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The Web MiniDisc App (2020)
- amanzi 6y agoThis is cool. As a side note - I recently found my old MiniDisc player in an old shoebox. Popped in a new AA battery, and it still worked perfectly! Some funny notes... I can't believe it lasts for ages on a single AA battery. And, I had forgotten how noisy they are, with constant whirring and spinning noises coming from the player as it seeks tracks.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- johnchristopher 6y agoWell it does seek tracks since it's basically a high density floppy.
- bayindirh 6y agoActually it's HAMR disc. :D
- johnchristopher 6y agoI totally messed things up, minidiscs were optical discs and `MiniDiscs use rewritable magneto-optical storage to store the data. Unlike the DCC or the analog Compact Cassette, the disc is a random-access medium, making seek time very fast.` Sorry.
- bayindirh 6y agoWe all mix things up sometimes. My comment's supposed to be soft hearted and humorous, not a stern one. We're humans, here's HN. We're just chatting, and misremembering things is alright. Have a nice and safe weekend. :)
- acomjean 6y agoI tried mine out a year ago and they all worked (the ones I had recorded). I think the MO technology they used was pretty robust (compared to recordable cds and dvds)
- grishka 6y agoThere is something soothing about these noises. They reassure you that the device is doing something. I've never seen a MiniDisc player in person, but I remember PSP with an optical drive that made similar noise while your game loaded.
- 1-6 6y agoThe Windows Task Manager does that for me. I like staring at graphs to reassure me the computer has not stopped.
- bombcar 6y agoHard drive seeks used to be the way I'd tell if the Windows 98 SE machines were doing something or just hung - if you didn't hear the hard drive seeking it was probably time to reboot.
- maxwellito 6y agoBest use of WebUSB so far! It's so good that even /r/minidisc no longer bother using old software to enjoy this format, they keep recommending this. This is an excellent work
- whywhywhywhy 6y agoI know a lot of people dislike webusb and webbt but honestly the potential for sustainable devices is huge. No more devices turning into landfill fodder once their iOS and Android apps stop being updated.
- Erwin 6y agoBack when I used Netscape on DEC ULtrix, connected from a Windows X client some 20+ years ago, I sure would not have believed that one day device drivers would be written in scripting language and run in my browser.
- bayindirh 6y ago> I know a lot of people dislike webusb and webbt... The problem with these technologies are not their utility, but their potential for being abused. Who on this blue dot ever uses battery percentage meter as another input for browser fingerprinting. That's insane.
- moron4hire 6y agoI use the battery API for it's intended purpose. I make apps that run in fullscreen, immersive modes, targeting battery operated devices, with built-in teleconferencing. Users need to know if their battery is about to run out so they don't just lose their meeting session with no warning. I've gotten really tired of this browser fingerprinting FUD. Removing features like WebUSB, WebBluetooth, etc, is not going to make users less fingerprintable. You're 100% fingerprintable from just your browsing activity. Preventing fingerprinting is not just "hard", it's impossible. But we still get people complaining about it enough that browser vendors implement these security theater mitigations like when Google unilaterally decided WebAudio needed to be hobbled. Are users any less fingerprintable because WebAudio now requires a user activation to run, and timing information needed to have artificial noise added? No, users are still 100% fingerprintable. But now we have to jump through hoops to get it to work, the API as a whole is unusable for timing-critical applications, and old demos and apps are broken. I'd be fine with a permissions prompt. We have the web app manifest format. Let's use it. It's not like the app stores are doing anywhere near a good job at preventing abuse, anyway. But no, is so often not even an option. That is what is insane.
- icu 6y agoI'm really nostalgic about the MiniDisc format. You've inspired me to check my loft to see if mine still works. Thing is, besides retro coolness, I can't think of any particular use cases that my mobile isn't better suited for.
- bayindirh 6y agoSound quality, optical in, auto audio tagging when paired with a supporting CD Walkman and using a CD which contains CD-text. Also, it's good for a relatively high quality recording device when paired with the output stage of a make-shift studio mixer. Anyone who wants to read about the sound quality, a relevant discussion is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26440967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26440967 The form link is still open. I'd do what I've said there if a couple of people applies.
- ubermonkey 6y agoAre you saying MD provides higher sound quality than lossless digital? I find that hard to believe!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bayindirh 6y agoNo, of course not. :D I only say that ATRAC3, while being lossy and old, can provide very enjoyable sound. I argue that sound is transparent in SP mode and very high quality in LP2. I further argue that when combined with Sony's DSP and electronics magic, its sound still holds very well and provides a very rich, detailed and enjoyable listening experience, and can rival today's mid-high end portable devices very, very well. I tell this as a former orchestra player, btw.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- temp5565_65 6y ago
- washadjeffmad 6y agoI was gifted a Sony MZ-1 in the early 90s that I used until its death in 2020. It survived longer than the MagicLink and the little book reader they also sent. I often felt like the Sony of that era made up formats just so they could design cool gadgets that made use of them. I remember using TOSLINK to write tones to a MiniDisc to use on the old Jupiter or Saturn Bells with the unmuted receivers back before MP3 and other digital audio players existed. I want to say we moved to a Creative Nomad, but it didn't have the same cyberpunk feel as discreetly swapping discs into a MD player. Does anyone know if the masters used were unique MDs or the same as for CDs of the era? I've been wanting to create a FLAC library of MD rips, or at least recreate the playlists to burn onto some blanks if they're the same.
- bayindirh 6y agoYou can create awesome sounding MDs from any CD or FLAC. The sound modelling of ATRAC3 and MP3 is very different, so they don't translate well to each other.
- temp5565_65 6y agoI can second that. MDs created from lossless FLACs are very clean.
- acomjean 6y agoI only had one pre recorded MD (oasis). I would imagine that the masters weren’t unique to MDs. Pre recorded ones weren’t that common (at least in the US)
- teekert 6y agoAh, the mini-disc, loved it, and it developed quite nicely. My first one was a Sony [0]. It had 3 hours (they said 4 but meh) on one special li-ion battery (and 6 when I hooked up an external 2 AA compartment, they said 10 but no). When my wife got one, shortly before they got out of fashion hers could run for 40 hours on a single AA battery and fit 4x the amount of music on a disc. [0] https://www.minidisc.org/part_Sony_MZ-R55.html https://www.minidisc.org/part_Sony_MZ-R55.html
- throwanem 6y agoThose were NiMH batteries - I have the same model, got it back in high school with summer job money. Don't leave the "gumstick" battery in the unit; it will leak and swell, and taking the unit apart far enough to clean the contacts is an exceedingly fiddly job despite the excellent service manuals Sony used to put out. The things are the electromechanical equivalent of a Swiss watch.
- dave84 6y agoI used one of the NetMD Minidisc players throughout college. The discs could be formatted for data and could store 1GB, they would show up on a PC as a USB drive. It beat the hell out of the zip drives everyone else was using. I'm tempted to use this and see if it still works.
- throwanem 6y agoFwiw, a 1GB MD would be Hi-MD, a different media in the same form factor. I don't actually know if the Hi-MD players support NetMD transfer or use their own protocol, but I guess I can think of a way you could find out!
- dave84 6y agoYup, mine was NetMD. Didn’t realise that worked with the older discs too, never had a regular minidisc.
- throwanem 6y agoYep! "NetMD" was just a new logical format on the same media, plus USB connectivity and ATRAC version 3. Hi-MD was the one that reformulated the media for 1GB total storage. Those discs don't work in older players, but older discs do work in a Hi-MD player.
- wazoox 6y agoThis is really awesome!
- l00sed 6y agoWhat an awesome, fun idea. Great work, thanks for sharing!
- brailsafe 6y ago> I started by porting the code from linux-minidisc to a new JS library that I’ve now published on npm, called netmd-js This is a couple of days of work!? I should just quit trying. Dude is a machine.
- grishka 6y agoI once made an unofficial Clubhouse app for Android in 1.5 days... lol But then my fingers hurt from typing so much code in such a short timespan. And then all that media attention, it was exhausting.
- kleer001 6y ago> I should just quit trying. Dude is a machine. Maybe, but certainly dude doesn't have the same direction as you. Don't compare yourself to others. Well, unless you're trying to do exactly the same thing.
- sneak 6y agoThe catchphrase around it became a meme and fell out of popularity, but despite all of that, there remains a huge disparity (definitely more than an order of magnitude) in the productivity and output between the most efficient hackers and the least. I wouldn't take this as a reason to quit trying: take it as an inspiration to which to aspire.
- novok 6y agoTo be fair, it was probably more like transcribing writing from one dialect to another dialect in the same language, where you are literate in both dialects, vs. creating something completely from scratch. It's a lot faster when you don't really have to think about the creation of content. Still impressive either way!
- brailsafe 6y agoThat seems to be true. After looking into the Linux implementation, I realized that it's python and not something more low level. The differences amount to an extensive syntactical refactoring, at least on the library porting side, but it's still a large amount of super tedious work that I can admire. Getting it to work with WebUSB though, having a high proficiency with TS, and putting in the work to write tests for it all is also impressive.
- cbm-vic-20 6y agoThis is really neat! I like that the same web app can be used from a desktop and the phone, and the functionality is the same, since they use the same browser API for accessing the device. Too bad my MiniDisc players are pre-NetMD devices.
- snurfer 6y agoI had no idea NetMD and Hi-MD were things. Sony certainly shows determination when it comes to continuing development of their technology (even when it's clear they'll only ever be a niche player).
- 1-6 6y agoIt's important to not drop good ideas. Things have a way of circling back to needing it in the future.
- Jonnax 6y agoSometimes people think you need to be the best to succeed. Sony likely made millions off MiniDisc even if it didn't win in the end.
- snurfer 6y agoMD certainly isn't the first niche media format to surprise onlookers with its staying power. Laserdisc lived for many years past the advent of DVD, too.
- borepop 6y agoI'm not a coder, so perhaps I'm missing the appeal of this project. My main takeaway is that I can't understand why somebody would go through the hard work of re-creating this but not bother writing a single line explaining to casual readers what the advantage might be of using the app compared to other more obvious solutions for playing music files.
- brailsafe 6y agoThe point is really just how pointless and esoteric it is, not to offer a better way of playing music. This isn't for casual readers, this is for nerds who do stuff that nobody else cares about, for the fun and challenge.
- kmeisthax 6y agoThe idea is to re-enable functionality that was lost on old devices that were locked to shitty DRM schemes.
- temp5565_65 6y agoThe advantage is that the app is designed to work with specific obsolete devices that needed a now long-in-tooth software package to transfer files to them. It's very hard to get this package working on modern machines, so having this functionality available via a web app is a quantum leap.
- debrice 6y agoBrilliant!
- retox 6y agoI think it's a real shame that there is no way (as far as I know) to use re-writable MiniDiscs in the same way that CR-RWs, for storing generic files. There only seems to be projects like this for storing/transferring music. Can anyone in the know give a quick explanation why that is the case? I appreciate it's a moot point now with the extreme price of MD-RWs, but every now and then I'm reminded of them and get upset. It's probably out of the question now that there's an MD resurgence like cassettes are enjoying.
- dehrmann 6y agoI had a mz-n707. It had functionality to record, but as far as I could tell, there was no way to read the audio data back over the USB interface.
- bombcar 6y agoI suppose if you really wanted to you could encode the data and read it back via the aux in on the sound card, quite like the old cassette tape computers.
- chefandy 6y agoNot sure why someone hasn't done it recently, but I'm not surprised they didn't do it back then. At the time of MD's popularity, it probably wouldn't have made much sense to compete with zip and jaz drives unless you could make them much cheaper, and I doubt they could have with MD. Portable audio that wasn't as finicky as CD but was higher quality than a cassette was the real killer functionality.
- turtlebits 6y agoMD Data exists, it was slow and expensive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD_Data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD_Data
- rvense 6y agoThe USB functionality came fairly late in the MD's life, I think. For the vast majority of MD devices, you could only get data in or out via audio connectors, which, even if digital, is incredibly slow and unwieldy - there's no transport control from the computer! It'd work like the tape drive on a C64.
- peanut_worm 6y agoWow that’s amazing I didn’t think the USB api in the browser was able to do things like that
- olduh 6y agogreat piece of work ! I try it with my sony mz n707 and a galaxy tab. works great. but I did not get it to work with win10 (chrome browser). Is windows supported ?
- olduh 6y agodoes thiswork with windows ? i have tried but sadly did not succeed with chrome.
- lyptt 6y agoI used to have a minidisc player in the early 2000s. Loved that thing. It got replaced for an iPod mini though, which was way more convenient.
- mistyvales 6y agoLoved MD's.. used to have a few decks, and at least 3 portables. Wish they made a Hi-MD car deck.