Many Different MiniDiscs

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I had this one.

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Why oh why did it have to break
 
Man, when the MiniDisc arrived I still was a student with pretty much no money left for anything else than the strictly necessary.

In short... despite how much I drooled over those gorgeous machines, I never had one. But it's incredible how futuristic they look today. Great technology too.

When it comes to design, Sony was really the king of the hill during those decades.

Maybe I should buy one of those, just for the sake of it!!!!!!!!
 
So much this...I loved my player to death, such great sound and a great format....

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That player and remote look like Windows Media Player skins circa 2002.
My baby in high school

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I owned that model in blue for about 3 days before exchanging it for this one which was just a few dollars more:

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Mostly for the remote which meant I could keep the player in my pocket and also for the car kit that I never used, more buttons and a larger lcd screen which meant it was better in my mind. Looking back, I should've kept the first one. It was a little more compact and didn't have that "lip".

I had the whole scheme figured out. I would check out cd's from the library for free and rip them straight to MD.
 
Sonicstage really was shitty, like iTunes. But I loved my player. :)

I had this one.

MZ-RH1
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I'm gonna get one of these for my collection but they're like 400 fucking dollars. Most players are in the 35-60$ range.
 
"The Sony brand audio players were on the market from September 1992 until March 2013."

What? Over here in the UK mini disks didn't get 'hot' until about... 1998? That's when I remember most people suddenly jumping on the mini disc bandwagon, for whatever brief time period.
 
I used to looooove my mini disc player. I sold most of my friends on them. Great amount of storage for the space, rewritable, but most importantly, awesome battery life. If I remember correctly it was comparable to a NGPC even. That was so huge for me and was one of the reasons I stuck with the format so long.

Once the iPod got that 10 battery life in 04 though, there was no going back.
 
I still use my beautiful Sharp SD-NX10 as my main home CD player. I don't use the MD slot anymore but I still love the fucking thing.
 
Its cool you go through and make 1 second track marks on all your techno mixes and then plug them into a mixer on "repeat track" and slowly seek forward over the course of the performance creating an ad-hoc looping mechanism.
 
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Had a Sony MZ-R55 that I bought in Japan while on vacation back in 1998. I still remember having to hook it up to my stereo to record songs to the mini discs.
 
Also I totally have some Hello Kitty Minidiscs. I loved collecting MD around 2001-2003. I loved that format.
 
A friend used to have a nice recorder and a portable player. A few years later, he got a head unit for his car. I cruised with him tons with minidisc tunes filling my ears He's the only person I ever knew who had minidiscs.
 
I had this player.

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I bought one instead of an mp3 player at the time because of how tiny the capacity was on those players, compared to cost. I loved mine, except for how recording songs to a disc was just like recording to tape. If it had been easier to transfer mp3s to MD, earlier on, the format might've lasted longer.

Agree 100%, right down to having the same player. I just checked and it still works! The remote is messed up though. "Play" can't be pushed in, "Stop" stops the music and lowers the volume, and the volume rocker only increases the volume. I got it for my birthday. I decided to ask for a MiniDisc player instead of an MP3 player, because the MP3 players at the time topped out at 64 MB. That's maybe 1 CD of poor quality music.

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To this day, I still think the actual discs look really cool.
 
^ I think that specific MD player was the first MD player I ever saw in real life.
 
This thread has made maybe the second time I have ever seen a minidisc player, and the first time I've seen the discs. I have never seen either in real life. Would have been nice to own a few...
 
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Had a Sony MZ-R55 that I bought in Japan while on vacation back in 1998. I still remember having to hook it up to my stereo to record songs to the mini discs.
High 5! Mine was in 'Champagne Silver'. I believe the R55 was the first MD recorder that was kinda MD-shaped - previous to that they were bigger, rectangular and pretty ugly. Unfortunately this ambitious design meant appalling battery life. Was my most prized possession at the time, and I still have it in a drawer in superb condition... can't find the bloody adapter though!

I recorded all my CDs with it, and plenty of radio as well. I remember my friends at school being blown away by the audio quality - a lot of people still used cassette Walkmans. I recorded a great live set by Radiohead that was broadcast on Radio 1... that in itself was a treasured possession. A legendary gig, very few had good recordings of it. Now everything is just so easy, it's all on YouTube. Where's the fun in that?
 
The Sharp MDS20 was a square and released in 1995.
Though you can clearly see that the buttons on the "spine" are more cassette walkman influenced.

And the Sony MZE30 followed it in '96

The R55 was a '98 release.
 
I loved those things. They felt like a device out of the 80s with all the neat moving parts. It's just too bad Sonicstage was required... fuck that POS.
I had this one too:
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My Grandad still swears by minidiscs. He seems to always have something on the radio recording on minidisc to listen to later.
 

#windplayer


I'm making a mix right now and the MD player literally tickles you like its discovering its sexuality as it writes to disc.
 
Holy shit! I was just recently going through my stuff and discovered a ton of brightly colored MDs and got a huge nostalgia flash.

I´d also argue that MD is a format that still holds up rather well - unlike audio casette, which I also LOVE from a nostalgia standpoint, but that endless << and >> just to get to a specific song is just mindnumbing.

MD was also one of those jumps in technology that I remember the most. I was really into recording audio back then and making my own digital tracks was just a blast.

And man, those pic in this thread look absolutely gorgeous. That Sharp player with the black ring on silver is so badass! If you will excuse me now, I need to create a new folder on my computer so save all this eyecandy to.
 
I copied all my tapes of stuff i'd recorded off the radio onto MD and then started to record the audio from music videos off MTV, old school real-time piracy!


Still works! MZ-R70 the dark grey version, but the LCD has half leaked out.
 
Sonicstage really was shitty, like iTunes. But I loved my player. :)

I had this one.

MZ-RH1
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That thing looks awesome. The remote especially. I wish smartphones had a remote you could use for volume and skipping tracks and the like. I hate having to pull out my phone for every time I want to skip a song, especially in winter it sucks.
 
I just want to make it clear how much everyone in this threads support means to me. Reading these nostalgic comments makes me feel whole.
 
The Sharp MDS20 was a square and released in 1995.
Though you can clearly see that the buttons on the "spine" are more cassette walkman influenced.


And the Sony MZE30 followed it in '96


The R55 was a '98 release.
Ahh but those two were playback only, not recorders?
 
You've gotta play that busta rhymes MD, dude.

Savin' the Bjork for last I see.
 
Aaaah, good days, although they didn't last long. Still remember people talking about portable mini-discs due to the Freestyler videoclip from Bomfunk MCs - lol.
That's what I had back then.. It must have been 1998.. Still have those things, I really love the stereo.

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Goddamn, so on the R55 is that PUSH button for the pop open gesture? Usually its a slide gesture.


You have the model number on those two twin units above? Gorgeous. Though its not quite the Sony era I adore. And most importantly: are those glass doors mechanized?
 
It's the CMT-SD1.
You could go for the cd/player tuner and on top of that you could add a mini disc and/or a cassette player:

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What do you mean mechanized?
You have to "manually" adjust them if this is what you are referring to, although the lights on the buttons turn on only when the glass is down. So beautiful.
By the way 2-3 years ago I started having issues with the main unit, it stops playing at random (it's still working but there is no sound and it's not about the speakers for sure). After a while it might resume working properly but still I have no idea what to do and probably even at Sony they won't have a clue (or they will rip me off).
 
Aww, I was hoping you'd press a button and watch them glide down in a methodically impractical showcase.

Tying the LEDS to the hing is an ok compromise, so tell me about the R55's open mechanism. You push a button and it just pops up! No slider? :Q__________
 
It would be cool but even like this I am not complaining :).
This thing looked marvellous 15 years ago, and I am even more impressed now because I think that it still looks nice.

Yes you just press a button for R55.
I never thought that it's something special... maybe it is after all, who would have thought :P.
 
I seem to recall that if you were recording, the push button to open on the R55 became softer, as if the mechanism/spring behind it had disappeared. I believe it prevented you from opening the device while it was burning to the disc. It's a very faint memory though... I may have got that wrong.
 
Absolutely. In fact, there was a camcorder that wrote to MD.

It was a network attached device that could stream data directly from itself over IP.

Peep the different MD data logos
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Were minidisks strictly an Audio format? Could they be used for ROM data?

The Minidisc data versions were also offered in 4 track versions for home musicians. I remember wanting one before home computer based recording was viable.



They were also incompatible with regular audio MDs. I think there was an 8 track version by yamaha but similar devices from Roland with hard disk drives killed these off pretty quickly.
 
god, i wished Sony wasn't so fucking assholes with their policy towards MP3. By forcing everyone to use their crappy ass Atrac, they totally lost on the personal music player to Apple. And then their design went to shit.

how did we go from the amazing awesome MZ-RH1

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to this ugly ass "walkman"?

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The Minidisc data versions were also offered in 4 track versions for home musicians. I remember wanting one before home computer based recording was viable.



They were also incompatible with regular audio MDs. I think there was an 8 track version by yamaha but similar devices from Roland with hard disk drives killed these off pretty quickly.

I have that. I made so many good tracks on it in my youth. I also had the original MD player, an automobile 6 disc changer, and a newer Walkman style one. I am bummed that it never really caught on in the west. It felt like something from the future.
 
WHAT where are they and what did you do with them? You own 3 of the coolest MD devices?
Take photos of them Sell them to me.
 
"The Sony brand audio players were on the market from September 1992 until March 2013."

What? Over here in the UK mini disks didn't get 'hot' until about... 1998? That's when I remember most people suddenly jumping on the mini disc bandwagon, for whatever brief time period.

I remember seeing one for the first time in Last Action Hero which came out in 1993.
 
screw all you guys! I never had an MD player - they seemed exorbitantly expensive and I was fine between my mix tapes and discman..

..however..

when this thing came out I completely lost my mind

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32MB onboard, with a slot that could accept an extra 32MB. You connected it to your PC thru a printer port interface device, and it took several minutes to upload maybe about 15 songs in total (128 KBPS)

And the thing was so horribly cheaply made that if it got even gently nudged, the flimsy-plastic battery pack cover would shoot open and launch it's AA out.

It was a godawful piece of garbage in hindsight, but truly the beginning of a revolution. It blew my mind that I could DL music from an FTP site, and play the songs thru my car's stereo while I drove or just while I was walking to work...

"kids today will never understand how good they have it!"

(sorry for thread derail)
 
woo! minidisc. Back before MP3 players could hold a reasonable amount of songs for cheap, Minidiscs were what I used to make my computer playlists portable. I wanted a step up from tapes.

I just recorded everything with analog line out from my PC. I added track names to the songs on the disc on the player itself using the jog dial. Man&#8230; it took so much time.

I had this Kenwood DMC K9R recorder. Got it in 1998 (imported from Hong Kong by a friend of mine) and used it pretty much every day until I got my first ipod in 2005. I still have it in a desk drawer along with around a dozen discs with lots of mid 90s, early 2000s pop hits.

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look at that extended battery pack!
 
screw all you guys! I never had an MD player - they seemed exorbitantly expensive and I was fine between my mix tapes and discman..

..however..

when this thing came out I completely lost my mind

115374513.JBAXRMnv.59220_pbzElrDiamondRioPMP300SecondMP3PlayerintheWorldYear1998.jpg


32MB onboard, with a slot that could accept an extra 32MB. You connected it to your PC thru a printer port interface device, and it took several minutes to upload maybe about 15 songs in total (128 KBPS)

And the thing was so horribly cheaply made that if it got even gently nudged, the flimsy-plastic battery pack cover would shoot open and launch it's AA out.

It was a godawful piece of garbage in hindsight, but truly the beginning of a revolution. It blew my mind that I could DL music from an FTP site, and play the songs thru my car's stereo while I drove or just while I was walking to work...

"kids today will never understand how good they have it!"

(sorry for thread derail)

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DAMN IT I was sure I pressed "edit" not "reply"
 
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