybe recording.)
I have the Sony MZ-N505. It has the Net MD feature, which means you can hook it onto a PC through USB port and transfer files of any format (MP3, Wav, Ac3 etc) to the MiniDisc.
It also features LP4 compression, which means you can cram 4 times more music in a single 80 minute disk. (4x80=320 minutes). Also, the file transfer is very fast. You can move a 3 minute song in about 10 seconds or so. It was quite expensive when I got it, but I love it!
I use a Sony MD recorder/player to hook up to the soundboard when my band plays to get a copy of the show. I also use it to record concerts that I attend with a sweet mic that I can clip to my shirt…Can’t say I have ever used it to really listen to music though…I transfer everything to my PC/CD.
The only place I ever used MiniDisc was at an NPR station in Florida. We used them for easy portable recording. Similarly, the NPR station here uses DAT tape, another basically-dead format, at least as far as home use goes. The only place I’ve seen MiniDiscs for sale is the Sony superstore in Manhattan, and even their selection wasn’t that great.
I had a component minidisc system plus a portable unit (still have them, actually, in the garage awaiting our next family yardsale).
My main interest was in getting durable copies of a my large collection of vinyl and cassette albums. I was generally happy with the results, audio-wise, but found editing and splitting tracks to be cumbersome.
CDs are also more convenient for playback - everyone in my family has a portable CD player, I have a CD player in my office, in my car, etc. So, having switched to CDs, I’m no longer limited to playing on the two minidisc units I owned, and can share the music with the rest of my family. Obviously, if minidisc players had been as common in our house as CD players are, this wouldn’t have been a factor.
So, when the costs of recordable CDs and CD writing hardware dropped low enough, I abandoned the minidisc. Even though I had to re-record onto CD about 50 albums I had copied onto minidisc, I still think this was a good move. (I’ve made CD’s of about 150 albums now.)
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- As noted, (-if they have them-) the only reason most people in the US keep minidisc recorders around is for portable digital audio recording. In some countries commercial album releases were available on minidisc (Japan, mostly that I heard), but not in the US. Minidiscs aren’t expensive, $2 for a disk that is physically durable and re-recordable at least 10,000 times–the official figure, but during QC testing some go three times that much. To the casual listener, a minidisc recording sounds basically identical to a CD recording, but a Walkman minidisc recorder costs $200 and a portable audio-CD recorder costs up around $700. A DAT is higher quality but costs even more (like $850) and needs maintenance besides–else they eat $45 tapes.
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- I looked into getting a car radio that had a minidisk deck in it, but the only one available in the US was like $400. All the other few are Japanese (Japanese character displays!)
… - For general music-listening portability now, you are probably better off going with MP3 CD’s. You can easily make them on a computer, and now many car units and even some of the cheaper portable players can play them.
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We have a professional minidisc recorder for our radio project, chiefly for recording outside interviews and articles. It’s OK.
Like Betamax, DAT tapes are still used in industry for high-end purposes no consumer-grade medium can quite cover. In the tapes’ instance, it’s for very large backups/archives.
I have one and used it quite a bit when I first got it for making copies of LPs so they could be portable. I loved being able to move or delete specific tracks or edit out intros/outros I didn’t like. They’re great for using to work out or run because they don’t skip like a CD player. I didn’t have any trouble finding blank discs at regular record stores, but I ended up buying a huge multipack when I saw a good deal because deep in my heart I suspected they weren’t going to catch on. I wouldn’t have any idea where to get them now.
As for playing in the car I picked up one of those cheap things that looks like a cassette tape on a cord. You put the cassette part in your tape deck and the cord to the output jack on the player and it plays through the car stereo somehow. I’m guessing the sound quality isn’t A-1, but like I said, I was listening to old records to begin with, and plus there’s all the noise of you barrelling down the road on top of it. Perfectly adequate as far as I was concerned.
When I worked as a service tech for Circuit Shitty I saw quite a few come in for service in the last 4 or so years I worked there. Because of this, I got the impression that we sold quite a lot of them (rule of thumb: the service department sees the most of whatever brand/model sells the best). I still see them for sale in Best Buy. There are several models to choose from, indicating that they still seem to have appeal.
I still have a full size and portable. The full size (MXD-D3) is great because it’s a dual CD + MD player. I really loved the editing features. I made a lot of mix discs without using a professional mixer and they sound great.
I’d have to admit that if I was in the market to buy a portable audio player now, I’d probably go for an IPOD since I’m not much interested in the remixing thing any more.
I teach dancing - and a lot of the dance teachers around here bought MD machines a few years back. We mostly got the large ones designed to be put on a hi-fi stack, because they had the extra features we wanted. I have one of those, and also a portable one for mobile use, and to practice with using earbuds.
We like them because we can record just the music needed for teaching on them (beats carrying an album for one dance); they have speed control (useful while learning something tricky); I can carry my entire dance music collection in a small box, and if I lose it I still have the originals safe at home. Minidisc’s are much more durable than CD’s - a very important requirement in this business. Also they are anti-skip - an important feature in a percussive dance environment. If we’re doing a performance, I’ll make an MD with just the music needed, and let it roll.
Before MD’s, we mostly used 5 minute tapes or records - as tape machines and record players can both be speed controlled easily. Now variable speed and non-skip CD players are available, but they weren’t then, except in very expensive models.
If I was doing it again now, I’d probably buy a Zen Jukebox or similar, set my music up in playlists, and carry everything around in a unit the size of a paperback book. But the MD is still very easy to use, I can take my discs to any dance studio near here and use their machine, and dance teachers with no computer skills have no trouble using one - so I don’t expect to change for some time.
DancingFool
My digital camera, Sony Mavica MVC-CD200 uses a mini disc. That’s the only time i use them.
Quite a few companies used mini-discs for business cards and/or advertising. Haven’t seen any recently as they are bulkier the traditional cards and you have to put them in the PC to read them except for the label. Just not very convenient.
Never saw a dedicated player.
I use MDs all the time, I even have an MD player in my car. That being said, I’m in Japan, one of the very few places where they ever became, and are still, popular. MP3 players might be more portable but the sound quality is atrocious. ATRAC compression barely affects the sound compared to 44.1 16-bit audio. This makes Minidiscs a useful format for field recording; the media is cheaper than DAT and in my experience more durable. For situations that require better sound, I’ll get out the proper and bulkier DAT recorder, or better yet a hard drive field recorder.
Spingears, I think you’re confusing two different things. This thing here is a Minidisc.Completely different thing from the smaller sized CDs.
I’m a journalist and use my small Sony MD recorder ($150 used on eBay) to record interviews I conduct and conference sessions I attend. One disc (available at my local Best Buy for about $1.50 each in packs of 10) can hold 320 minutes of digital stereo audio. Even though that’s the “slow” speed, I can hear someone whispering from across the room. It’s fantastic, and beats the crap out of the horrible microcassettes I used to use.
The only downside is that there’s no way to transfer a recording from an MD to my computer or to another format, except by recording the analog output from the headphone jack in real time. The recording format is proprietary, and except for a couple of Sony notebooks (only available in Japan, I think) there are no MD drives for computers.
So when I want to check a recording, I usually just play it back from the player, since it’s not worth my time to copy a four-hour recording to the computer. It’s a bit of a pain if I’m looking for a 30-second quote from a long session. If I could just copy it as a file onto the hard disk and work with it in an audio program, that would be great. But not possible for now.
Since I mostly use the recordings as a backup to the notes I make contemporaneously, it’s not a major problem.
After seeing mine, a friend bought one to record his band’s rehearsals and live performances. He loves it, too.
Tell me about it! We bought our minidisc recorder thinking that we would be able to transfer the files digitally to the computer (i.e. with no loss) and were gutted to discover that this just isn’t possible.
At the moment, I’m investigating the possibility of recording interviews on my Treo 600 smartphone (don’t laugh) - there’s a third-party app called ‘SoundRec’ that will record straight to the SD card as WAV format at up to 44.1Khz - so far, it looks promising (even using just the internal mic, the results are really quite impressive), but I don’t know yet if an external mic can be used. It works out at about 4.5Mb per minute, so around an hour of recording on a 256Mb card, which is readable on the PC.