Oddity Archive: Episode 120 - Minidisc 

Its funny that you mentioned the obsolescence in 2011. When I was in broadcast school around that time, we were still using MiniDiscs to record all manner of things, mostly live air checks. It was a running joke that we were still using such uncommon tech, but the story was that the school bought all the machines hoping their relevance would stay strong professionally, kinda like cds but they obviously lost that gamble and we had to stick with the results. For what it was worth, they were really good and if they were more popular I'd invest in a good player/recorder.

True personal story time from a former broadcast engineer…sorry for the length of this in advance. It was August of 1999 and I was a much younger DJ / aspiring Engineer. The large company I worked for at the time was worried about Y2K…especially since most of our stations / studios had been converted to computer operations via Dalet Studio Automation. To say Dalet was junk is putting it rather mildly, but that’s a different story for a later time. To make a long story short, someone at Corporate HQ decided it would be a brilliant idea to buy two mini-disk machines for each station that could record and play out. They also wanted two machines in each production room. In the building in I was at in the southern US, there were six stations: four music FMs, a sports AM and an embarrassingly low-wattage talk AM. We also had three production bays. That meant wiring in eighteen pieces of new equipment. The plan was for each station to record enough programming to cover January 1, 2000 LIKE THERE WAS NOTHING GOING WRONG. Yup…Music, generic DJ talk and (most importantly to our big bosses in Chicago / Atlanta at the time) billable commercials. By the way: this was just in the location I worked at. The company I worked for had about 300 stations nationwide at the time. You do the rough math of how many of these paperweights were bought. Engineers at all the stations, along with the Corporate Engineers, argued this was a huge waste of time and money. There had been a company-wide Y2K test two months earlier and not one station had a problem. We had tested everything and it was fine. Still, in late August 1999, the mini-disk machines (and all the recordable disks to go with it) arrived at our loading dock. We did what we were told and had everything installed and ready to go. DJs were rotated into the production rooms to record what they had to (that extra work was good for morale right around the holidays…NOT). Three days before New Year’s Day, a full slate of commercials were recorded to mini-disk as well. Come midnight on 1/1/2000…everything continued to work just fine and the mini-disks machines were powered down. They were pretty much never touched again until they were removed six years later. I will say this: since these were the very high-end Sony machines, the quality was pretty good and would have worked well if anything had gone down. Still, it was a waste of time and money. BTW - that company I worked for is now fighting to stay out of bankruptcy court due to managerial mismanagement and questionable practices…go figure.

This is the show that reminds you in 20 years the young will think DVRs were stone age technology.

WHAT thrift stores are you going to?! You always are finding cool stuff. The ones near me only offer used small appliances, shirts that were never fashionable, and copies of 50 Shades of Gray.

Minidiscs were very popular in France. I still have mine with almost 50 discs. It is a great pre-zoom H2 recorder, I used to have my compact Minidic recorder everywhere with me during my art school years with a sony mini mike. I liked it but I always found the sound too compressed, the sound sounds cold in this format and you can hear that many frequency are missing. But, yes, I think I'll buy a mini disc player one day to connect to my amp, I still like it.

My radio station was using MDs regularly until 2008, when we installed a computerized on-air/playback/recording system, at which point they were gradually phased out over the next several years...while we still have MD recorders in most studios, they're rarely (if ever) used nowadays. Incidentally, all our recorders are Tascam MD-350 systems, for those wondering.

Funny you're posting this today, Ben. I just saw a MiniDisc a few days ago at the radio station at which I work.

Ok but hear me out on this idea: larger discs

You can rip CD's to ATRAC files on a PlayStation 3 at a bitrate of ~352kb/s, it says something about the system being able to process the audio better, you can also move the files on to USB drive.

I used MD religiously from about 2003-2006. It was a great format, especially among the music and recording geeks I hung around.

If only Hired Stud: Will Travel was on Mini Disc.

I liked the md format. Recording from the radio, editing out the adverts! I was making my own songs and mixing to md too...

Minidiscs are still used for some older broadcast recordings. We have some archived programs at the station on minidisc.

So minidisc is now retro tech? Damn I must be getting old.

Would love to see an episode on other oddity optical formats such as GD-ROM (used in Dreamcast), UMD (used in PSP) and even HD-DVD (unless that was already covered in a Format Wars episode)

I remember using those minidisc recorders to record vox pops when I was an intern at a radio station. People were constantly stealing the little bastards to pawn them for drug money.

The latest version of SonicStage 4.3 is old, it's from 2007, but it still works with Windows 10. So I can still transfer music from my laptop to a NetMD Walkman Minidisc. For a recordable format from the nineties the quality is pretty good. Much better than audio-cassettes. I still use it to record stuff from the radio. You can finds discs and minidisc walkmen for very little on Ebay.

I have made music mixes on: Cassette: 1986-2000. Mini-disc: 1998 (once, which I later transferred to cassette). CDs: 2001-09, with a few in the years since. Digital playlists: 2010-present.

I've got the Rolling Stone disc, in addition to 2 Alice Cooper albums released on the format (The Last Temptation & Classicks). Also have 2 working MD machines that I actually still use to playback discs and record bits and pieces for my pirate radio station. Like DAT, this format may not have been great commercially, but is still viable for recording, especially when I'm wanting to record something quickly and not have to mess with computers. Also a great way of archiving digitally, as you pointed out. In other words, a format that never got its just deserves and one that is still useful today, in certain applications.

Back in the later 90's one of the best things I bought when I had DAT and MD machines was a M-Audio CO3 which was a format converter and also allowed you to bypass SCMS copy protection.

I visited the studio of a radio reading service recently and they still had a Minidisc player in one booth

that tuner is a misnomer, the tuner itself was contained entirely inside the headphone dongle remote thing. The big thing was that this recorder was able to record that audio signal.

i had a small collection of minidiscs back in 97-98. i recorded songs from my friends cd's onto them amd listened to them in my 93 civic with a sony minidisc deck. i was literally the only person in town with minidiscs. what sold me was the small size, the protective case and of course the ability to copy cd's and even rearrange the order of the tracks and delete sections of tracks. they were awesome.

Can you do background music system formats like the 3m cantata, or the seeburg system for an episode?

Do a video on TBN and other Christian TV channels!

Can we applaud how he didn’t get nailed by either a certain Music Distribution Company or SD for this video?

Used mini disc for audio production at the small radio station I worked at in 1999. Still used it for back up recording when cool edit pro would crash. The station had that exact Sony cd minidisc unit in 2002 along with that more professional hi end units. Tascam etc. my minidisc Walkman skips like a bastard now. Just can't throw it away yet. Probably have 40 discs in a box that I made in 2000. recorded 5 hour long Howard Stern shows,in "LP 4 " mode. Kinda cool that minidisc can do that.

The FM remote and most processing is actually done in the box on the remote cable. That's why you cant access FM without the original remote.

I got suckered into this MiniDisc crap in 1997. I bought a bundle that included a low end Walkman/portable player a home deck and 6 blank Minidiscs. I used it for a whole 3 months and never did so again. I ended up selling the portable unit on E-Bay for like 25 bucks in 2005. The home unit croaked. $499.99 down the toilet.

6:23 - Wrong! The newer Hi-MD recorders released after 2004 were indeed backwards compatible with the original ATRAC3 292kps codec. Some of the early models like the NH600 even allowed recording at that bit rate. Sony's only mistake was that it never released a Hi-MD deck

I got a NetMD instead of a MP3 player due to cost for Christmas 2004. It was a good format if you could get windows to work with the software. I convinced myself it was better since it had "infinite expansion"

The latest version of SonicStage does work in at least Vista, but you may have to run it in XP compatibility mode. I have the MZ-NF810 with mic and line/optical inputs, but sadly no optical out. However, I found that older players from the 90s will happily play recordings from it (SP only) with seemingly perfect reproduction, and can deliver bit perfect transfers via optical if the player supports it.

These things cost a fortune here in the UK in the late 90s. For some strange reason when i was in my late teens I was sort of obsessed on them thinking they were the future. I bought a brand new "Kenwood' mini disc recorder for £329 (telling my parents it was £50), at the time i was at college and worked 2 days a week (in the local electronics store) so it was very extravagant even with staff discount. I soon realised it was pointless as my car used cassettes and all the music i bought was on cassette. I sold it on QXL which was an early version of Ebay for virtually nothing. I still think they were a good idea but too late and too expensive.

My dad has tons of these! I always assumed they were common as a kid since there were so many lying around the house.

I have done my own testing with my HiMD MZ-RH910 FLAC vs 256 ATRAC3plus @256kbps (Hi-SP Mode) and even with good quality DACs and Headphones it is very hard to tell the difference. Of course RU-vid makes this test pointless as everything is recompressed. I love my MD player, I use it every day for my commute. I rip Tidal Lossless service with Toslink (Optical). I use SonicStage in a Windows 7 VM to change the track names after recording.

My MiniDisc Walkman has one of those remotes but it's not hardwired to headphones, which is extremely helpful as it didn't come with headphones.

NETMD and SonicStage works fine on my Windows 7 Ultimate System.

I loved MD, Have the same sony cd md recorder, had a deck in my Honda Accord in 1999, and used the MD walkman. Loved making my own mixs before iPods were a thing

A true music geek would appreciate the minidisc

I remember the Sony connect attrac software. When support was gone all the music I had bought from there was useless in its native form due to the proprietary nature of Sony. I cursed a lot about this.

I gotta say, I still have those annoying audio issues (the sharp cutting-sounding noises) on my Discman from '99. But it really depends on the disc, if it's scratched or not.

What do you mean no hits on that MiniDisc?...I believe RHCP's "Breaking the Girl" and Gangstarr's "Mass Appeal" were fairly popular. I also like "Nothingness" by Living Colour.

I had a minidisc player for a while in the early 00s as it was cheaper than an Ipod at the time. SonicStage really was an awful piece of software.

I was so excited about MD at first but man was I disappointed when I bought my second device and ran into the DRM fiasco, I was trying to use it as a recorder for recording conversations and did get them recorded but there was no short way of getting around the DRM issue other than using the analog cable.

Sorry you’ve had so many issues with MD. I use my Hi-MD portable even now, also the version of Sonic Stage I use works perfectly on my Windows 7 Pro 64. Also I only record digitally in either Hi-SP 256k or PCM. Thanks for bring up the technology again

MiniDisc also had very few pre-recorded content ever released (6:16), most of them being from Sony's music publishing label. (8:02)

also in my experience in archiving for a band, it seems like minidisc was best for taking a line in from a board rather cause if you wanna mic the room you'd be better of bringing a rig

Strawberry Station released an album on MiniDisc in 2019.

Minidiscs are cool still here in UK.. Still very much a 'thing' '...I also have a hacked version of sonicstage that works on Windows 10

And the format that wiped out the cassette...? The microSD card. Though both had their advantages and disadvantages, DCC was backwardly compatible with analogue cassette. Neither survived. Also, good on the BBC for explaining lossy compression, using psychoacoustics to preserve only the sounds humans hear versus the I would say lossless compression but really uncompressed digital audio on a CD. But yes, had Sony been less protective of the MiniDisc format and just opened it up, it would have had a time where it would have been a convenient format for both music and data in the late 1990s to early 2000s (when memory cards would have taken over anyway) Perhaps if we'd seen albums released as read only, full size SD cards we might still have a currently supported physical format.

I find MDs to be quite attractive objects (I simply find them more satisfying to play than a CD) and a very good mixtape format due to the sound quality and the ability to re-order and edit tracks after you record them. My MD Walkman's headphone out SQ is quite impressive too. But of course I'm a weirdo who finds the obsolete alluring, I watch this show..

Ben, Sony Sonic Stage works perfectly on Windows 10. I've been using it for a year now with zero problems. Give it a try! I also got into mini disc after finding one at a thrift store. It was broken, but not to be defeated, I went on an eBay minidisc spree picking up 3 players, a bunch of new blank discs from Japan, and even spending a couple of hundred bucks to get a copy of Daft Punk's Homework shipped from the Philippines. I was planning on using the format as a field recorder, but then sobered up and realized I could do better on a phone nowadays (not that I would).

I thought you were going to have Musical March in September like a certain Cinema Snob?

I have working SonicStage 4.3.01 on windows 10 machine and MZ-N710 and they works together perfectly, all I have to do was install MD driver in safety mode on computer,

I had a mini disc that came with a Little People toy from McDonalds.

I use to recorded a lot of my gig's on a rack mounted Sony MD player and pre-amp with two pzm's that I either stuck on opposing walls or on the floor. always got great results.

I own a Hi-MD Walkman MZ-NH1. Sounds really nice only issue is the goddamn battery in my unit is dead like they are nearly $90...

It just occured to me that SCMS on Minidisc in particular seems excessive. It is true that since DAT records audio samples as is, it is possible to 'clone' DAT tape bit-by-bit over digital connection, as there's no D->A->D conversion involved; This is what SCMS was designed to thwart. However, at least in theory, it may not be possible to clone a Minidisc - with digital connection, there's still no lossy D->A->D involved, but now there's lossy glorified FFTIFFT conversion happening. Results of [inverse]FFT depend a lot of calculation precision, and the fact that different versions of ATRAC may encode/decode stuff slightly differently is likely not beneficial to the recording quality and will cause generational loss. Therefore it doesn't really differ much from HQ analog copy with added benefit of copying track marks and, perhaps, track titles, automatically. Think "re-encoding MP3 file many times". Only way to make exact copy of a Minidisc would be to exactly copy data from one to another (think "dd"), but I'm not aware of any hardware/software that can do that.

Another random cassette haul ep sometime in the future, if the closeout was anything to go by...? O.o

I preferred your theme best, even in the crappiest mode it's still suitable for the weird stuff that shows in your videos ;-)

Am I the only one wondering why Sweet Lullaby is on that Rolling Stone disk. With all of those rock songs (some of which are complete fire:)), it seems odd that they decided to add a new age song. (It's an awesome song though)

I still use minidisc and its fantastic..

I used mine with a keyboard & no special cable, long time ago now...

10:50 Well the newest Windows machine I have is Vista.(probably time to upgrade)

My older brother used to have one of these back in the day! I remember thinking it was the coolest thing... too bad the technology didn't really get to develop much further than what it did.

I used some kind of Sony software to put music on my N707 Walkman in Windows 10...

There actually is a way to use SonicStage on Windows 10, but in my experience, it's more finicky than on Windows 2000 and Windows XP. I find it easier to just install an older version of Windows in a virtual machine and run SonicStage on that.

SonicStage can be made to work in Windows 7 x64. I have two Hi-MD recorders (MZ-RH1 for use at home and MZ-NH700 for usein car or just as a portable) that I use semi-frequently and I can use SonicStage without a problem on Win7.

soundstage 4.3 works pretty well on windows 10

What is the name of the second test song, the one with the woman singing?

There was a lot of Mini disc in Chinese.

I did buy a minidisc player in 2004 with FM radio "toggle" on the headphone cord and some blank minidiscs...then MP3 players became the standard...yeah I wasted my money. I downloaded music from my laptop

I still have the Sony JA555ES top of the range machine...very large and heavy

I have a Yamaha MD-8. I love mine but 37 min per disc. Is the only reel drawback.

would be nice to see the waveform on an oscilloscope (optical cable vs phono cable)

what is the song used in the "worst" section?

I liked minidisc, after I got a recorder two of my friends did about 15 years ago... then all 4 recorders died, all of them sit in my pile of dead things. Not long after that miniDV bit me more then a few times with three layers of failure. Then I lost all faith in tiny consumer formats. Digital 8 is as small as I will go if there is a choice... and I don't like flash "ram" either for similar reasons. Data errors. Yet I "have to". Maybe I should go back to using 8mm video tape FM HiFi stereo as portable audio as I did in the mid 90's... though if I had more then 4 backup laptops with good recording maybe I'd use raw digital. Maybe I'm crazy but right now I have a thing for betacam sp AFM, 1/4" 2 track RTR @ 15 ips, 12" 45's and of course the D...i... g......t....l computer tower (although the search/seek/"jog" control is absolutely piss poor in general). What happened to new and better anyway?

Old technology is cool, like classic cars. Plus it's what I grew up with.

Sony made the RM-D11P keyboard remote commander to input titles etc onto MD's

I don't think it is fair to say that MiniDisc "failed".. It was relatively successful in some countries and demographics. Perhaps not in the US so much. It was like Zip-drives, not widely popular but still somewhat successful... Speaking of zip-drives, Sony should've definitely made a PC version of MiniDisc -drives available, that would've boosted the success of the format dramatically. Back then the most popular portable mass storage format was 1.44 MB floppy discs. Relatively cheap and readily available MiniDiscs could've easily replaced them (and also CRUSHED Zip-drives!).

tfw you beat techhmoan to it

You forgot Gescom's MiniDisc album. It was the world's first and only MD exclusive album, if memory serves.

rope gang smokke weeeeeeds

SonicStage 4.3 will work with up to Windows 10 but you need the correct drivers which are hard to come by. Use Minidisc.org to help you find information and help.

Anything that can still record analogue should be kept. Not bad but strange.

I never stopped using cassette. It's getting harder now. Down to my last two Walkmen... never liked MD, I didn't like digital downloads... I stream and record to tape...

wait a minute I had a few mini disk but it was from a promotion from Coca Cola and they had some good songs from good bands. but my mini disks never had that outer plastic shell. are they the same? and what about Nintendo game cube. that's a mini disk. right?

well from comparison test for music quality. with your own song there's no real difference. but with the real music the third test was a little bit louder and I am listening to this on a smartphone and a Bluetooth speaker so if this tells you anything.

Ben: the MZ-NF610 itself does not have a tuner, the remote sold with the unit (which is gigantic, BTW, I have one) contains that tuner. Sony logic.

Great series.. Just as good as LGR, UXWBill, and Gaming Historian's history videos!

13:44 why was your minidisc made in Austria?

You should get your own website and upload the files in RAW there..

Techmoan did the exact same topic at exact same time lol

ok ben, i have an idea... have you heard of this program called Virtualbox? you can use it to run every os imaginable in a little window (or fullscreen if you prefer) alongside your main OS. i use it to run windows xp programs in windows 10, so if i can do it, so can you. and if you need any help (which i'm sure you will because i was also a noob with it) lemme know. let me know if you want me to send you my vhd file containing windows XP through email or some other method, because it's already pre-installed and has google chrome on it (in case you can't stand internet ex-glitcher). and since windows XP is no longer supported, it shouldn't be a problem to Microsoft, as with windows 2000.

You need to download the unofficial NetMD x64 driver in order to make it work on modern systems.

Learned Bennie is preferred spelling ❤❤❤

you could load xp on virtual pc on windows 7 then install the software...

Mini disc was quite successful in the UK tbh. See Tech Moan's channel for more information on this

Hey Ben, we should do a video together

Steely Dan!