8 ms·
MiniDisc Hacking
- xupybd 3y agoI wish minidisc had survived. I like physical media and think that was the perfect size.
- joecool1029 3y agoWhile the recorders aren't produced anymore, the blank recordables (non-HiMD ones) still are. There's enough demand somehow I guess in Japan market (look for MDW80T if you want brand new ones).
- xp84 3y agoI heard from Techmoan very recently that production of the last ones was shutting down this year.
- mofosyne 3y agoI wish Sony didn't hobble the mini disc format against storing data in it's paranoia against piracy. It could had been the next floppy disc of its day.
- mjg59 3y agoBy the time HiMD rolled round, Sony seemed to have figured this out - the 1GB MDs store data, and the players can reformat the older discs into a data storage format, so there exist players that you can boot from. Far too late, of course.
- LiquidPolymer 3y agoYes. Yes there is. MiniDisc platinum is new software that works with “Net-MD” models and allow USB connections. I have cassette/CD/minidisc bookshelf system in my home office (also in my downtown office!) with this feature. I also have several small portables with Net-MD. I recommend a YouTube channel called “Techmoan” which has several incredibly well presented minidisc episodes.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sverhagen 3y agoGreat memories of MiniDisc, being that the local radio station was my chosen hobby in the 90's. Playing commercials and jingles off of musicassettes was tedious and they were prone to wear. MiniDisc, being programmable and digital, solved much of those problems for us. Yes, some people had PCs with SoundBlasters, but that too was in its infancy, and we laughed at neighboring radio stations where the PC would crash in the middle of the night, and do silly things for hours. No, we on the other hand, had MiniDisc, and proud of it. (Until the whole local radio station thing collapsed. This was in Belgium, and most of those stations got gobbled up by networks soon after.) On top of all that, my early Sony MDS player had that dial that let you position and then edit your things really precisely, which opened up a whole new world of jingle editing for the teenage amateur radio geek.
- darkclouds 3y ago[dead]
- webdevver 3y agovery strange website design, font size seems to be a function of the window pixel width. changing the browser zoom level doesn't seem to do anything, so i'm stuck with a very large font size on my widescreen
- joecool1029 3y agoYeah, you're not kidding! I don't think it was their intent to force 'boomer mode' text. I had to manually edit the stylesheet to change fontsize from 2vw to 1vw and it looks fine (reader mode is a workaround too). My guess is they did this as a shitty workaround for high PPI screens that run 200% scaling, but on more common pixel density screens we get beachball sized text.
- notRobot 3y agoI agree, it is kinda weird. For anyone curious, the relevant css property on the site is: body { font-size: 2vw; } This sets font size to be 2% of the viewport width, which means if the text is too big you can try resizing the browser window to be narrower to make the text smaller.
- physhster 3y agoI, too, was very confused by this.
- wierd-eye-loser 3y ago[dead]
- physhster 3y agoExcellent memories of much simpler times... Minidisc was a great technology but the advent of flash memory was ineluctable.
- alehlopeh 3y agoOff topic but I see ”the advent of” more and more these days. Yet when I look up the word, the definition is a religious holiday. In this particular instance I see that you use another very obscure word, so I’m going to assume it’s something people say to try and sound smart, despite it not being the correct word
- LiquidPolymer 3y agoI'm a minidisc collector and continue to make mix tapes and copy CD's, records, etc. The cases are about 1/3 the size of CD yet big enough to make great art. Despite the appearance of the disc, it is a very different technology from CD and a single minidisc can be erased and re-recorded multiple times. I can re-arrange tracks with little effort, or add/eliminate single tracks. I'm making a Louis Prima mix tape as I type this. I also have multiple recording decks from pro to esoteric. I have a lot of portables including field recorders. In the age of streaming and digital players why do I do this? Joy. It's just fun and I enjoy very much listening to the final product. I love the thoughtful hardware and beautiful art that can be made to go with the discs.
- keyle 3y agoCan we even still find minidisc and players new?
- PaulHoule 3y agoYou can import discs from Japan for about $1.50 a piece. Players/recorders aren't that hard to find on Ebay, I even found one at a local "reuse center" but I did have the laser burn out on my NetMD recorde, tried to get another on Ebay, and the laser was burned out on that one.
- LiquidPolymer 3y agoYou can buy new discs on Amazon. While there are many minidisc players on eBay, my best finds are on Craigslist. Why? Demographics. The old guys who find them in a shoebox in their closet think they might be worth $20. I’m not exaggerating- I travel a bit and in large or small towns I’ll scan local CR for “minidisc”, “mini disc”, “minidisk”, etc. I recently acquired five players from a single seller in Bend, OR for $50. All in nearly pristine condition. I buy empty minidisc clear cases from Japan (similar to CD jewel cases) on eBay. I have a photoshop template for printing card stock on my Epson that allows me to create art and graphics that fits perfectly in the case. Once the completed minidisc is placed inside it fits like a glove. I find it all very satisfying. I also bought a Sony MXD-D3 ( hard to find and expensive on eBay) so I can quickly rip an entire CD. Or I can use the “Rec-it” button and just capture a single track. One of my other decks is a Tascam MD-301 MK II which has a keyboard port so I can easily tag albums and tracks with text that dances across the player screen on most playback devices.
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago(2006) maybe? minidisc.org..... tstation forums...wow, it was definitely a time. Nestled nicely in the period where mp3/digital and CDs overlapped and the rise of piracy etc.... mixes and albums (and in certain scenes, live recordings) on minidiscs galore. Then no more CDs basically and straight digital files to digital players.
- snvzz 3y agoI wonder if there's a way to get the digital audio in ATRAC format out of these discs, into proper computer files, without decoding it.
- Sir68k 3y agoYes, it is now possible on many Sony Portables thanks to firmware reverse engineering efforts and custom homebrew code. Most of the functionality is available directly in Web MiniDisc Pro. See https://github.com/MiniDisc-wiki/md-firmware https://github.com/MiniDisc-wiki/md-firmware And https://github.com/asivery/netmd-exploits/ https://github.com/asivery/netmd-exploits/
- snvzz 3y agoVery nice. I am hopeful many will leverage this work to properly extract and archive audio from MDs that would otherwise eventually be lost with the media.
- aspenmayer 3y agoLinks! > Web MiniDisc Pro (WMDpro)[0][1] is a web app that can copy (almost) any audio file onto a Sony MiniDisc using the NetMD USB protocol. It can also manage tracks, erase discs, and enable new features that extend the MD format. It is a complete replacement for Sony's SonicStage (except Hi-MD modes.)[2] [0] https://web.minidisc.wiki/ https://web.minidisc.wiki/ [1] https://github.com/asivery/webminidisc https://github.com/asivery/webminidisc [2] https://www.minidisc.wiki/guides/webminidisc https://www.minidisc.wiki/guides/webminidisc h/t Sir68k https://github.com/Sir68k https://github.com/Sir68k
- doublerabbit 3y ago[2] is out if date. Hi-Md is now supported.
- aspenmayer 3y ago
- dang 3y agoRecent and related: A Repairman's View of Portable Minidisc Recorders (2000) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37807786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37807786 - Oct 2023 (48 comments)
- FrankyHollywood 3y agoThere are those days you really appreciate the Firefox reader view :D
- prmoustache 3y agoI could have but I just tiled the firefox window to one side of the screen.
- benguild 3y agoI love my MiniDisc player. The discs are so cool, and so satisfying to pop into a player.
- jusssi 3y agofont-size: 2vw; Got to be the most annoying way to set font size. Completely unreactive to page zoom, have to shrink the window to make text readable.
- sharoma 3y agoHi there. I shall make changes to the style sheet soon. When I first published this page in 2006, I never encountered any issues or had any complaints about the font sizing until now. I had completely forgotten that I used 'vw' and in fact had to look up what it even did. I must've had my reasons at the time... Anyway, thanks for bringing it to my attention!
- dunk010 3y agoUse reader mode.
- Rossimac 3y agoDecided to not read the website because of that.
- Sarkie 3y agothanks!
- preya2k 3y agoPage is completely unreadable for me, too. What a stupid idea.
- jeroenhd 3y agoIs this a desktop browser issue? Here on Android neither Firefox nor Chrome make the text unreadable, and zoom works just fine for me.
- kristofferR 3y agoPinch-zooming works great, but cmd+ doesn't.
- 3y ago
- _glass 3y agocan't they make minisd drives? this format was so perfect. also one thing even better than flash drives, with my player I could just plug in the mixer into the machine, and record our jam sessions, like 4 hours, or something. and then you had these stylish discs. There were also some movie experiences when data was exchanged, and it looked just so good. nowadays flash drives don't have that.
- _joel 3y agoQuick, someone call Techmoan
- gtsnexp 3y agoAnyone has thoughts on ATRAC (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding)? The compression system used to store audio data in MiniDiscs? There isn't a way to simply record and read FLAC natively from these, right?
- HerculePoirot 3y agoI bought a sony mzrh1 around 2007 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Sony_mz_rh1.jpg https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Sony_mz_rh1.jpg It was discontinued a couple years later. The software to download & upload files from/to the disc stopped working past osx snow leopard. The windows sonic stage program was absolute garbage. It sits unused in a drawer. Sony refused to open-source their code and the encryption/decryption can't be reverse engineered because you need cryptographic keys. Don't trust sony. Their hardware may be superb, but they have abysmal execution when it comes to software.
- primis 3y agoThere's an entirely web-native replacement for upload/downloading tracks now https://stefano.brilli.me/webminidisc/ https://stefano.brilli.me/webminidisc/ It's based off the reverse engineer minidisc python libraries and, imho, is super impressive. The author even figured out how to dump atrac data off any netMD capable deck (not just the MZ-RH1).
- Sir68k 3y agoMinor note: ATRAC extraction on non-RH1 models and Hi-MD support is only available on the fork at web.minidisc.wiki (Web MiniDisc Pro).
- oceanghost 3y agoDespite the rosey memories, it encoded the audio in ATRAC. I don't want a lossy audio format in my life.