3 ms·

Oh man. I went through like four MiniDisc portables and had that awful Sharp MD component that could dupe a CD to MD at 4x. I can't tell you how many hours I sp

Oh man. I went through like four MiniDisc portables and had that awful Sharp MD component that could dupe a CD to MD at 4x. I can't tell you how many hours I spent spinning a dial to choose alphabetic characters so all the tracks would be properly titled. My dream for years was to get an in-dash MD receiver. I wonder how much longer I would have used them if I had actually managed to do that. They were just so cool. A terrible waste of space and technology, but really damn cool. I actually thought about getting another one last year, just for nostalgia, but wound up not--even though they can be had for like $20-40 on eBay. Around the same time I was trying to run BeOS as my desktop. I would have liked to have developed for it, but at the time I was just barely grasping Python and C++ with threading really wasn't within reach for me. I'm happy Haiku has been getting press and may try to run it in a VM (haven't had much luck with that in the past) but there was something really liberating about running an OS on the metal that booted in ten seconds. Everything was so snappy. Of course, you couldn't do much with it, but what you could do, you could do really well. :)

protomyth 14y ago
I really wish that Sony had built a reasonably priced IDE version of the MD recorder. Those things were tough and not too bad. Unlike the article's love of ZIP drives. I liked ZIP drives like my first car, it got me places I couldn't go before and left me stranded there multiple times. ZIPs were not very reliable.
- fusiongyro 14y ago
  I suddenly remembered how much I hated seeing Sony portable MD players for sale. They were all perfectly cuboid except for an obviously battery-sized lump in the posterior. Sony being the monsters they are, their packaging was deceptively designed to show just the front face and conceal the back inside the plastic bubble, so you wouldn't find out about their terrible shape until you got home.
  - protomyth 14y ago
    I bought the recorder and it was a small rectangular box. I was pretty nice.
slantyyz 14y ago
I went through a bunch of music players too. I got the original MPMan on a trip to Taiwan one year. I think it had 64MB of memory, which meant I had to downsample to "radio" quality to get a full album on it. I had another Rio that played off SmartMedia as well. At one point I refused to get an iPod because it didn't have gapless playback so I got a Rio Karma instead. It was pretty good, but it has literally disintegrated while in storage. -- Went through way too many PDAs also. Several paper Daytimers (which were pretty expensive at the time), Sharp Wizard clamshell, Casio Windows CE, Palm, Handspring, and a Toshiba e800. The e800 was an interesting disappointment - it was the first to have a VGA screen, but it was also crippled by a horrible Windows Mobile OS. Extending the PDA thing, I went through a couple of Windows Mobile phones, an Audiovox SMT5600 and an HTC Excalibur. Good devices hampered by a crappy OS. On a side note, I've been quite impressed by the Windows Phone OS. The iPhone is probably the first PDA that I have used consistently for an extended period of time. -- EDIT: I forgot that I actually had the original Newton message pad and one of its successors too. I remember buying the original Graffiti software from the company that would eventually become Palm. Holy crap, I bought a lot e-junk in my lifetime.
- fusiongyro 14y ago
  Yeah. I got the IBM WorkPad 20x, which was basically a black rebranded Palm III. Used it... very sparingly. :) After a few years of it atrophying in a box somewhere I decided my life would be perfect if I had a Palm Vx. I even got a weird spring-loaded portable keyboard for it that sort of unfolded and docked with it. I think I imagined I would take more notes in class this way. In reality, I played a lot of Bejeweled on it and didn't use it for much else. Based on my experiences with these things, I shouldn't have expected that I'd get more out of my iPhone, but I really do.
ben1040 14y ago
I knew a DJ who had a MD dash unit in his car. It seemed like the coolest thing ever. I had a MiniDisc component unit and a portable or two, one of which was the one pictured in the article. I dumped the component quite some time ago. I can't bring myself to throw the portable away -- I've got tons of archives of my old college radio show on MiniDisc in a closet. That particular portable depicted in the article was one of the last MD portables at all before Sony decided to pack it in; I think it came out in 2002. It had a USB input, and you could use your PC to push music onto a disk. It suffered from the classic Sony problem that they own a record label and they also make stuff that can copy music, so they made using it a complete pain in the ass in some misguided effort to protect their own interests. You had to use the bundled NetMD software, which would transcode MP3s to the proprietary ATRAC compression format. Then you had to "check out" the songs to the device, in which case they could not be put on any other device until they were checked back in. It encrypted the stuff as it sent it down, and you could not get any digital audio back off the device -- USB was only one-way and it had optical SP/DIF in but not out.
- pbhjpbhj 14y ago
  I bought a MD device for sermon recording under the misguided notion that it was a digital device that connected via USB and that live recordings would thus be simply drag-dropped from the device. It cost me many hours in real-time playback of recordings in to my computer. But for that one missing link I'd still use the device now. At the time I should have purchased a slightly more expensive MP3 device.

protomyth 14y ago

I really wish that Sony had built a reasonably priced IDE version of the MD recorder. Those things were tough and not too bad. Unlike the article's love of ZIP drives. I liked ZIP drives like my first car, it got me places I couldn't go before and left me stranded there multiple times. ZIPs were not very reliable.

fusiongyro 14y ago
I suddenly remembered how much I hated seeing Sony portable MD players for sale. They were all perfectly cuboid except for an obviously battery-sized lump in the posterior. Sony being the monsters they are, their packaging was deceptively designed to show just the front face and conceal the back inside the plastic bubble, so you wouldn't find out about their terrible shape until you got home.
- protomyth 14y ago
  I bought the recorder and it was a small rectangular box. I was pretty nice.

slantyyz 14y ago

I went through a bunch of music players too. I got the original MPMan on a trip to Taiwan one year. I think it had 64MB of memory, which meant I had to downsample to "radio" quality to get a full album on it. I had another Rio that played off SmartMedia as well. At one point I refused to get an iPod because it didn't have gapless playback so I got a Rio Karma instead. It was pretty good, but it has literally disintegrated while in storage. -- Went through way too many PDAs also. Several paper Daytimers (which were pretty expensive at the time), Sharp Wizard clamshell, Casio Windows CE, Palm, Handspring, and a Toshiba e800. The e800 was an interesting disappointment - it was the first to have a VGA screen, but it was also crippled by a horrible Windows Mobile OS. Extending the PDA thing, I went through a couple of Windows Mobile phones, an Audiovox SMT5600 and an HTC Excalibur. Good devices hampered by a crappy OS. On a side note, I've been quite impressed by the Windows Phone OS. The iPhone is probably the first PDA that I have used consistently for an extended period of time. -- EDIT: I forgot that I actually had the original Newton message pad and one of its successors too. I remember buying the original Graffiti software from the company that would eventually become Palm. Holy crap, I bought a lot e-junk in my lifetime.

fusiongyro 14y ago
Yeah. I got the IBM WorkPad 20x, which was basically a black rebranded Palm III. Used it... very sparingly. :) After a few years of it atrophying in a box somewhere I decided my life would be perfect if I had a Palm Vx. I even got a weird spring-loaded portable keyboard for it that sort of unfolded and docked with it. I think I imagined I would take more notes in class this way. In reality, I played a lot of Bejeweled on it and didn't use it for much else. Based on my experiences with these things, I shouldn't have expected that I'd get more out of my iPhone, but I really do.

ben1040 14y ago

I knew a DJ who had a MD dash unit in his car. It seemed like the coolest thing ever. I had a MiniDisc component unit and a portable or two, one of which was the one pictured in the article. I dumped the component quite some time ago. I can't bring myself to throw the portable away -- I've got tons of archives of my old college radio show on MiniDisc in a closet. That particular portable depicted in the article was one of the last MD portables at all before Sony decided to pack it in; I think it came out in 2002. It had a USB input, and you could use your PC to push music onto a disk. It suffered from the classic Sony problem that they own a record label and they also make stuff that can copy music, so they made using it a complete pain in the ass in some misguided effort to protect their own interests. You had to use the bundled NetMD software, which would transcode MP3s to the proprietary ATRAC compression format. Then you had to "check out" the songs to the device, in which case they could not be put on any other device until they were checked back in. It encrypted the stuff as it sent it down, and you could not get any digital audio back off the device -- USB was only one-way and it had optical SP/DIF in but not out.

pbhjpbhj 14y ago
I bought a MD device for sermon recording under the misguided notion that it was a digital device that connected via USB and that live recordings would thus be simply drag-dropped from the device. It cost me many hours in real-time playback of recordings in to my computer. But for that one missing link I'd still use the device now. At the time I should have purchased a slightly more expensive MP3 device.