this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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miniDisc FTW
For sure.
My mini disc cost as much as the first iPod when it came out. It was either 3 or 5 of the discs equaled it's storage and I think it even took rechargeable AA batteries. Or at least had an attachment that would work with them.
And it has the remote in the cord that gave song title and playlist info.
It was better in everyway. But the promise of "new" and the marketing made everyone go iPod. I never met a single other person at the time that had a mini disc.
But being able to just swap a disc with someone at school and then upload it back to your computer at home would have been huge at the time.
Literal peer to peer file sharing without the internet. And it might have been normalized for an entire generation if Steve Jobs wasn't so good at marketing.
Wtf man, donβt you know not to copy that floppy? π
Minidiscs rocked! My first model, which I loved, was unfortunately stolen. They hardly took up any room and I could carry loads of them on my travels to college. They were cheap and came in lovely bright colours.
The replacement model I bought was a Sony NetMD which I thought was amazing. It ran for hours on it's chewing gum battery and if that failed, I could screw on an attachment to use a single AA battery.
The player used Sony's new compression techniques and I could fit three or four albums on a single disc. It came with a dock and connected to my Windows 95 PC so I could rip CDs or convert mp3s and use the computer to fill in the artist and track name information.
I found the in-line remote on eBay so I could control it via the little cylinder remote with the backlit blue LCD display, clipped to my jacket.
I loved minidiscs.
just like mine. in fact, i loved it so much, i didn't go iPod until gen 3. man, i still miss my MD player...
Okay, so I somehow missed the whole minidisc era. I imagine probably because it was shortlived, or just impractical for me at the time. However I find them incredibly fascinating, especially portable minidisc players. I've low key been on the lookout for one while thrifting, so I have an excuse to dive in.
they were super-cool, and, yeah, it was very short-lived. i had a net-MD player, a small, portable MD player that ran on a single AA battery and lasted ages. it could also record on-device and also played mp3s. i loved that fucking thing!
MDs were better than CD-RWs because they were 1/2 the size and came in a case while being almost skip-proof.
If you still have any minidiscs around, glue a couple magnets on the back and they make a great retro fridge magnet.
Worked in radio for a number of years, and we used mini disks to record phone calls for a while. Still have a number of them knocking around a storage box somewhere.