WOW. This is sweet. I have an RH1, and a ton of Discs. Off I go!
Dumping MiniDisc Media
11–20 of 62 posts
Re: Dumping MiniDisc Media
#12Nice tutorial. I loved MiniDiscs back in the day, they were so futuristic. I had a portable Aiwa MiniDisc recorder long before I could burn CDs. I used it for everything - copying CDs, recording live music, field recordings. Some day, I'll have to rescue all that old stuff, so this tutorial is greatly appreciated.
I remember using them over CDs purely because they had that ghost-in-the-shell anime-scifi feel, although burning a CD was much less pain than converting & writing to my Sony MD player
SAME!
Added bonus that it's what Neo uses in the first matrix movie to give some software to the guy who knocks his door in the opening scene.
I always wanted to use minidisks as a data medium, but it seems like it was never really possible.
For the sake of suspending disbelief at the film I like to imagine that Neo encoded the data into the audio channels, but that would be super slow to load.
Re: Dumping MiniDisc Media
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember using them over CDs purely because they had that ghost-in-the-shell anime-scifi feel, although burning a CD was much less pain than converting & writing to my Sony MD player
SAME! Added bonus that it's what Neo uses in the first matrix movie to give some software to the guy who knocks his door in the opening scene. I always wanted to use minidisks as a data medium, but it seems like it was never really possible. For the sake of suspending disbelief at the film I like to imagine that Neo encoded the data into the audio channels, but that would be super slow to load.
There was MD-Data. 128 MB per disk IIRC.
Re: Dumping MiniDisc Media
#14Nice tutorial. I loved MiniDiscs back in the day, they were so futuristic. I had a portable Aiwa MiniDisc recorder long before I could burn CDs. I used it for everything - copying CDs, recording live music, field recordings. Some day, I'll have to rescue all that old stuff, so this tutorial is greatly appreciated.
I remember using them over CDs purely because they had that ghost-in-the-shell anime-scifi feel, although burning a CD was much less pain than converting & writing to my Sony MD player
I had one as well and it was very cool... but could never use it regularly over my Discman simply because ATRAC sounded so horrible! MP3 was the first audio compression which was even remotely acceptable. Still, it was very futuristic and I loved it for what it was. Now DAT on the other hand.. that was the bomb.
Re: Dumping MiniDisc Media
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
SAME! Added bonus that it's what Neo uses in the first matrix movie to give some software to the guy who knocks his door in the opening scene. I always wanted to use minidisks as a data medium, but it seems like it was never really possible. For the sake of suspending disbelief at the film I like to imagine that Neo encoded the data into the audio channels, but that would be super slow to load.
There was MD-Data. 128 MB per disk IIRC.
Seems like you're right but I never-ever saw this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzwtCBj5jEs
Although it seems like it's not really minidisks.
Re: Dumping MiniDisc Media
#16This brings back some great memories from 2002. My daughter had just been born and when I was up doing the night feeds I used my PlayStation 2 with its optical out to transfer my CDs onto my MiniDisc player. It was a slow process (real time) but it was so great to have all the track details automatically included rather than having to manually name the tracks on the player.
This was before Sony's NetMD software and I couldn't afford a HiFi MiniDisc unit at the time which would have made life simpler. Also many, many hours playing Final Fantasy X on the same PS2. Great times!
I soon moved onto an iRiver CD-MP3 player which was much easier to work with thanks to being able to burn my own CDs. Audio quality wasn't as good as the MiniDisc but considering I was listening to it in an office with ear buds that wasn't a big deal. Then onto an iRiver HDD based MP3 player and finally I got an iPod.
There is still something so cool about MiniDisc though. Feels so CyberPunk, even today it is like living in the near future when you hold one in your hands.
Re: Dumping MiniDisc Media
#17It feels like the project uses "download" and "upload" the wrong way. Surely transferring files from the disc drive to the pc using a piece of software on the pc should be considered "downloading"?
So.. in this way: The Minidisc Player is the world. As such you download content or data from the real world down to it, and you upload data up to the real world from it.
But, the software that performs the transfer runs on the PC, and it is the one receiving data. Even Wikipedia defines "downloading" as "receiving data"...
Re: Dumping MiniDisc Media
#18This brings back some great memories from 2002. My daughter had just been born and when I was up doing the night feeds I used my PlayStation 2 with its optical out to transfer my CDs onto my MiniDisc player. It was a slow process (real time) but it was so great to have all the track details automatically included rather than having to manually name the tracks on the player. This was before Sony's NetMD software and I…
> There is still something so cool about MiniDisc though
Agree. I really wanted one for years, I even had some blank discs to fidget with, but when I could finally afford one the iPod had come out and I bought that instead. Part of me still wants to buy a MiniDisc player and some discs, but I try to keep the amount of stuff I own down to the essentials, and vintage electronic doesn't really make the cut.
TechMoan on Youtube have a few videos about the MiniDisc format for anyone interested.
Re: Dumping MiniDisc Media
#19Edit: I have finally created a separate organization for the project now: https://github.com/linux-minidisc/linux-minidisc
Original project creator and co-author of the linux-minidisc project here.
Awesome to see my project on the frontpage of HN, maybe I can use this opportunity to find new contributors to move the project forward as it has been a little dormant due to lack of time.
The upstream repository is currently located on my Github page [1], but I would like to create a separate Github project so that others can easily become maintainers and help review PRs and so on. There are a couple of patches in forked projects which improve the NetMD functionality of "libnetmd" in many ways. However, I would like to create a separate project first before I want to merge any new patches.
For creating a new project, I was thinking for changing the name as the original name "linux-minidisc" is rather misleading as the software isn't Linux-only. It works on any operating system with libusb support and is known to work on Windows and macOS.
Furthermore, I think the GUI transfer application - QHiMDTransfer - needs an overhaul. Luckily, the NetMD and HiMD functionality are in separate libraries, libnetmd and libhimd, so it should even be possible to create a new, more professional GUI application or even write plugins to existing music players like Amarok.
The Python code mentioned in this article are actually no longer in development as it was supposed to be a proof-of-concept only. We used a Google Summer of Projects slot from the VideoLAN project to have a student work on implemeting the full NetMD functionality in the libnetmd which was forked from the original libnetmd.
If anyone is interested in helping project wit the aforementioned tasks and/or joining us, please let me know. This project is the only known software which is actually able to decrypt most of the tracks on NetMD and HiMD (not all though [2]).
> [1] https://github.com/glaubitz/linux-minidisc
> [2] https://wiki.physik.fu-berlin.de/linux-minidisc/doku.php#sta...
Re: Dumping MiniDisc Media
#20Still use my Minidisc almost daily. I prefer older equipment, but boy they're both getting expensive to get discs and tapes. Check out platinum md for a sonicstage replacement