3 ms·
I still have several portable MD players I bought new in the early 2000s. At the time, even on high spec PCs, the software was slow as hell to convert music to
by ragingrobot 5y ago
I still have several portable MD players I bought new in the early 2000s. At the time, even on high spec PCs, the software was slow as hell to convert music to their proprietary format. MP3 wasn't speedy, but it wasn't nearly as slow as converting to ATRAC. I remember it taking on the order of hours to copy a CD to MD. The quality was better than MP3 so it was worth it in the end, but an annoyance nonetheless, and probably didn't help adoption in the US (we want it now dammit!).
> The MP3 format spelled the beginning of the end for the MiniDisc.
That should be "the iPod spelled the end". MP3 and MD coexisted for quite a few years before the iPod's arrival.
- kiksy 5y agoOne of my friends had a later NETMD and I remember that only taking seconds to convert and copy MP3s to disk. The software was horrible though.
- ragingrobot 5y agoHow much later? The experience I described was about 2000-2001, and it was far from seconds. To be fair, encoding to MP3 wasn't exactly speedy on the machines at the time (compared to the present day), but converting to ATRAC was significantly slower.
- JKCalhoun 5y agoIf you have a Net MD player today, head over to this much nicer Web front-end for ripping your mp3's to MiniDisc: https://stefano.brilli.me/webminidisc/ https://stefano.brilli.me/webminidisc/