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MiniDisc: The Best Thing That Never Happened To Your Music
![MrMobile [Michael Fisher]](http://yt3.ggpht.com/Bf8B_79jyHxP6CVnjV5WKws93l9Vxlk0d7aPmcBygTBDKzgsGrpazdJRFUrfg1sUNlo8YX8rji8=s48-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 มี.ค. 2018
- The cruelest truth in technology is that being better doesn’t always mean being the winner. Almost twenty years ago my uncle gave me one of the best pieces of technology I’ve ever owned - a product that still sells for over two hundred dollars on eBay despite the fact that the format it’s built on has been dead for years. Before Spotify, before the iPod, there was the MiniDisc Player - a product ahead of its time. This is the MrMobile Retro Review.
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[ABOUT MRMOBILE'S MINIDISC RETRO REVIEW]
MrMobile's MiniDisc Retro Review was produced following a week with a Sony MZ-R37 MiniDisc Player from 1999. The filming device was purchased from eBay, while the bulk of the MiniDiscs are from MrMobile's teenage collection.
[MUSIC]
“True Persistence” by Cymatix, available at Premium Beat:
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“Live Up” by Cymatix, available at Premium Beat:
www.premiumbea...
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mrmobile.tech
[DISCLOSURE]
This post may contain affiliate links. See Mobile Nations' disclosure policy for more details: www.mobilenatio...
It's almost 2023, I still have them and just bought a bunch of blank discs! Still love them!!
When the mobile tech scrambles for tomorrows news its highly refreshing to steps back relax and cherish the old gold. Thanks mr mobile for a retake.. i lived my childhood for a few mins.
Aahhh Nostalgia Lane. One of my favorite back roads. I too like that Michael takes this route often recalling all that brought us here. Good call man and thank you also Mr. Fisher
“Sony officially disc-continued...”
In Japan the MD is still a big number!
I see the price for MD‘s getting continuously higher on ebay
Booooo
@@domestique3954 true
Lol
They were so perfect!
Digital sound, Scratch proof, No skipping, Recordable (over and over ) and more compact than CD
really nice to see this type of review, not about the hottest and latest that spams my subscription with basically the same content, but how technology and daily life interact with each other, and how some gadgets can have an emotional value despite being "outdated"
Figure8 yeah!!!! 😍😍😍😍😉
you should follow Techmoan. He is entertaining and does this kind of thing full time.
"In the way Napster intended." That right there, made the whole video for me. :D
John Doe: Sony only allowed it's proprietary ATRAC compression on Minidisc. Had Sony supported MP3, the iPod would have never succeeded.
@John Doe MP3s didn't kill Minidisc. At the time Minidisc was a great companion to the MP3. I got my first Minidisc recorder in 1999 and used it to record MP3s.
Keep in mind that at the time MP3 players were garbage (expensive and low capacity) and even if you could afford a CD burner for your computer, most discmen and car decks couldn't play burned discs. They could only play pressed discs from the factory. This made the portable Minidisc recorder a good (though not ideal) physical format for MP3s.
Once cheaper PC compatible iPods and burn playable discmen/car decks started to hit the market, the Minidisc player no longer had any advantages. If anything it was usually disadvantaged because you had to play the song on the computer while recording it to MD. So it took a while to make an MD disc.
I was just going to comment the same thing hahah then i scrolled down a little !
Lars Ulrich wants to know your location
right now we have online Music streaming services like Spotify XD
To me, minidiscs will NEVER die. I still have my minidisc player {Sharp Recordable MD MT821H}. Brilliant piece of kit.
You got me curious, how is this better than an mp3 player using an sd card? In terms of ease of use (excluding apples n itunes), not skipping, storage size, and durability, I'm really happy with them!
@@freshrot420 Well, first, the sound quality is better than mp3 and on par with CD quality. I personally absolutely love the sound after recording some albums off Tidal. And all players have an anti-skip technology that, as he said, basically never ever skips.
@@freshrot420MD isn’t better it was just a product of the time. Cheap sd didn’t exist at the time so discs made sense. What also hurt MD is that the files were compressed similar to mp3 so it wasnt a CD replacement and in a few years time MP3 players held enough data to make MD irrelevant
@@freshrot420 Quality (depending on source medium and recording), MD is on top.
Durability, flash memory won't last forever, MiniDiscs do and the discs are protected against dirt and abuse.
@@njs461 MD SP was better than MP3 of the same time, depending on the source. Of course most people recorded their MP3s from Napster onto MD, so the quality was shit as you compressed a compressed file again.
Hi-MD were on par with CDs, actually. You could copy a CD without losses to MD.
I still listen to mine!!! I loved making playlists curated especially for my friends.
I still have mine too. Still works like a charm after all the years I've had it.
I loved MiniDisc, they were like a view of the cyberpunk future we could have had.
Which in turn reminds me of the movie Strange Days, where they recorded the "drugs" on MiniDisc-like media.
They feature briefly in The Matrix.
There was also a minidisc portable & disc in “Time Cop” (Van Damme’s old cop buddy goes back to Wall Street in the 1920’s and fires up his futuristic music player while he looks at stocks) and there was also a brief shot of an md spinning up in the movie “Behind Enemy Lines” when the F-18 is flying around & taking pix of the Serbs.
OMG!!! I LOVE(ed..) this, and still have one of these in my closet(Sony, of course)....I just can't get rid of it. Plus, I still have hundreds of burned mini disc's....wow, gonna dig it out now :D Thanks, Michael, this one hit the spot on a miserable day, very appreciated!
Michael Livote Enjoy how nostalgic your day is going to be with what you were listening to 10+ years ago.
You know it :-) Still sounds great too ;-)
Even though it wasn't successful during it's time, it was reinvented. I see this now with my Play Station Portable (PSP) game player.
adavid9155 same
Me too, i still have several players, my original sony one plays but no longer records. I continue to collect stuff to this day!, They still sound great!
Minidisc was and is AMAZING. The fidelity of the music is still astounding to this day.
The same tech was incorporated into the PSP. Brought back memories 😢
MiniDisc and UMD are different technologies
Jason Zak true. I wasn’t that clever two years ago
I think it maybe was the GameCube that used minidiscs.
@@user-gk4jp6lt2b No, GameCube used GameCube Game Discs, which were based on MiniDVD.
@@JasonZakrajsek UMD use similar technology but in different capacity and caddy.
Awesome video man. Brought back memories
Thanks my friend!
I remember I had one of those in early 2000's despite living in Egypt and it turned heads when people saw me using it but unfortunately the movable car seat had crashed it
You made me remember these days 😍😍😍
I got my first Discman when I was 8. I loved that thing but it skipped like mad. Never used a Mini Disc player but man, they look awesome.
So weird to think about. I mean I guess it's not that different from VHS vs Beta ... but it's crazy that the sheer added durability/versatility of MiniDisc didn't result in its supplanting the CD entirely.
Morris Laurent yes, my son. Yes you will
I've still got my old minidisc player. Such a shame it never caught on.
I still use my discman
U should get one U won't be sorry ("
I loved my MiniDisc player back in the day. Saved up months for it. Sony was the equivalent of Apple back in the day when it came to build quality and premium feel of devices. This video took me back, thanks!
Mini disc's made you sit down and actually listen to the music that you were acquiring because you had to sit there and manually add in those track marks. That and the fact that you knew space was limited helped to make sure that all of your mixes were all killer and no filler. No time for bullshit songs you really didn't want.
Don't forget adding in all the album & track titles with the remote or a keyboard (which I did so long that I would sometimes get cramps in my hand) Haha.
If you have a 3 second gap between songs (which is normal on cds) the recorder will auto insert a track mark... or at least the sonys would do that.
[glances over at MD tower with Sum-41's "All Killer No Filler" album front and center]
Was that intentional?
Because I hope that was intentional.
I loved my 💽 Minidisc, wished it lasted longer.
Cyh yes that was intentional lol.
Don't forget some of the best parts...
you can edit track starts and ends (and even delete tracks)... you'd record more music and it filled the free space you deleted
If you edit a live album so that the tracks start just as the music starts, you can shuffle the tracks and it sounds like a custom concert every time (true gapless)
But my favorite part was as you said... you can just keep a whole pile of them in your car and not have to have a CD wallet and worry with skipping. It was quite nice in the 90s when I had one too.
I've never once stored my CDs like that.. I've always had CD books. I used to walk around town with a 500 CD book in my backpack and an anti-skip protection CD player 😁😅
while watching the video I was like "NOOOOOOO!!!! DON'T DO THAT TO YOUR CDS!!!!" hahaha. nobody handled cds that way!!!. most people took care of them!!.
Loved my minidisc, and recently got back into them, purely for nostalgia. I have to take issue with them being a failure, though: maybe in north America, but in Europe, and the UK in particular, they were very popular. I got my first recorder in 1999 and only moved on in 2005 when MP3 players came down to sensible prices.
I loved the MD format and used to plug them into the AUX in on my car stereo because they worked more reliably than the CD that car came with. I bought a cheap one on holiday in Florida and loved it so much I stepped up to one that allowed you to sync it with a computer.... like iPod's would eventually. Absolutely fantastic. Miss it now.
I enjoy your smartphone reviews but these retro reviews (or reviews of new spiritual successors like that PDA you reviewed) are even better, back in the days I was a little kid so I have no idea what cool technology was being sold at the time.
heretic124 me too! It helps us leadn about the past! And can bring back memories!!!!! 😍😍😍😍😉
If you are interested of old tech visit Techmoan. 👍
MiniDisc was a brilliant format, and was actually fairly successful outside the US. For me, the best feature was its editability. You could add track title data, move around or delete individual tracks from a compilation, and edit out tenths of seconds (or longer) from tracks without having to re-burn an entire disc. Its functionality was light-years ahead of compact discs. Honestly, if MP3 integration hadn't been so generally clunky, it could have lasted way longer as a format.
Also I had that tiny silver Samsung clamshell phone you used for size comparison. Not my favourite pre-smartphone mobile, but a cool little device. I had this trick where I could spin it out of my hand, the force of the spin would open it, and then I'd catch it the right way round in the same hand. I love the functionality of smartphones we have these days, but kinda miss some of the mechanical elements like that of older phone designs.
Hahahaaaa - dude, I had the same trick (and the same phone: SPH-A500 - my first phone with a color display). Loved doing the spin-toss! Agree with your points on MiniDisc too.
It's best abilities was: nuclear explosion, md keeps playing! Cd's worst abilities: fart, and the disc stopped playing because of the vibration 😂🤣
Absolutely, it is still way ahead of mp3 in terms of editing. I find editing digital files a real chore sometimes, and it cannot be done on most players, unless you use a dedicated app on your phone or pc. We took a step backwards in some respects.
MD integration with a pc was great though, as you could fill an entire disc with tracks stored on your pc in around 5 minutes. And it would carry over all the track names andctrack markers automatically, saving you considerable editing time afterwards.
@@darkdeity2012 Nokia N95 was my all time favourite phone. One of the first smart phones, and way ahead of its time. It had a music player with dedicated keys, landscape orientated vidoe player, platform games capability, like Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario Bros. And it was also compact, due to the 2way slide out keypad, and really tough and robust. Smallish screen at around 2" but so user friendly and practical. Pretty good battery life too.
I eventually replaced it with an N97 mini, with one of the first qwerty slide out keyboards, but I never really liked that phone. I went back to an N95 until I got a Galaxy S3.
I loved minidiscs & players! I still have two, one I bought new on ebay ($60) and another at Goodwill ($5)... the best part was being able to record and re-record! I used mine like I did my portable cassette recorder in the '70's and recorded tunes straight off the radio...
I still own, play and record on one! I just love them!!!!
Good for you Fisher! Ive used my ZUNE HD for about 7 years, and your nostalgia over a "dead" piece of hardware is fully reflected.
I fired mine up a week ago. It took an hour for Me to charge it but It Played!
A trip down the memory lane..thats why i love your reviews
You should do these retro reviews more often
Sony is so often ahead of its time... I always wanted one of those
was. very poor these days
@@hahanah1463 how you mean that? So many innovations and industry Leading product
@@hahanah1463 Along with LG, Sony is a market leader with TV tech, gaming, and mobile communications. The music player industry is a cut throat world, and constantly changing, so Sony made a wise decision to concentrate on its biggest sellers, and consolidate their product range. But they still make supreme quality products.
My sister had a different model of MiniDisc Player and managed to record directly from a portable CD player. The UMD used in the PSP was the successor to the MiniDisc and allowed for games and movies to be stored on them as well.
"The way Napster Intended." I laughed so hard.
Maren Jones 😂😂
That really was funny Maren.
I love these kind if retro reviews. And even more so if its from Mr.Mobile
This was a huge hit in Japan in early 2000. My wife bought me a mini disk player and a mini disk stereo to record all my music. Very convenient and awesome to use in the gym
Great video, as others have said, it takes me back. I can't tell you how many times at school I had to chase an ejected cd down the hall after dropping a discman out of my arms. Once I got the Sony minidisc player I could shuffle around high school with it in my pocket all day and never risk dropping it. I still have my player buried in a box somewhere. It'll be fun to revisit it when I'm 70 and listen to the old Napster tracks you mentioned hahaha.
Baggy pants. And this or the discman goes into the back pocket. Good times. Gooooood times.
JNCO's! I had a pair and absolutely hated them, but it's what the cool kids wore...
Cargo pants, even.
Cargo pants were hip back then. More pockets to put stuff such as MiniDisk player. 😂 Good times indeed.
MrMobile [Michael Fisher] Cargo pants. Loose shirts. Long hair split down the middle. And a choice of Boyband or Eminem in the playlist.😂😂
This is actually so cool. I'm almost 19 and I had no idea this was a thing. I love music, perhaps I will try to find one on eBay. You're not the most well known reviewer but you handle everything professionally and if you have a review on something I like I always watch yours first. Great work!
Adam York he is actually the most well known youtuber in the world... He is counted among the best tech youtubers of world .
He used to work in pocket now where he actually got all his fans .
Adil Husain Yes, I enjoyed his content with Pocketnow, but with this channel he doesn't have many subscribers.
" he is actually the most well known youtuber in the world" ??
Tom tech youtuber
Adam York Dude don't waste your moo-la. Seems like a load of carp. I've never even heard of this mini disc player b4
Thank you Michael for this trip down memory lane! I loved my MD player back in the day. Ur vids are hip, creative, and inspiring to watch. I can't wait for you to be on the tele or big screen. You are so talented, cheers friend!
0:30 that's exactly what I had.
Really miss it. Best portable sound I've ever had
It really really is
This series retro throwback is the kind of review which will help us appreciate today's tech even more so that we take for granted! Thanks MrMobile for this!😊
Minidisc was awesome, but believe it or not but Audio Magazine tested and found that Type IV cassettes offered greater bandwidth. Minidiscs truncated the bass and treble, and with the use of Dolby S, Cassettes could offer better sound quality. That said, Minidisc was pretty dope in its day. It never took of in the states but had decent success in Asia. In the US most retailers were clearing out inventory by 1996, offering free portables with the purchase of a home component unit.
Type IV offers the same bandwidth as cd and minidisc 20-20,000hz but less signal to noise ratio and by the time dolby S came out I was already using cd and minidisc as my primary formats
Thanks a lot for making me remember of that time. I was also a heavy user of minidisc and it was also my uncle that got me the player. Because my father also used them I believe we even got one car stereo with a mini disc player.
Mini disc was great. I had the mz-r700 player. I recorded a lot of my bands music with it. I found it very useful.
I still use my minidisc player. And the home minidisk full home stereo deck that I have.
axllebeer +1
The portables generally measure pretty poor but those home and professional decks are amazing.
I still use mine too even though I also have an iPod. MD's may be outdated & have limited capacity but they are just so much more satisfying to look at, play with & record on.
MiniDisc was our tech of choice in college in the Music Department. For recording lessons and practices this by far had the best quality equalled with compact design. Wish it would have been around longer.
Todd Engle I wished that MiniDisk standard were more open and I wished that it replaced the CDs instead. It's smaller, self-protected and just looks cooler than normal sized disk that we have.
KornKernel I think it was okay, with minidisc hardware from at least 6 main manufacturers. Blank Disc from 3 plants but maybe about 10 companies?
I used to work as an AV Technician for a Production company during the late 90's, early 2k's. The Mini Disk was one of my must trusted tools. Setting up large PA systems for presentation s or concerts, It provided the clear signal I needed for soundcheck and It also provide d me with some unauthorized live performances from some of the greatest artist I had the honor of working with. It sounded so good but eventually had to replace it with an Ipod as I lost it during a concert tear down. Someone must had been very happy that day especially with the live recording from The beach boys play at a Tivoli Company Party.
I own the same MZ-R37 device and I rediscovered it today, which brought me here. Dropped in fresh batteries and voila! I had created some choices mixes from 2000 to 2001 and the music was still there on the half dozen minidiscs waiting for me like old friends. I recall the effort it took to create a bootleg of the audio from U2's Zoo TV: Live from Sydney DVD...so tedious but was worth it because I could take the entire show's music with me wherever I went on those minidiscs. Retro tech is certainly fun and the Sony MiniDisc allowed me to wander nostalgically back in time to some simpler times and awesome tunes.
Nice video, as always. I enjoy the retro reviews especially. I kinda wish CDs and DVDs went the Floppy Disk/Mini Disk route by having a plastic case, as they made it much more resilient to scratches.
Looks like the same technology used in the PSP. Believe they called it UMD instead of mini disc. Makes the same noise when you open the hatch and inside looks the same too
Yea Sony missed a trick there, I wished they had used a minidisc drive in the psp so it's was not only a games machine, video player, mp3 player but also a minidisc player, it came it out in 2004 and minidisc was still alive then, I love the psp but that was my only real gripe with it.
completely different tech. minidiscs are magneto-optical. UMDs are just optical.
@@onometre I'd give it different but not completely different! Disc inside a protective case goes back to floppy technology.
A high density mini CD inside a caddy is what UMD tech is closest to.
I still have my Sony Mini Disc deck and dozens of MDs! I use them for archiving samples and such, mageto-optical, random access, easy to loop beats, I love it!! Speaking of busted up, I have one MD where the cartridge is cracked in the corner, a chunk is missing out of it and the little sliding tin door that protects/covers the spinning MD is GONE and the disc still plays flawlessly!
Fell in love with Minidiscs back in the late 90's, when I was looking to archive my collection of audio cassettes (mixes, albums and so on). Minidiscs are so cool and durable and supposedly can be erased and re-recorded a million times. Some of the Minidiscs I recorded off the aforementioned cassettes go back 20 years and they still sound just as good as if I had recorded them yesterday. I have a few hundred blank Minidiscs just waiting for music to be put on them, plus several recorders and players. That ought to keep me for a while.
Lovely vintage coverage and still relevant. The best thing about these type of gadgets is the way in which you can physically categorise your collection and pop in the one that you want to listen, instead of searching through menu options and trying to battle with creating digital albums on your computer using weird software that never always works as intended on digital hard drives!! Thank you for a great video.
I am still using my MiniDisc Walkman MZ-R700. I got it in 2002 or 2003 I think, upgrading from a previous model. I still use it, basically by building playlists on spotify and recording them on my discs. I usually record in LP2 which gives me about 2h of music which is more than enough for my commutes. The tactical feedback on the controls which allow me to work all of the device without looking at it, the fact that it runs forever on a single AA battery, and the absence of intrusive notifications are all the good reasons I stuck with it. Also, there is a nostalgia in rituals, and using my MiniDiscs set me in a better mood than mobile apps. A photo of my device is at: instagram.com/p/BYqJ-DSD3NR/?taken-by=andregarzia
Andre, I looked at your instagram photo. I had 3 units similar that came out after yours, and with the introduction of the NetMD option which I believe is how you saved to .MP3. Mine were MZ-N707 (which I had 2) and my last one was MZ-N505. The controls on the older models were actually better. After a while my 707's had trouble distinguishing between pause, play and stop because they were all built into one small control, much smaller than previous units. The result was it would lose my place some time. That was the problem with minidisc, if you lost your place during playback you had to start over, especially when the tracks were not marked. Sometimes I would use the track mark option to bookmark where I was at, but he problem was it created a track within a track. On the other hand marking tracks meant that you could erase portions you didn't want to save. That's where my home deck would come in handy because it was more difficult to do on the portable units.
@@FoxRivers778 Ha, I'm giving my daughter my N707 actually. She is very excited as she is into anything music "retro". I suspect Andre actually used optical/line in to record, since he mentions he made playlists from spotify. Even if you cache spotify locally it is encrypted so you could not convert them to a playable format.
The MZ-R37 was the first MD recorder I owned that didn’t die. Loved it. Love it’s looks and controls.
The best music format after vinyl. Love my minidisc player.
I love MiniDisks !!! I still have an impressive collection of MiniDisks at home and a proper Sony Mini Disk player. Love this format and a fact it's recordable, I still use it too 😎👍
I still use mine at least weekly. Have well over 200 discs.
I’m still Using my Sony Net HI MD 1 gig a disk player /recorder .2019 😎🇺🇸👍
SurferJoe71 Me too! I have 2 Sony Hi-MD portables (1 works/1 broken) & a beautiful silver Onkyo Hi-MD deck. Sound great & hold a ton of songs. But I really wish they had released a version for the car as well.
I was really into car audio since early 90’s Sony made a in dash AMFM MD head unit for cars and a MD changer .Eclipse car audio made a had unit and a MD changer for the car .May 2020 😎🇺🇸👍
I also have a Sony Hi-MD portable player, as well as 4 Blue 1GB Hi-MD discs. It had stashed it away for a long time thinking it was no longer working (as one of my Hi-MDs got corrupted, and I had put in what I thought was a new battery, and it didn’t power on, but turned out to be dead because when I found it a week ago and tried a fresh battery in it, it purred to life). Since rediscovering my Hi-MD player, the 4 Hi-MD discs, and the regular MDs (recordables and official releases), I’ve been enjoying the hell out of it! I even started putting more music (and video audio like the full audio of the movies “Back to School” and “Beavis and Butt-Head Do America”) on the blank Hi-MD that I had. As I’m on a Mac, I had to download a copy of Windows XP to use in a VM specifically to manage my minidiscs without issues. The only issue I have is when transferring songs to my Hi-MD, some songs have their names flip flopped with other tracks, so I have to manually rename them once on the disc through Sonicstage. Other than that, WAAAAAY better sound than any iPod!
What a refreshing review Mr mobile when the Mini Disc came out here in the UK I went crazy over the format as I had been reading articles about the new format coming in hi-Fi magazines for a while by then so I bought a Sony Mini Disc player & same as you I recorded loads of CDs into my Mini Disc player. Then a year later I bought a full size Sony MD-950 Hi-Fi Recorder & I used to borrow CDs from the Library & I went to record over 300 CDs onto MDs all with the digital titles of each song as the format feature has. Now in 2018 my Mini Disc collection is over 400MDs & my full size Sony MD machine is still hooked up to my Hi-Fi system & I still listen to my MDs from time to time & my full size Sony MD recorder is over 17 years old and it has never failed me & still sounds great my portable I sold it on eBay over 5 years go on Ebay as I use my smartphone phone for my music anyway brilliant review Mr Mobile cheers and peace.
I had a mini disc player. It was awesome because I could record my cds onto them. My cds would skip on my portable CD player. My mini discs never skipped. The sound quality was great too! I worked at a radio station back then and we would record news reports, remotes and commercials on mini discs. Never had a problem!
New Techmoan video. Nice
Moris Sombre in terms of subject matter perhaps. But not in terms of content, style or oroduction quality. Infact wildly different.
I'd say once TECHMOAN did a video about something it is closed.
I like all type of documentation, I also like this one
Well done!
I bought the last available MD player in 2017 (tascam) for many, many dollars. That will last longer than I will ;-)
All of these amazing retro reviews Mr. Mobile should collab with Techmoan!
LGR is another good collab idea.
Happy Minidisc Day! I still have my Sony MZ S1 I purchased in 2003. Still plays great.
Still have my Sony Net M.D with my college stuff from all those years ago. Great video. Made me feel all nostalgic about the music of my youth.
I still have 2 players, one of which is a Net MD Walkman, and I love them. I love their convenience, their durability, the sound quality, the durability and robustness of the discs themselves, and the recordability. Also, if you have a player with long play, like I do, then you can double the capacity of the disc with no real loss of sound quality, or even quadruple the capacity. Up to 320 minutes on one tiny mini disc (if you use an 80 minute disc) is amazing. Although in extra long play or LP4, you will notice a drop in quality. But that is ok if you're just recording music for on the go I guess. But YOU get to CHOOSE the quality that suits YOUR particular needs, which is one of the reasons why MiniDisc was so great. A great format that still has its uses today.
As far as I know, you can't use an iPod as a quality field recorder. You can use a voice recording app on a phone, but you can't connect quality microphones. You can with a MiniDisc. And with MiniDisc, you can set the recording level, so YOU are in control.
And lets not forget to mention the "HiMD" format, which greatly increased the capacity of MiniDisc, and allowed the discs to be used as a storage media, for photos, videos, or almost anything else, program files etc. Effectively a flash drive on a tiny inexpensive disc.
MiniDisc met a premature end imo. But amongst fans of the format, it lives on. Just wish that Sony had kept SonicStage up to date with a release for Windows 10.
Imagine if a modern himd player was made today with every bit of innovation since the formats inception. CD players and tape players are still being made, let’s get some minidisc players
Update for 2023. I still have both portable players, and both STILL work, perfectly. Around 20 years after I bought them.
One of em is a Sony MZ-N520 Net MD recorder, and the other is made by Sharp, though I cannot remember the model number.
The Sony uses a single AA battery, and a good battery, like a Duracell, will play for around 15-20 hours, which is AMAZING!
The Sharp still uses its original NiMh Gumstick style battery, and is good for around 8-10 hours, which is still great, considering the battery came with the player.
I don't think I will ever get rid of these players, as long as they continue to function, as I still have many discs that I recorded back in the day, which are great when I fancy a trip down memory lane.
I have also got round the issue of ripping tracks from my old discs on to my pc, and converting them to more useable, modern files. So I can now transfer my old discs to my other devices, and play them via bluetooth in my car etc. The process uses two apps, and is a little clunky and convoluted, but it is a solution to my needs. It just lacks any plug and play/copy convemience.
But in closing, I am so pleased that I was an early adopter of Mini Disc, (I had a home hifi player first, from around 1996) as the sound quality never failed to please. The convenience and robustness of the format was also a huge selling point to me, and the longevity of the discs and hardware is testament to a format, which in my opinion, was killed off unnecessarily. Mini Disc still has a cult following, but then so does vinyl, and they resurrected that format. It would be great to be able to buy some new, affordable MD hardware in 2023 and beyond. And slso an updated, user friendly app for pc's, to get the most from the format. It may never happen, but if it does, I will be one of the people that continues to breath life into the Mini Disc phenomenon that was, and still IS, in my eyes.
I started this video ready to disagree with you, but you’ve done this device so much justice I’ve started to miss my old Mini Disc. Nice work Sir.
I was heavily into minidisc back in the late 90's & early 2000's. I've owned 4 different portables & still have an Aiwa boombox md player with a motorized cover, 3 component MD decks (Standard, Lp & Hi-Md) & have about 200 blank & pre-recorded minidiscs. I even bought a beautiful double din Sony car minidisc deck that not only plays md's but cd's as well. Still works too! I also still enjoy using them, to this day, despite their limited capacity.
Anyway, great video & really nice to see so much luv for my beloved minidisc format. In all these yrs, i've never actually met anyone who actually owned one & I sometimes feel like i'm the only guy left in the world who still actually uses one. Haha. Nice to see that isn't the case though.
Loved my MiniDisc player. Recently found the player with my collection from High School and nostalgia kicked in.
I had that same one! I purchased it at Circuit City with money I earned from bagging groceries at age 16. Lol
My god i remember watching pocketnow throwback that you'll going to do mini disc throwback and you said that for another time now you did it...
The Mini disc was what every one needed and wanted...but was never given a chance ...with hindsight it was an interim forrmat....record companies were almost asking you to buy all your CDs again on a smaller MD format...but the internet and the MP3 was out there...I loved mini disc but I am thankful it was a format that was, ultimately, skipped. Loved this video. Brought back a lot of memories. Thank you.!
The cord you were using was not an optical cord :) While there is a 3.5mm to regular optical cord, you can still see that it carries light through. That said, just using a regular 3.5mm analog was probably fine. My daughter is getting mine, and I'm loading up a few discs with 70s and 80s music which is something she really enjoys. Her favorite record of all time is A-HA's Hunting High and Low. Paired with some Koss retro looking on-ears (with orange foam pads of course!) she is a happy camper! PS: I use the mini-usb to fill up the discs using sony software but that is a whole other wormhole of difficulty to get going on a modern computer!!!
Outdated tech you ask ? Rollerball mice (don't know the correct terminology, but you know what I'm talking about) , I remember the days when I used to just sit and roll that ball around...
Like I remember the days when I was scared that my eyesight would be permanently damaged when the school bullies shone the laser mouse into my eyes.
Minidisc is the new collectible, the prices of players and discs are on the rise. Still a great system for archiving your precious vinyl. Much more robust than CD-R, which has a high failure rate as the discs age.
Awesome video man.... Old is Gold
I love watching retro tech videos. Its always enjoyable to look at what used to be and what is still great stuff
I saw this on your instagram. Cool vid!
Nokia 1100 was my first mobile and I am still using it.
I still have that exact one. Fantastic build quality, and it still works perfectly. Recorded loads of mixes off the 1210's and Gemini mixer.
My MiniDisc player got me through the tail end of high school and the beginning of college. I really miss it. So many folks didn't get it but we had a small crew of Sony MiniDisc pals. It was like being in on a secret. Thanks for helping me remember one of my favorite pieces of technology!
Been beaten with the nostalgia stick! I Loved my minidisc player, I wonder what ever happened to it...
"The optical cable" you say and show a analog one😋 I still have my minidisc too somewhere😋
Was going to mention this! The best thing about recording through optical was that the player would automatically mark each track, and many CDs included CD-Text that would also be transferred to prepopulate the tracks with all the right metadata. So cool!
I bought one in like 2004. I loved it! The iPod was huge and I refused to get rid of my MD. The software got better so that the burn was a lot faster. I still miss my MD player
I love the video and appreciate your enthusiasm and please keep making these! That being said I have to say I was less then enthused over my mini disc player. I was 16 and got my first mini disc player as a birthday gift back in 2002 so I was a little late to the game. I remember it wasn't cheap (probably $300) and I remember being frustrated about several issues I had. First off the syncing software that came with it was incredibly slow and I remember some of my cd's had different titles and tracks then what was on the original copy. For example the Korn album "untouchables" had completely unrecognizable title track names that the software changed before loading it on to my player. The mini disc player itself had alot of buttons and although I knew how to use it there was one grinding frustration that got me almost every single time. On the top of the unit there was an option to change the name of the track that if I remember correctly was either the same or very close to the volume control buttons and I hit that thing so many times trying to adjust the volume that I just stopped dealing with it. Lastly I don't remember there being a great advantage in terms of the amount of music you could store on each disc. I didn't have an extensive library but I remember i was able to fit maybe 2 full albums worth of songs on a single mini disc. I tried my best to use it for a solid year on and off but despite it's frustrations I ended up buying a $40 Sony walkman and dealing with it. Given the uprise in mp3 players in the late 90's I'm shocked that Sony actually thought this would take off as a viable replacement and I for one was not disappointed when it went away.
Does the opening mechanism sorta seem like the PSP's? Or the other way around lol
Darin Nguyen since sony produced both I wouldnt be surprised if it was the same mechanism
The mecanism is similar but the discs have different plastic cases and sizes (6 cm for the UMD, 6.4 for the mini disc)
Other way around.
They both worked on the same principle. After all, they were both made by Sony.
if I had a dime for every proprietary Sony thing...
Brandon Miniman this was one of the good ones...
...you could afford to buy a Sony.
It was 1999. Back then, almost everything was proprietary. The first iPod in 2001 only synced with MacOS computers. Nobody had a CD-R drive or a USB memory stick so 100MB Zip drives were a thing as well.
MD was not a proprietary Sony thing, though. Many brands made them. One of my favorite MD decks is a Tascam.
Yeah MD was just as proprietary as VHS or Beta. A lot of cars in Japan were actually available with minidisc players instead of a cassette deck.
I still have my old MiniDisc player in mint condition. Hugely surprised to see I can probably sell it on eBay for more than I paid for it! Not many forms of tech you can say that about these days.
This is a love letter of sorts. I had one myself and took it round the world and back. I ended up giving it to my little brother but somehow it had malfunctioned for him. I'm glad to see yours is still up and running like a champ. And that Palm Pre in the beginning UGH!!! I miss that too!!!
I would love to see a Mr mobile and techmoan collab in a video.
somehow I dont see that happening anytime soon
wclifton968 Well you have to keep your hopes high.
I guess so
It would certainly be a curious mixture, thats for sure
At 3min, were you in Dublin recently?
Craig Turpin noticed that myself, I was thinking claddagh records looked very familiar
Stock footage, I'm afraid! Last time I was in Dublin was 2006.
To truly appreciate the awesomeness of them at the time - you had to have been someone who made a lot of cassette mix tapes. I couldn’t believe that with Minidisc - you could delete tracks, edit tracks, re-arrange the order of tracks, etc. etc. Compared to a cassette, it was magic.
This just made my day!😁 Thank you. I still have mine. It replaced my Sony Walkman at the time and I never had a Discman. I even used it in my car later on connected to my car radio. My collections are memories I'll never want to miss😁
Never even knew that there was such a product from sony. I almost fell in Love seeing it right now!
Hey Michael, what happened to your left index finger?
Cut it on this sharp af piece of tech
MrMobile [Michael Fisher] stay mobile, my friend.
well, very cutting-edge technology this thing was...
LOL Master Yoda! We hear ya.
Still fantastic, just purchased the one in your vid, had it years ago but it broke, so recently purchased it again, fantastic sound.
AWESOME VIDEO MR MOBILE.. OLD IS GOLD MAN
Got my first player in 1993 and still own my MD player, home recorder and tons of blank discs. Love them!
always been a fan of the MiniDisc; still have discs in one of my flight-cases, even new ones in packaging. my only problem is that i don't have a MD-player... 😩
when i started at a smal radio-station in 2003, we used an Denon Broadcast Studio MD-player that was connected to the PC-RadioDJ, for pre-recorded shows.
as i moved to a bigger station in '06; it was no longer with the MiniDisc but with 'Broadcast Remote', going fully digital.
i sometimes look online for an MD-player, but i doe have my price-limmit.
greetz from 🇧🇪
AGREED! I work in the broadcast industry, and the MD was one of the practical tools I ever used. I still have a stack of discs and two portable minidisc recorders. I'll use them until I can't.
Great blast from the past. I loved my Sharp MD, which I used for super-clear recordings of band rehearsals. I got a pair of binaural mics, which we taped to a foam head we had around the rehearsal room. Unfortunately consumer units had no digital output (to prevent piracy) so I had to transfer the audio to my PC with an analog cable, in real time, trying not to clip the signal... but I could then burn CDs and distribute them to the band members at next rehearsal. I loved being able to carry my recording rig in a pocket camera case. I don't have the MD anymore, but I still have some of the recordings I made with it and they still sound great. (I also thought it was neat that Sony's acronym for the compression algorithm was my name spelled backward.)
I have a few consumer MD decks with toslink optical digital outputs.
Just subbed. You hit the sweet spot. Minidisc is something I enjoy but I find it hard to make it relevant today. You just did that for me. Lesson learned: if you enjoy something (in this case the format because of the hardware that supports it), just ignore the evolution of the tech. Just use the damn thing, because it makes you feel good. Not to mention the nostalgia...
Mr. Mobile's reviews are great! He has the perfect voice... pace and pitch are great! The hair goes well with the facial expressions and he is pretty fashionable too. He has a great sense of humor and you are still learning all at the same time... not just fluff for a cheap laugh. I love the obsession with Star Trek and you can see the care he puts into making his videos and they are a pleasure to watch. I think he has one of the best openings (love the drawings and colors). I turn off the lights just to get the full effect and turn up the volume with the highest resolution my device can stand before stuttering. The opening reminds me of the old chalk boards back in school... yeah, I know I'm an old goat. Saw a recent video and didn't miss the fact that it looks like he is alumnus of ODU. I went to NSU and had friends there... those were the days. Stay mobile, my friends. Never left a comment but just wanted to show my appreciation after being a long-time subscriber.
This flashback brought a smile to my face. I had the Sony MZ N1 minidisc, a wonderful piece of kit for the time. So flexible and versatile, I recall being able to perform a given function by a variety of means and being able to hold large amounts of music (if you used lower quality recording bit rate). I was so impressed I wrote a rear review on Amazon.
Memories, memories....
I still love minidisc. I record on them, still. Back then, I knew that this was going be big! Even the movie strange days starring Angela Bassett used minidiscs in those scences. Turns out they abandoned it in2013.