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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 s
by 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 It didn't get outdated, get 17 trillion UI updates, require a password or have ever-changing terms and conditions.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 agoFrom 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.
- ace2358 4y agoThat’s so sick. I have been into minidisc for about 4 years and never knew this :)
- fleddr 4y agoI can't really say, at that age I had no idea what fragmentation means so any issues with it would not register. Statistically though, I imagine reordering to be the most frequent operation. Deletion should be rare since it's a purposeful decision to put the song on the disc in the first place. You might rarely delete one when you get tired of it.
- LeoPanthera 4y agoFragmentation is possible, but unlikely. You'd have to do a lot of cutting and deleting and reordering. And most tracks are reasonably long, so, this wasn't a huge issue.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- trompetenaccoun 4y agoWhat killed it is that they weren't really portable the same way flash memory is. An obvious improvement over CD players but the disk would still jump. Plus the disk swapping! Don't know how large your music library is but but having 8 discs for nostalgic reasons is different from having hundreds of them because it's your primary source.
- aidenn0 4y agoJust because HN is the home of pedantry... > You can't reorder a song on a cassette, obviously. I've reordered songs on reel-to-reel magnetic tape with a knife and special tape; I don't see why you couldn't do something similar with a cassette...
- s1mon 4y agoThe reason you wouldn't do it with a normal cassette is that there's a side A and a side B. You could reorder one side with enough time and skill, but the other side would now be screwed up. Maybe you could develop a taste for songs that are all about the same length and/or put a lot of buffer between songs, and then this would kinda sorta work. The other reason is that cassettes sound like shit, even if you have metal tape and a Nakamichi Dragon.
- aidenn0 4y agoA friend of mine had a deck that could record 4 tracks on a standard cassette instead of using them as two sides. That's getting pretty niche though.