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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

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 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.

sorenjan 7y ago
> 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU3BceoMuaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU3BceoMuaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sabtaoTCSKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sabtaoTCSKQ
jasonjayr 7y ago
IIRC MiniDisc was big in Japan when it came out, and a lot of artists draw on that 90s-era Japanese aesthetic projected into the future. A lot of cyberpunk art features devices that look and function like MiniDisc devices + discs.
- throwanem 7y ago
  A lot of vaporwave/synthwave and adjacent artists do limited minidisc releases for the aesthetic, too. Nobody's pressing them any more, but there's a UK company whose name I forget that does mass copying and UV label printing on rewritable blanks.
Twirrim 7y ago
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 of a beating. In the end I replaced it with a Creative Nomad Jukebox (http://www.iretron.com/blog/posts/technology-flashback-creative-nomad-jukebox-2000/nomadjukebox/ 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.
- cat199 7y ago
  > the equipment involved in recording to it was so expensive it was hard to get the labels on-board. 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
  - AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
    I was a young guy getting started in the music industry around this time... At the first studio I worked at, we used MiniDiscs all the time to do professional audio work. It was often the way we stored productions and the way we distributed them to other partners. That said, any sort of mass production of MiniDiscs for the consumer would have been laughed away due to the costs. > mass high quality digital copying by consumers This has likely been a facet of the music industry's concerns ever since the cassette tape[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio#Data_access_from_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio#Dat...
wil421 7y ago
If you had MiniDiscs spread all over your desk you had to be some cool hacker. Around a similar time I bought my first MP3 player with a 16MB sd card. I think I could fit 3.5 MP3 songs on there and I had to figure out a way to edit one song so they could fit.
lxgr 7y ago
Are you saying that the PS2 actually sends the track names over the optical cable? I remember always having to painfully enter these via the player buttons later on.
- satysin 7y ago
  Not always. Shockingly (or I guess not shockingly by todays standards) some MiniDiscs have copy protection on the track listing! However a majority of CDs I owned with CD-TEXT would happily label everything correctly. This was the reason I used my PS2 rather than my regular CD player which also had optical out but did not do the CD-TEXT. I have read that CD-TEXT data is not transferred over optical however it most certainly worked for me. I made at least 100 MiniDiscs this way. Perhaps it was something special with how the PS2 did things that was not to the standard? Who knows. I have searched for information but never found anything concrete except for a few others who agreed with me that it did work as they used to do it the same way. Nothing official sadly.
  - lxgr 7y ago
    Amazing bit of information, thanks! This would have saved 12 year old me quite some time. I think I never owned a CD that had CD-TEXT on it, or if I did, I had already given up on doing real-time transfers via my PS2 at the time. A Sony-proprietary extension sounds plausible, given their track record of developing pleasant niche features like this, especially between devices in their ecosystem. (Sonic Stage and Real Player were both horrible, but could transfer a full album in a few minutes over USB.)

sorenjan 7y ago

> 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU3BceoMuaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU3BceoMuaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sabtaoTCSKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sabtaoTCSKQ

jasonjayr 7y ago

IIRC MiniDisc was big in Japan when it came out, and a lot of artists draw on that 90s-era Japanese aesthetic projected into the future. A lot of cyberpunk art features devices that look and function like MiniDisc devices + discs.

throwanem 7y ago
A lot of vaporwave/synthwave and adjacent artists do limited minidisc releases for the aesthetic, too. Nobody's pressing them any more, but there's a UK company whose name I forget that does mass copying and UV label printing on rewritable blanks.

Twirrim 7y ago

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 of a beating. In the end I replaced it with a Creative Nomad Jukebox (http://www.iretron.com/blog/posts/technology-flashback-creative-nomad-jukebox-2000/nomadjukebox/ 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.

cat199 7y ago
> the equipment involved in recording to it was so expensive it was hard to get the labels on-board. 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
- AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
  I was a young guy getting started in the music industry around this time... At the first studio I worked at, we used MiniDiscs all the time to do professional audio work. It was often the way we stored productions and the way we distributed them to other partners. That said, any sort of mass production of MiniDiscs for the consumer would have been laughed away due to the costs. > mass high quality digital copying by consumers This has likely been a facet of the music industry's concerns ever since the cassette tape[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio#Data_access_from_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio#Dat...

wil421 7y ago

If you had MiniDiscs spread all over your desk you had to be some cool hacker. Around a similar time I bought my first MP3 player with a 16MB sd card. I think I could fit 3.5 MP3 songs on there and I had to figure out a way to edit one song so they could fit.

lxgr 7y ago

Are you saying that the PS2 actually sends the track names over the optical cable? I remember always having to painfully enter these via the player buttons later on.

satysin 7y ago
Not always. Shockingly (or I guess not shockingly by todays standards) some MiniDiscs have copy protection on the track listing! However a majority of CDs I owned with CD-TEXT would happily label everything correctly. This was the reason I used my PS2 rather than my regular CD player which also had optical out but did not do the CD-TEXT. I have read that CD-TEXT data is not transferred over optical however it most certainly worked for me. I made at least 100 MiniDiscs this way. Perhaps it was something special with how the PS2 did things that was not to the standard? Who knows. I have searched for information but never found anything concrete except for a few others who agreed with me that it did work as they used to do it the same way. Nothing official sadly.
- lxgr 7y ago
  Amazing bit of information, thanks! This would have saved 12 year old me quite some time. I think I never owned a CD that had CD-TEXT on it, or if I did, I had already given up on doing real-time transfers via my PS2 at the time. A Sony-proprietary extension sounds plausible, given their track record of developing pleasant niche features like this, especially between devices in their ecosystem. (Sonic Stage and Real Player were both horrible, but could transfer a full album in a few minutes over USB.)