10 ms·

The MiniDisc deck you hoped to never see [video]

122 points by hggh 4y ago

RedShift1 4y ago
I'm kind of sad that MD didn't get more broadly adopted. Had MD data been more of a thing and allow for more flexibility (no dedicated audio and data discs), MD would probably have been everywhere.
- aphroz 4y ago
  Actually MD was everywhere, except in the US. There was a Vaio computer with integrated MD drive and you could store data and audio on it.
  - dwringer 4y ago
    There was a small window between heyday of Tascam 4-track cassette recorders and the emergence of modern digital recorders/PC interfaces when Yamaha's 4- and 8-track Minidisc recording consoles were a great and relatively affordable home/amateur recording option, fairly popular in the US. Sadly there is no digital out(!) so when I recently transferred my old tracks to digital I had to send each channel with a separate unbalanced(!) analog line. It's also prohibitively expensive to track down new MD Data discs (the MD audio discs which were far more common would only support 2-track recording instead of the full 8).
    - gizajob 4y ago
      I thought those minidisc 4 tracks were great, but the compression on them could be a bit nasty
      - dwringer 4y ago
        That explains why, looking back, I never got a satisfactory distorted guitar tone, but those were also the days of listening to 128kbps MP3's so half the time we didn't know any better.
    - zoomablemind 4y ago
      > ...Sadly there is no digital out(!) so when I recently transferred my old tracks to digital I had to send each channel with a separate unbalanced(!) analog line. MD audio was compressed with proprietary ATRAC, so sending it out would only make sense if the other end supported it. On the other hand the analog audio would clearly be more compatible. However, those MD decks supported TOS link for input, but had some bits flipped to disallow CD digital recopy.
  - awiesenhofer 4y ago
    Ah yes, the mysterious Sony Vaio PCV-MX2 - I still want one of these even though it would probably be completely useless nowadays. LGR has a nice video about it: https://youtu.be/UQSKWOw-sZc https://youtu.be/UQSKWOw-sZc There was also a Vaio laptop that had an MD drive, it didnt support data though: https://www.zdnet.com/product/sony-vaio-pcg-nv109m/ https://www.zdnet.com/product/sony-vaio-pcg-nv109m/
- LeoPanthera 4y ago
  As other comments have said, it was almost uniquely rejected in the USA, and enjoyed a healthy long lifespan in almost every other country. They are still, in fact, making blank MDs. Those in the USA can type "mdw80t" into eBay if they'd like some. MiniDisc is my favorite example of "History is written by the USA" - younger people in many countries believe it was a failure, even though it was successful in their own country, just because it failed in the USA, and it's mostly the USA who write blogs, make YouTube videos, post to social media.
  - gizajob 4y ago
    I was listening to my minidisc player on a train in Italy in the early 2000s and got chatting to an American girl, and she had absolutely no idea what I had in my hand. I was like "see, there's these little discs, and you record your music onto them" and she couldn't even compute what I was showing her. I was pretty stunned too, because all my friends in the UK (I'm British) knew what they were and lots of us had them. It was like we were in two completely different worlds, somehow. Also, the main advantage not well discussed following the rise of the iPod and smartphones, was that virtually all minidisc players were RECORDERS. We really lost something, culturally and creatively, when audio devices lost their record-ins. I used to love plugging my headphones into the stereo-in on my minidisc, and walking around capturing the sounds around me. Later playing back through those same headphones would transport you directly to wherever you were at the time. Amazing for field recording and dumping mixes and tracks onto them. Technology progresses, but it seems like the past few decades it hasn't necessary improved a great deal as it does, and much gets lost.
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      > Also, the main advantage not well discussed following the rise of the iPod and smartphones, was that virtually all minidisc players were RECORDERS. I used to love plugging my headphones into the stereo-in on my minidisc, and walking around capturing the sounds around me. I agree that technological change as resulted in a regrettable loss of common-man recording capability (e.g. streaming and disc-players vs VCRs), but did that actually happen for your use case? Smartphones all have mics, and you can certainly download a recording app even if your phone doesn't ship with one. I know you can kind of abuse headphones into a microphone (I used to do it all the time as a kid), but would they actually work well with good quality? Did you have some special headphones for this use case? I knew a guy who said he had some special earbuds designed for recording concerts: they had a microphone pointing outward from each ear, and he'd plug them into his MiniDisc recorder.
- jagermo 4y ago
  direct mp3 to minidisc would have been a killer application. mostly for sony's music business which got pummeld back then by napster, audiogalaxy, etc
atourgates 4y ago
I can't explain why I thought MiniDisc was such a cool format. Maybe it was just its appearance in the Matrix. Maybe it was the Japanese "strangeness" of the format, and the difficulty of getting one in the United States. I was finally able to afford one near the end of the format's life, around the time that MP3 players were becoming endemic. I honestly couldn't make any case for why it was better, and it was significantly less convenient. But I still loved using it. I need to dig through my "big attic box of outdated electronics" and see if I can still dig it up and see if it works. I recently imported a Japanese Kei (mini) Truck. A minidisc stereo would be a great theme-appropriate fit for it, if I can find one at a reasonable price.
- flir 4y ago
  It's the affordances, in my opinion. Whoever designed the physical hardware was an unsung genius.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  I still have a beautiful MD player from Panasonic not much bigger than a Minidisc in any dimension. I think the iPod really killed Minidisc, because the user experience was simply that much better than other MP3 players, which were generally janky designs from unknown brands.
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    MiniDisc's killer was none other than Sony itself. Sony's own competing divisions hobbled, crippled, then killed the MiniDisc. The first issue was cost of the media. MiniDiscs we're just never going to be as cheap to manufacture as CDs. So record companies would have far tighter margins on MiniDiscs than they would for the same album pressed on CD. Unsurprisingly not a lot of record companies bothered producing pre-recorded MiniDiscs outside Japan. Without pre-recorded albums readily available the only way to get music onto a disc was to record it yourself. So you had your MD player that cost hundreds of dollars you had to plug into some other audio player to record music to take with you. There was no high speed dubbing unless you had an expensive console recorder so your hour long CD took an hour to copy to the MiniDisc. As the 90s went on Sony also refused to allow MDs to connect to a PC. So you couldn't rip music off a CD (which Sony considered unforgivable piracy) to your PC and then digitally load onto your MiniDisc. That is until they relented and released the NetMD players. But those were crippled in that they would only encode low resolution files but padded them so you only got 80 minutes of play time on a disc (despite the low resolution allowing 160 minutes). Sony also didn't allow their MD data drives to write audio MDs. But no one even had those drives because they were stupid expensive. All of this inconvenience was happening in a time when portable CD players were dropping in price (and getting audio buffers for skip protection) and coming standard in cars. CD-R drives were also coming down significantly in price along with CD-R media itself. So if you did want to make mixtapes or just make CDs from files you got from the budding MP3 scene you could do so cheaply. Sony was even themselves manufacturing these devices, the DiscMan was a really popular portable CD player! The MiniDisc was essentially dead by the time the first portable MP3 players came out. Even the iPod wasn't competing against MiniDisc so much as it was CD players which by then added MP3 playback. The iPod didn't really take off until the third generation one was released in 2003. I say all this loving the aesthetic of MiniDiscs. They look super cool and could have actually been an interesting technology. Unfortunately Sony really likes their proprietary media formats.
metadat 4y ago
I wish this was available as a normal text/image written article instead of a video. The content looks cool but the format doesn't work for me; 30 minutes is wayyy too long for this one!
- layer8 4y ago
  In general I also prefer a written article with pictures, but you can skip-fast-forward through the video in ~5 minutes and still get most of the gist of it.
  - Synaesthesia 4y ago
    I often use the auto transcript feature.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    haha, if you can skip in 5 minute chunks and still get the gist, then something tells me that there's a lot of unnecessary cruft in that video.
    - layer8 4y ago
      No, not skipping 5 minutes at a time, more like 10 seconds at a time (YouTube double-tap), reducing the total runtime to ~5 minutes. That way you still get most of the talking points and can listen in to the couple more interesting parts.
- physhster 4y ago
  It's near impossible to monetize an article these days, unfortunately. This is a pretty heavy production so it's only fair.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    I always thought the reason was because a lot of people do not like to read. But your explanation makes more sense.
layer8 4y ago
I just love that kind of design with dedicated physical buttons and connectors for all the important (and less important) use cases. I would love to live in a world where such devices were ubiquitous, instead of everything just being a touch screen with inconsistent and half-baked UI.
aphroz 4y ago
I am very happy to see MD on the first page of HN, I can feel it's making a comeback! There's even new pre-recorded MD coming out. But don't look into it or you will end doing like me. I recently bought 3 different players and it's a bit absurd to pay that much for a lower quality of sound, but it does look cool.
- autoexec 4y ago
  I hope it does make a comeback, because I'd love to see some cheap players become available. I've got boxes of minidiscs sitting around, but all my old players have stop working.
Synaesthesia 4y ago
Minidisc is really a cool format. Another format which was consider too cool for consumers was DAT. Basically the notion that you could make CD quality digital recordings on a simple mini tape was terrifying to the recording industry.
dpitkin 4y ago
There is a link to the service manual on minidisc.org https://www.minidisc.org/part_Sony_MDCC-2000.html https://www.minidisc.org/part_Sony_MDCC-2000.html
schwartzworld 4y ago
We gave up a lot when we traded physical media for mp3s. I wish it would make a comeback.
mdmdmd 4y ago
There are a few comments comparing Minidiscs to CDs, I think that's the wrong way to look at the format. My mental model for Minidiscs is much more similar to tape, it was so easy to use them to record. As a teenager this was the most exciting thing about them -- you could record ~CD quality audio from CDs (I had so many MD mixtapes!) or the radio. On top of that, you could make your copy feel polished by adding track markers and names, giving you information about the track playing when listening and letting you skip back and forth between songs. This was a huge upgrade from cassettes and an upgrade from CDs because you didn't need to go through the rigamarole of burning. Of course, this doesn't even touch upon industrial design of the units which has already been well covered in this thread. If you'd like to browse through some old units and get a sense of that, I recommend minidisc.org.
asah 4y ago
wow, this device is incredibly well designed, with lots and lots of thoughtful design details. Masterclass in product design.
technofiend 4y ago
Minidisc proved very useful for dubbing an audio copy off the front of house mixing board. Sure you could run it to CD but that usually requires a much larger device that takes AC. The minidisc recorder was far smaller, more discreet and able to run from battery. I heard anecdotally it was the bootlegger's device of choice for a while.
ronancremin 4y ago
I’m surprised that nobody has mentioned Web MiniDisc yet. This combines the best of web (WASM) and MiniDisc, allowing you to write content to discs from the comfort of your web browser and dispense with all of the awful Sony software. https://stefano.brilli.me/blog/web-minidisc/ https://stefano.brilli.me/blog/web-minidisc/
- ronancremin 4y ago
  I forgot to mention that it supports MP3, FLAC, or WAV files.
- starik36 4y ago
  I legit thought this was a parody.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
retox 4y ago
Is there any technical reason that the MD format cannot be used to store arbitrary data and not just audio?
- layer8 4y ago
  MD Data exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc#MD_Data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc#MD_Data
fleddr 4y ago
Interesting how so many people comment on the aesthetic but not on the unique capability of MiniDisc: the TOC. You can delete and reorder tracks and this new state is written back to the disc. There's nothing else that does this. You can't delete a song from a cassette. You can overwrite it with noise but that's not the same thing as skipping it. It's not random access. You can't delete a track from a CD either, as they were not writable back then. Even today with a re-writable you can't easily delete a track, you'd need to rewrite the entire disc. You can't reorder a song on a cassette, obviously. You can't really do this with a CD either, other than rewriting it fully with the new order. You can program a CD player to play songs in a particular order but this is not persisted across players. MiniDisc can do all of the above and will do it instantly. This allows a music buff to constantly tweak and optimize their playlist. You can quite compare it to your current Spotify playlist, but now physical. No other physical media allows you to manage a playlist like a MiniDisc can. The reason I know this is my dad's 30 year (and ongoing) denial in this not being a more widespread standard. He has this cute little box with 8 MiniDiscs in it. Each crafted to perfection in personal meaning, genre, order of songs. He plays it every day. I look at it with admiration. Because it works. It worked when I was a teenager and now that I'm middle-aged, it still does. It didn't get outdated, get 17 trillion UI updates, require a password or have ever-changing terms and conditions. It just plays. For 25+ years in a row. Long may it keep playing.
- aquova 4y ago
  > You can delete and reorder tracks and this new state is written back to the disc. There's nothing else that does this. This may be a naive question, but did they suffer from fragmentation? Reordering tracks via the TOC is a simple operation, but after adding and removing and re-adding songs, I would imagine the writer would need to eventually re-write the entire disc to fragmentation issues, or else have a very complex set of metadata.
  - TheNewAndy 4y ago
    From memory, you could end up fragmenting things, and I think this would typically result in losing some of the capacity of a disk. I think people would do a disk to disk dub in these situations as a form of "defrag" operation. You could also get an 80 minute disk, put it in a recorder and get it to read it, then sneakily swap it with a 74 minute disk without letting the recorder's eject switch trip, then force a TOC write, and you would be able to upgrade a 74 minute disk to an 80 minute version.

122 points by hggh 4y ago

I'm kind of sad that MD didn't get more broadly adopted. Had MD data been more of a thing and allow for more flexibility (no dedicated audio and data discs), MD would probably have been everywhere.

aphroz 4y ago
Actually MD was everywhere, except in the US. There was a Vaio computer with integrated MD drive and you could store data and audio on it.
- dwringer 4y ago
  There was a small window between heyday of Tascam 4-track cassette recorders and the emergence of modern digital recorders/PC interfaces when Yamaha's 4- and 8-track Minidisc recording consoles were a great and relatively affordable home/amateur recording option, fairly popular in the US. Sadly there is no digital out(!) so when I recently transferred my old tracks to digital I had to send each channel with a separate unbalanced(!) analog line. It's also prohibitively expensive to track down new MD Data discs (the MD audio discs which were far more common would only support 2-track recording instead of the full 8).
  - gizajob 4y ago
    I thought those minidisc 4 tracks were great, but the compression on them could be a bit nasty
    - dwringer 4y ago
      That explains why, looking back, I never got a satisfactory distorted guitar tone, but those were also the days of listening to 128kbps MP3's so half the time we didn't know any better.
  - zoomablemind 4y ago
    > ...Sadly there is no digital out(!) so when I recently transferred my old tracks to digital I had to send each channel with a separate unbalanced(!) analog line. MD audio was compressed with proprietary ATRAC, so sending it out would only make sense if the other end supported it. On the other hand the analog audio would clearly be more compatible. However, those MD decks supported TOS link for input, but had some bits flipped to disallow CD digital recopy.
- awiesenhofer 4y ago
  Ah yes, the mysterious Sony Vaio PCV-MX2 - I still want one of these even though it would probably be completely useless nowadays. LGR has a nice video about it: https://youtu.be/UQSKWOw-sZc https://youtu.be/UQSKWOw-sZc There was also a Vaio laptop that had an MD drive, it didnt support data though: https://www.zdnet.com/product/sony-vaio-pcg-nv109m/ https://www.zdnet.com/product/sony-vaio-pcg-nv109m/
LeoPanthera 4y ago
As other comments have said, it was almost uniquely rejected in the USA, and enjoyed a healthy long lifespan in almost every other country. They are still, in fact, making blank MDs. Those in the USA can type "mdw80t" into eBay if they'd like some. MiniDisc is my favorite example of "History is written by the USA" - younger people in many countries believe it was a failure, even though it was successful in their own country, just because it failed in the USA, and it's mostly the USA who write blogs, make YouTube videos, post to social media.
- gizajob 4y ago
  I was listening to my minidisc player on a train in Italy in the early 2000s and got chatting to an American girl, and she had absolutely no idea what I had in my hand. I was like "see, there's these little discs, and you record your music onto them" and she couldn't even compute what I was showing her. I was pretty stunned too, because all my friends in the UK (I'm British) knew what they were and lots of us had them. It was like we were in two completely different worlds, somehow. Also, the main advantage not well discussed following the rise of the iPod and smartphones, was that virtually all minidisc players were RECORDERS. We really lost something, culturally and creatively, when audio devices lost their record-ins. I used to love plugging my headphones into the stereo-in on my minidisc, and walking around capturing the sounds around me. Later playing back through those same headphones would transport you directly to wherever you were at the time. Amazing for field recording and dumping mixes and tracks onto them. Technology progresses, but it seems like the past few decades it hasn't necessary improved a great deal as it does, and much gets lost.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > Also, the main advantage not well discussed following the rise of the iPod and smartphones, was that virtually all minidisc players were RECORDERS. I used to love plugging my headphones into the stereo-in on my minidisc, and walking around capturing the sounds around me. I agree that technological change as resulted in a regrettable loss of common-man recording capability (e.g. streaming and disc-players vs VCRs), but did that actually happen for your use case? Smartphones all have mics, and you can certainly download a recording app even if your phone doesn't ship with one. I know you can kind of abuse headphones into a microphone (I used to do it all the time as a kid), but would they actually work well with good quality? Did you have some special headphones for this use case? I knew a guy who said he had some special earbuds designed for recording concerts: they had a microphone pointing outward from each ear, and he'd plug them into his MiniDisc recorder.
jagermo 4y ago
direct mp3 to minidisc would have been a killer application. mostly for sony's music business which got pummeld back then by napster, audiogalaxy, etc

atourgates 4y ago

I can't explain why I thought MiniDisc was such a cool format. Maybe it was just its appearance in the Matrix. Maybe it was the Japanese "strangeness" of the format, and the difficulty of getting one in the United States. I was finally able to afford one near the end of the format's life, around the time that MP3 players were becoming endemic. I honestly couldn't make any case for why it was better, and it was significantly less convenient. But I still loved using it. I need to dig through my "big attic box of outdated electronics" and see if I can still dig it up and see if it works. I recently imported a Japanese Kei (mini) Truck. A minidisc stereo would be a great theme-appropriate fit for it, if I can find one at a reasonable price.

flir 4y ago
It's the affordances, in my opinion. Whoever designed the physical hardware was an unsung genius.
KerrAvon 4y ago
I still have a beautiful MD player from Panasonic not much bigger than a Minidisc in any dimension. I think the iPod really killed Minidisc, because the user experience was simply that much better than other MP3 players, which were generally janky designs from unknown brands.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  MiniDisc's killer was none other than Sony itself. Sony's own competing divisions hobbled, crippled, then killed the MiniDisc. The first issue was cost of the media. MiniDiscs we're just never going to be as cheap to manufacture as CDs. So record companies would have far tighter margins on MiniDiscs than they would for the same album pressed on CD. Unsurprisingly not a lot of record companies bothered producing pre-recorded MiniDiscs outside Japan. Without pre-recorded albums readily available the only way to get music onto a disc was to record it yourself. So you had your MD player that cost hundreds of dollars you had to plug into some other audio player to record music to take with you. There was no high speed dubbing unless you had an expensive console recorder so your hour long CD took an hour to copy to the MiniDisc. As the 90s went on Sony also refused to allow MDs to connect to a PC. So you couldn't rip music off a CD (which Sony considered unforgivable piracy) to your PC and then digitally load onto your MiniDisc. That is until they relented and released the NetMD players. But those were crippled in that they would only encode low resolution files but padded them so you only got 80 minutes of play time on a disc (despite the low resolution allowing 160 minutes). Sony also didn't allow their MD data drives to write audio MDs. But no one even had those drives because they were stupid expensive. All of this inconvenience was happening in a time when portable CD players were dropping in price (and getting audio buffers for skip protection) and coming standard in cars. CD-R drives were also coming down significantly in price along with CD-R media itself. So if you did want to make mixtapes or just make CDs from files you got from the budding MP3 scene you could do so cheaply. Sony was even themselves manufacturing these devices, the DiscMan was a really popular portable CD player! The MiniDisc was essentially dead by the time the first portable MP3 players came out. Even the iPod wasn't competing against MiniDisc so much as it was CD players which by then added MP3 playback. The iPod didn't really take off until the third generation one was released in 2003. I say all this loving the aesthetic of MiniDiscs. They look super cool and could have actually been an interesting technology. Unfortunately Sony really likes their proprietary media formats.

metadat 4y ago

I wish this was available as a normal text/image written article instead of a video. The content looks cool but the format doesn't work for me; 30 minutes is wayyy too long for this one!

layer8 4y ago
In general I also prefer a written article with pictures, but you can skip-fast-forward through the video in ~5 minutes and still get most of the gist of it.
- Synaesthesia 4y ago
  I often use the auto transcript feature.
- dylan604 4y ago
  haha, if you can skip in 5 minute chunks and still get the gist, then something tells me that there's a lot of unnecessary cruft in that video.
  - layer8 4y ago
    No, not skipping 5 minutes at a time, more like 10 seconds at a time (YouTube double-tap), reducing the total runtime to ~5 minutes. That way you still get most of the talking points and can listen in to the couple more interesting parts.
physhster 4y ago
It's near impossible to monetize an article these days, unfortunately. This is a pretty heavy production so it's only fair.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  I always thought the reason was because a lot of people do not like to read. But your explanation makes more sense.

layer8 4y ago

I just love that kind of design with dedicated physical buttons and connectors for all the important (and less important) use cases. I would love to live in a world where such devices were ubiquitous, instead of everything just being a touch screen with inconsistent and half-baked UI.

aphroz 4y ago

I am very happy to see MD on the first page of HN, I can feel it's making a comeback! There's even new pre-recorded MD coming out. But don't look into it or you will end doing like me. I recently bought 3 different players and it's a bit absurd to pay that much for a lower quality of sound, but it does look cool.

autoexec 4y ago
I hope it does make a comeback, because I'd love to see some cheap players become available. I've got boxes of minidiscs sitting around, but all my old players have stop working.

Synaesthesia 4y ago

Minidisc is really a cool format. Another format which was consider too cool for consumers was DAT. Basically the notion that you could make CD quality digital recordings on a simple mini tape was terrifying to the recording industry.

dpitkin 4y ago

There is a link to the service manual on minidisc.org https://www.minidisc.org/part_Sony_MDCC-2000.html https://www.minidisc.org/part_Sony_MDCC-2000.html

schwartzworld 4y ago

We gave up a lot when we traded physical media for mp3s. I wish it would make a comeback.

mdmdmd 4y ago

There are a few comments comparing Minidiscs to CDs, I think that's the wrong way to look at the format. My mental model for Minidiscs is much more similar to tape, it was so easy to use them to record. As a teenager this was the most exciting thing about them -- you could record ~CD quality audio from CDs (I had so many MD mixtapes!) or the radio. On top of that, you could make your copy feel polished by adding track markers and names, giving you information about the track playing when listening and letting you skip back and forth between songs. This was a huge upgrade from cassettes and an upgrade from CDs because you didn't need to go through the rigamarole of burning. Of course, this doesn't even touch upon industrial design of the units which has already been well covered in this thread. If you'd like to browse through some old units and get a sense of that, I recommend minidisc.org.

asah 4y ago

wow, this device is incredibly well designed, with lots and lots of thoughtful design details. Masterclass in product design.

technofiend 4y ago

Minidisc proved very useful for dubbing an audio copy off the front of house mixing board. Sure you could run it to CD but that usually requires a much larger device that takes AC. The minidisc recorder was far smaller, more discreet and able to run from battery. I heard anecdotally it was the bootlegger's device of choice for a while.

ronancremin 4y ago

I’m surprised that nobody has mentioned Web MiniDisc yet. This combines the best of web (WASM) and MiniDisc, allowing you to write content to discs from the comfort of your web browser and dispense with all of the awful Sony software. https://stefano.brilli.me/blog/web-minidisc/ https://stefano.brilli.me/blog/web-minidisc/

ronancremin 4y ago
I forgot to mention that it supports MP3, FLAC, or WAV files.
starik36 4y ago
I legit thought this was a parody.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

retox 4y ago

Is there any technical reason that the MD format cannot be used to store arbitrary data and not just audio?

layer8 4y ago
MD Data exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc#MD_Data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc#MD_Data

fleddr 4y ago

Interesting how so many people comment on the aesthetic but not on the unique capability of MiniDisc: the TOC. You can delete and reorder tracks and this new state is written back to the disc. There's nothing else that does this. You can't delete a song from a cassette. You can overwrite it with noise but that's not the same thing as skipping it. It's not random access. You can't delete a track from a CD either, as they were not writable back then. Even today with a re-writable you can't easily delete a track, you'd need to rewrite the entire disc. You can't reorder a song on a cassette, obviously. You can't really do this with a CD either, other than rewriting it fully with the new order. You can program a CD player to play songs in a particular order but this is not persisted across players. MiniDisc can do all of the above and will do it instantly. This allows a music buff to constantly tweak and optimize their playlist. You can quite compare it to your current Spotify playlist, but now physical. No other physical media allows you to manage a playlist like a MiniDisc can. The reason I know this is my dad's 30 year (and ongoing) denial in this not being a more widespread standard. He has this cute little box with 8 MiniDiscs in it. Each crafted to perfection in personal meaning, genre, order of songs. He plays it every day. I look at it with admiration. Because it works. It worked when I was a teenager and now that I'm middle-aged, it still does. It didn't get outdated, get 17 trillion UI updates, require a password or have ever-changing terms and conditions. It just plays. For 25+ years in a row. Long may it keep playing.

aquova 4y ago
> You can delete and reorder tracks and this new state is written back to the disc. There's nothing else that does this. This may be a naive question, but did they suffer from fragmentation? Reordering tracks via the TOC is a simple operation, but after adding and removing and re-adding songs, I would imagine the writer would need to eventually re-write the entire disc to fragmentation issues, or else have a very complex set of metadata.
- TheNewAndy 4y ago
  From memory, you could end up fragmenting things, and I think this would typically result in losing some of the capacity of a disk. I think people would do a disk to disk dub in these situations as a form of "defrag" operation. You could also get an 80 minute disk, put it in a recorder and get it to read it, then sneakily swap it with a 74 minute disk without letting the recorder's eject switch trip, then force a TOC write, and you would be able to upgrade a 74 minute disk to an 80 minute version.