31–40 of 62 posts
The software was terrible as were the restrictions placed on it. All the copy restrictions and forcing ATRAC on people long after it was clear that MP3 was superior really killed the format.
Earlier 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.
That capability postdates The Matrix, so I've been assuming small files and some sort of deniable, purely acoustic steganography that's resilient to ATRAC compression.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"...
Edit: 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 curren…
Edit: 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 curren…
I have both Net and Hi players and a collection of older ATRAC3. If there is anything I can put any of these resources toward (running tests, etc.), I’ll see what I can do.
Thank you for a great project that allowed me to finally (25 years later) pursue my interest in MD.
For those of you who're still using MiniDiscs daily, I've just released a SonicStage replacement app that works in the browser thanks to WebUSB and WASM.
Here's the link to the project: https://github.com/cybercase/webminidisc
and here's a short demo of how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Frs8qhw0g9Y
Hope you like it!
This 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…
MiniDisc lover here. Great tutorial! For those of you who're still using MiniDiscs daily, I've just released a SonicStage replacement app that works in the browser thanks to WebUSB and WASM. Here's the link to the project: https://github.com/cybercase/webminidisc and here's a short demo of how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Frs8qhw0g9Y Hope you like it!
This 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…
I managed to find a fairly cheap "all-in-one" hifi that had a minidisc drive in it too, so transferring was easy, but lacked the track naming, and it would only transfer at 1.5x speed.
Those minidisc players took a bit of a beating. In the end I replaced it with a Creative Nomad Jukebox (http://www.iretron.com/blog/posts/technology-flashback-creat...). That was a revelation. 6GB of MP3 storage meant I could rip all of my CDs and take them with me.
Sony seems to have a habit of producing some really great technology and then woefully mismanaging it by having short term thinking and failing to learn from rivals.
It had so many advantages at the time, but the equipment involved in recording to it was so expensive it was hard to get the labels on-board. If Sony had been willing to drastically subsidise the recording equipment and got the labels on board they'd have had so much more chance to make it in the market. When you're leaving it for your target consumer to wrestle with "How do I get my music on to it", and requiring specialty hardware purchase or complicated hacks, you've sort of lost the market already.
This 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…
I had a few mini-disc players in the late 90s. I had about an hour commute in to work in those days and it was awesome not to lug around tapes or the shock sensitive, constantly skipping, CD Walkman. I managed to find a fairly cheap "all-in-one" hifi that had a minidisc drive in it too, so transferring was easy, but lacked the track naming, and it would only transfer at 1.5x speed. Those minidisc players took a bit o…
Source or speculation?
If b, then, to add:
I don't think for a major (or even medium/minor) label this was the issue - at the time the labels had a real concern about mass high quality digital copying by consumers destroying their business