MD still feels like a format from an alternative future.

I remember back in 2003, heading off to college and wanting a portable music player. I picked the Sony MD over an iPod because of the ability to swap batteries... It was a great sidekick and I still have that little guy to this day.

It may seem strange, but I like the feeling of grabbing the media. Feel like it's something that exists!

I'd LOVE to see Mini-Discs to make a comeback even more than CD.

I love MiniDisc and even loved it in the 90s. Had a car deck too. :) Great buffering, but my favorite feature was the editing of track stops and removal of tracks on the fly. One thing I always used MD for then was for live concerts. You'd edit the start of the track to be at the beginning of the first instrument playing or voice heard... then when you shuffle the songs, it's like a custom concert every time. It was just that seamless when you'd shuffle.

Dcc was reasonably successful in Holland and Germany.And definitely a few people around interested in dcc Philips never seems to get the recognition it deserves for inventing 2 of the most significant Audio formats of the 20th century.

I found my Minidisc player yesterday, I had mine over 22 years ago, it still works perfect and was amazed at how good the Audio was, i remember loving it back then but it had been a while, it sounds so good. Wish they would have keep making them. Sound so much better then what my phone produces.

Mike, don't use SonicStage. It converts sound in LP2 mode (132kbps) even if you set recording to SP. Use Web Minidisc or Platinum MD, both SW made in 2020. They do recording in real SP 292 kbps. Sound quality is then comparable with AAC 320 and much better than youtube's AAC 128 kbps.. Anyway, I like Minidisc decks. True HiFi with very good DAC.

MiniDiscs remind me of a day when I listened to music pretty much CD quality on the go. Now my portable music player (phone) plays music at a much lower standard and my phone listens to me.

Mini Disc is brilliant I have more than 300 recorded MDs starting from 1998 and I just played a anMD recorded in 1999 to test out a midrange Sony MD JB 330 Deck I recently bought on eBay UK for £99 & it played perfectly with a great sound , I also just bought a higher end Sony JBD 930 UK tuned edition & for £279 with the remote instructions fully boxed in mint condition & I played a few MDs & they sound like I just recorded them absolutely brilliant, I love MDs I think the Medea format is brilliant & also for portability cheers and peace ✌️

The magneto-optical drive technology were the precursor of the MiniDisc. It was both a magnetic and optical hybrid medium, a fusion between cassette tapes and compact discs.

Thats me. Still using Mini Discs to this day. You simply can’t beat the sound quality

If it wasn't for vinyl and CDs being the main part of my music collection, I would go for MDs - they're quite expensive, especially a working equipment. Very elegant media.

I still use MD and I still enjoy it!

Used to work summer jobs back in school at a Sony parts distributor in Canada back in the late 90's. Japanese tourists/students would drop by and in broken English ask for parts for their MD players. They would prefer to talk to me because I was their age. They didn't want to give up their MD players. If there is a small part that looks like 5 Cents to make and sells for $25, they'll buy it.

Minidisc was doomed by being too far ahead of its time. Even though ATRAC is a lossy format, it is far superior to MP3 or other lossy codecs, at least in its later versions. The hardware ( most of it, anyway) was a technological marvel, and build quality of most units is something that will never be matched again. I still have 3 portables (2 recorders and a play only), plus two decks - one of them a pro model. I have, and will continue to maintain and service them.

In 2022 in the UK there were 18,000 MDs sold. I imagine in America this was probably 80,000.

The MiniDisc the ancestor of the PSP's UMD i love those physical media

The best retro format of all by far and this is coming from a guy who still uses all (cassettes -vinyl -Cds- md)

Found my old mini disk player, I’m surprised how good the sound quality is still!

Cool history. Always fascinated by MD so I bought a Nakamichi MD player for my 96 Landcruiser. I miss burning music.

Streaming litteraly destroyed music and made it fast-food and it's time for people to rediscover the true value of music. I have been a huge MD-Nerd in the 00s and I always missed the format when my last Player died in like 2004/5. On my forthcoming album I will release a small batch of MD-Versions for sure. That said: I hope Sony will at some point release new MD players or something similar. Or at least free the license so that someone could create a Kickstarter. Knowing Sony though I am not holding my breath :(

The USA which is a big market for tech did not realy glorify this at the time meanwhile asia and europe liked it,i liked it and went back to it in late 2023 till now

I do believe that for many it will make a comeback. When all media is only digital, there are people like myself that will want to have access to physical media. Whether we backup our media or want to have a piece of retro history. Physical media will be a big deal when everything goes 100% digital.

Bought a Sony mini disc player recorder when I was in the navy in 1997 at circuit city I was blown away by it

Still using. Still loving.

I remember seeing a minidisc promotional kiosk in best buy when I was little . And there was one person in my school that had a binder of minidisc

Yeah, I remember going to JR music NYC and spending over 900. On the JA-3 ES ,how primitive it sounded in reproduction, it didn't sound as good compared to my cdp'-87es 5 disc changer. The 20-bit scheme didn't cut, it and the disc would get stuck in the ejection mechanism, which piss me off,so I destroyed the machine and never brought another. I still have about 60 disc leftovers later on. I brought the W 2000es machine, which I still use today.

I still have mine that I bought back in 1999. Still works.

Got the classic MZ-R37, the advanced MZ-G750 with MDLP and AM/FM, the MZ-B100 featuring speakers and mic. One thing superior with the R37 is the dedicated audio output jack. Also have a top of the line SONY deck, and used to have the car head unit.

I love minidisc all different colors

Ich liebe das Format und die Player! 😍👏

I just wish Sony had the foresight to release minidisc as a removable storage media for PC's in the early 90's. 130MB would have been awesome in 1993 and would have easily become a defacto standard. Pity it took almost 10 years for them to figure that out with Hi-MD and by that time flash storage was well on its way.

I lived in Japan 96-99, have over 200 MD's! love them! Used a Kenwood portable CD player with optical out to record on my Pioneer MD player/recorder. The best.

Loved minidisc as I was regularly making compilation tapes and was happy to record in real time. I then found a digital music player and discovered the ability to rip CDs quicker and I ended up giving my MD recorder to my dad so he could record his favourite radio shows.

someone told me that those "minidisc's" could handle more data than a DVD but never came out. What we got was 1GB discs, but it was to late to the party.

I'm listening to MD right now.

at the time it WAS the best way for portable Music, no doubt!!! being someone who used DIGITAL DATA DISC's for a Home Studio this was an Amazing and simple fast way to mix songs and or rough mixes!!! as far as making a great mix ;Tape; this wasthe best for early 2000's for sure... One thing you cannot deny is the fact the you could and can not break this kind of Disc if you tried!!! and mine was top line and only cost about 90 to 100$$$ in around 2000...

Thanks for this video. Have you made the one on the new software that does the transfer to and from computer please share the link at your convenience Thank you

I had multiple minidisc players/recorders as well as a minidisc deck that I hooked into my stereo to create minidiscs from my CD collection.

5:23 I'ma stop you right there. If it were so easy to get music onto one of these things MD may have gained more market share, instead you had to fight the SonicStage troll.

ATRAC was a good format. I honestly couldn't hear a difference and it saved a lot of space.

I *really* miss MiniDisc. I had a Sony recorder player my grandparents bought it for Christmas, and I fell in love with it. I used this walkman so much is ended up falling apart after some 3-4 years of daily abuse. We really need Sony to bite the bullet and make some new MD players :). I had a hifi system that I could record my CD's onto MD with, so cool. MiniDisc aside, I miss dedicated media players full stop. If Apple were to announce a new iPod model or revive the classic style player I'd buy one in a heartbeat. Digital streaming is cool, until you don't have internet access. Sure you can store them on your phone, but I quite like to 'disconnect' and go without my phone and not have that temptation for social media etc.

Coolest format! Thinking the colors, size, disc inside a cartridge. Michael Jackson’s Dangerous art on mini disc just look awesome

I love the idea and I bought 16 portable recorders and two desktop ones in the last couple of months. I have one to our young son, so he could record his own music without using a computer.

Relic of the past. A 200 dollar portable audio recorder can record WAV audio which is far better than the compression MiniDisc uses

Still have my OEM (factory optioned) MD head-unit in my 2003 MX-5, a Sony Recording Deck in my component Hi-Fi system, and my Sony portable NetMD recorder player. (Australia).

I have rediscovered my like new Sharp 721 minidisc player-recorder. I have been listening to recordings I did off of my recording studio demo disks and other fun stuff. I love it and it is really like new including the remote and battery adapter.

On my old-school home theater , I have a Sony minidisc player recorder in place of the dual cassette deck. It's a 1999 model MDS-J510, so it only record's in short play, short play @ 256 bits per second so that's just fine. Anything I need LP2 or LP4 I use my mz-s1 Type R.

I found my fathers Sony Walkman MiniDisc recorder with digital bass, hooked it up to my sound system, and holly shit the quality is just amazing , cumbias all day !!

IF anyone on here has ever heard of the HRCD-(High Resolution Compact Disc), I am the man who invented it. I was led to the higher resolution processing for CDs THROUGH my Engineering research into minidisc Tech. I found a way to Manipulate SONY'S ATRAC coding. When I met the US Rep for Sony at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show, the ONLY words he said to me were these: The Company is aware of you and they don't like you". I took that as a compliment! I tell people I can produce a Minidisc that its audio will outperform DVD Audio, and I CAN DELIVER!

A cd you cant scratch, im all for it :)

I had MD when it was launched, loved it straight away and was sad that it failed.

I love MD. I got one in 2002, I think. I could go running with it, I think that was one of the main reasons. I also recorded live DJ sessions on the radio. There was one DJ that would play remixes that were really hard to get, back then. I think I still have MDs with some remixes of songs that I might be the only person still having a record of.

I have heaps on Minidisc players, it's seems futuristic but retro at the same time

I love Minidisc format. I have a minidisc deck an a portable unit.

I bought one & used it a lot and recorded lots of music. I still have the discs but my player broke. I did like it.

MDs are still so futuristic. Looking at stuff like cyberpunk media, MDs still fit and its awesome

The MD players made such a hit with the fact of the players being the audio recorders & were portable. So, a simple input/output connection was/is required. No computer needed & when finished recording, the music/audio was ready to play!

Great video and a good introduction to the joys of MD..... I have a portable player/recorder and use it to make a copy of all new vinyl I buy, at the same time I copy the vinyl to cassette and reel to reel (sad I know) The size of the MD is greta for travelling and I can have a collection of various bands or a disc of just one band in a good quality.... Although my goto is still a walkman from 2002...

I still got and used them. HiFi sound quality in atrac 3. Toslink optical communication since the early 90's

I was the only one in my school and later in university who had an MD player back in 2000-2003, I absolutely loved the thing. And as a student I worked in record store, and had access to copy whatever music I wanted. Now it is about collecting pre-recorded discs, I have a collection of about 100 pre-recorded MD's (rock, alternative rock, music i like) but I am not interested in likes of Madona, Sade, Britney Spears and other pop/adult pop discs. In past 5 years I had pretty much every Sony portable MD player (now I have about 15 left) and i still have my very first one MZ-R37 that i bought in 2000 (heavily and proudly worn - squeezed out every last bit of it). MD to me is me being 17-20 years old, to me it is more than just an old tech....also the memories MD brings to me.

The vinyls are here! The cassette tapes are coming back, some artists are releasing new albums in cassette tapes.

we use to use minidiscs for shows at the station i work at. we moved on but now i got a huge md deck and BOXES of discs lol 🤷🏽‍♂️

I'm a dj who wanna record my mixes, but the dj software won't let you record the mixes when using music from a streaming service (copyright). MD´s let me record in realtime with (almost) cd quality.

I'm one of those people who still use and love the MiniDisc format. Very convenient, especially for recording of radio (yes, that still exists) or internetstreams. I like to record livesets with it. And it's magical edit functions make it a breeze to cut out commercials or DJ quack. The deleted stuff then can be used to record again seamlessly as it if were at the end of the disc. Philips made one of it's biggest blunders ever by holding on to the then 30-year-old cassette format for the DCC. Don't get me wrong, I love cassettes as much as MiniDisc, but by the early nineties even a child could understand the magneto-optical disc like the CD with it's instant track playing was the way to go - not the slow and sluggish cassette. Apparently only the boffins and leadership at Philips could not understand that. What they did get right though was the sound quality: the first generation of DCC sounded better than the first generation of MD. Imagine if Sony and Philips had continued to team up like they did for CD and had created a combined MD format with the specs and technology as Sony saw fit, but with the superior PASC audio compression of DCC and Philips. That would have immediately become a worldwide standard and would eventually completely have replaced cassettes. It would over time have improved further with higher capacity disks, better audio compression (PASC 2.0 etc) and made it's way into the world of PC's too. It would still be a much used audio standard today used for internetstreaming and digital broadcast as well. But alas, that was never to be.

I started buying MiniDiscs about 4 years ago and have accumulated about 40 from the very first MZ-1 to my HiMD MZ-RH910. A lot of my machines are even still with the original packaging and accessories but, I have noticed that, the prices started to shoot up about a year ago. I paid, on average, £50 a machine although the HiMD models pushed that average up. I suppose now is the time to start selling a few, but I do like them and go through phases of using different ones. I know it's not the most advanced or the smallest machine that I own but, I keep returning to the MZ-R35 as it has the best sound, the best amplification, has a full metal body and the battery life is more than 12 hours.

I listened to a high quality recording (Spotify through a DAC onto an Onkyo Hi-MD deck at 256 KBPS) on my Hi-MD Walkman, the MZ-NH1, and onto reference headphones. The sound quality was astounding, revealed much, and was much easier on the ear than listening from my Xperia phone through Sony WF1000XM4. In terms of portable sound, I have not yet found anything close to the quality that my 25 year old minidisc player / recorder produces. Yeah, it's not audiophile, but it is good. If you want "music on the go" quality that nevertheless presents a good sound stage and separation, 64kbps on ATRAC 3+ on a 1GB disc is acceptable, and gives you about 30-40 albums per disc, or, say, 50-60 symphonies or concertos if that is your bag. This means that with 40 1GB discs (as I have) you can easily have everything you might possibly want of your music collection available to you at this resolution, with a few special albums saved for close listening at a higher resolution of sound. ATRAC 64kbps was said to be equivalent to MP3 at 128 kbps, and before you are physically sick with the thought of listening at that quality, the amp in the device and the dac were of very high quality (at least on the flagship models), really compensating a lot.

like! )) I have in my collection two mini disc decks and three players. And also - pieces of 200 mini discs with records

👍🏻😎 I still have and use my Sony MD-R37 recorder/player.

hi you are very right about the decks i am a tec i am finding there's alot of sold as parts and some of my old MD units ate not working never bin them as long as the drive is ok keep it as spare parts i had a MD when they came out £7 for a disc only the big music shops were selling them je501 edit buttons under a panel right pain i know it was coming of all the time like the sony c9 betamax

Does anyone know of quick way to get media off your minidiscs onto a hard drive? I have dozens of blank discs that I recorded my original music onto back in the aughts. I still have a working player but I know how to get music off there by using analog means.

I love my MD player/recorder.

I got the Sony MZ-R55 portable recorder. And still working. :)

minidisc is more live than ever

I still use mini disk these days and DVDs as well

Minidisc forever!

SONY MDZ S1. Minidisc is the perfect recording format, even in type R LP2 recording, which allows you to put 160 minutes on one disc, it sounds as good CD, you just have to record in analog. Digital mp3... not so much. I use a Aiwa xrs 3 stereo, running auxiliary through that and the Q chip the xrs 3 is equipped with in to my Sony Type R MZ-S1. This enhances the sound for recording. Ive even recorded type R LP4 and it sounds good. It's the perfect format, you can get a high MD which allows you to put 1000 songs on one disc in high-quality sound. Even uncompressed you can fit over 10 hours worth of music. What happened was all the licensing for music industry screwed it up for Hi-fi recording at home.

I have a handful of MDs that I need a good deck for. Need to get one imported probably.

MD with the best microphone you can afford provided unreal quality portable recording.

I got the MZ-1 almost the month it came out in the US. I regret selling all my MD stuff...

- "Trust your ears"... I have several audiophile friends that had to admit they can't tell the MD from CD after blind test. So good is the MD format. And the format is briliant to copy LPs to. You can play and copy your collecteable LPs. And you can still listen to them, and yes they sounds like LPS even after copyed to MD. This is maybe why collecters of LPs will embrase the format. They just needs someone to introduce it for them. hint hint

Why does no one think of DAT when looking at DCC vs MD. When you think about that you remember that sony basically already made DCC but better in 1987, it was smaller, seeked faster, and was already in the market. Can say MD is still alive, mainly because you can't buy a new laser or new md deck anymore. This still upsets me as there are plenty of players that work fine but the lasers are dead.

The best format MiniDisc

this sonicstage 4.3, need any drivers? same time as webmd to burn a disc?

I got a perfect mdlp player for 40euros and 19 recordable minidisc for 20 euro :) i’m so happy . It’s like a cyberpunk technology .

If think the goal for the music lovers and future of formats will be to paid direct to musicians. Record labels and streaming services will die, soon we will be able to build our own ethical system.

Had a couple of those players, the Sony low end ones and it was great for copying from my computer, but the software was glitchy.

It is difficult to say. It is believed the being is very likely relic more than others as some key softwares such as ATRAC SP experimental encode is already made by society based on published papers.

I've been wanting to get into MiniDisc for a year now .... but I am stuck on which player to get .... I really want a Hi MD model, but I know most of them use an OLED display which is known to go bust eventually. So in your opinion, what's the most reliable Hi MD player out there? I don't really care much about the cost as much as I care about it lasting a long time. It would suck to buy a model with an OLED display and then it just dies and I have no recourse / replacement parts for it.

I always liked the media MD there are so much possibilities it's almost to much to mention

Today we use web minidisc and platinum MD !

Im in several of those same groups, and still rocking an MD player for specific requirements. I was never a huge fan of cds.

Always felt like the UMD used by the PSP was based off the Mini-Disc.

Portable MD machines tend to sound better than portable CD players during the time of the late 90s and in the early 2000s. PCDPs were highly inconsistent in sound output regardless of brand.

Have you tried the Web MiniDisc? I can't post a link, YT keeps deleting my comments.

I had mini disc for a while

I want a minidisc drive to put in to iTunes

I love my mini disk players I have a Sony home player that llp and is compatible with my two portable mini disk players and I also have a car mini disk player that’s never been out of its box as the modern car has caused issues with user being able to fit there own stereo systems as there pre fitted now and this sucks badly so I have to use my portable mini disc player plugged in through the jack port in the car or via a Bluetooth adapter for my citreon

is like a cyberpunk relic