Dumping MiniDisc Media | Hacker News Reader

Dumping MiniDisc Media

pagetable.com

134 pointsingve60 comments

Edit: I have finally created a separate organization for the project now: https://github.com/linux-minidisc/linux-minidisc

Original project creator and co-author of the linux-minidisc project here.

Awesome to see my project on the frontpage of HN, maybe I can use this opportunity to find new contributors to move the project forward as it has been a little dormant due to lack of time.

The upstream repository is currently located on my Github page [1], but I would like to create a separate Github project so that others can easily become maintainers and help review PRs and so on. There are a couple of patches in forked projects which improve the NetMD functionality of "libnetmd" in many ways. However, I would like to create a separate project first before I want to merge any new patches.

For creating a new project, I was thinking for changing the name as the original name "linux-minidisc" is rather misleading as the software isn't Linux-only. It works on any operating system with libusb support and is known to work on Windows and macOS.

Furthermore, I think the GUI transfer application - QHiMDTransfer - needs an overhaul. Luckily, the NetMD and HiMD functionality are in separate libraries, libnetmd and libhimd, so it should even be possible to create a new, more professional GUI application or even write plugins to existing music players like Amarok.

The Python code mentioned in this article are actually no longer in development as it was supposed to be a proof-of-concept only. We used a Google Summer of Projects slot from the VideoLAN project to have a student work on implemeting the full NetMD functionality in the libnetmd which was forked from the original libnetmd.

If anyone is interested in helping project wit the aforementioned tasks and/or joining us, please let me know. This project is the only known software which is actually able to decrypt most of the tracks on NetMD and HiMD (not all though [2]).

> [1] https://github.com/glaubitz/linux-minidisc

> [2] https://wiki.physik.fu-berlin.de/linux-minidisc/doku.php#sta...

Looks like a cool project! I have a box of old mini discs (and a Sony player) in the basement that I've been wondering what to do with. I would love to give the project a try and get them converted for digital archival.

Great. Looking forward for new members.

The project mailing list can be found here:

> https://lists.fu-berlin.de/listinfo/linux-minidisc

For archiving purposes, I recommend getting a Sony MZ-RH1 (and the MZ-RH200 IIRC) as its the only device that can upload regular MD tracks using NetMD over USB. All the other devices can only playback over SPDIF.

FWIW, VLC also contains a universal decryptor written by us for any OpenMG media files saved by SonicStage. So if you have recordings on your hard disk which cannot be decrypted with SonicStage anymore because you forgot to backup the decryption keys, VLC should just work.

I archived all my Minidiscs a few years back using SonicStage. My Minidisc was my field recorder. Archiving was a very emotional experience- both hearing the voices of dead friends, and prying my own history from a futuristic and beautiful but frustrating and pointlessly locked down machine.

Wish I had linux-minidisc then. I wrote about the experience here http://www.danreetz.com/blog/2013/07/26/finishing-minidisc/

For what it’s worth you can just rename the github repo into another project and it will setup a redirect.

You can also add maintainers while it’s inside your namespace.

I created a new organization, transferred the repository now and invited members. Worked like a charm.

Not sure how much the projects diverged, but I forked a fork of a fork, about 60 commits apart it seems. In any case, this fork worked for me, not your original one. I since sold the MD hardware, but in case you have some time, you could perhaps pull some stuff back in from [1] or any fork closer to you. I remember speaking at least to one of the other forkers saying upstream was unresponsive at the time (I guess that may have been you ;)). IIRC, this all branches out before the Python stuff was added. I used cmdline only, but with great pleasure.

[1] https://github.com/brenthuisman/linux-minidisc

Thanks. I'm already in contact with the owner of the fork with most of the fixes to figure out how we can merge all these changes into the upstream project. He has promised me to open PRs to get the changes merged upstream.

I'm happy to add new members to the Github organization.

I’ve spent some time with the code in the past few years (glad it exists for my recent interest in MD!). I’ll look through the (minor) changes I have and see if there is anything worth pushing back (I seem to recall something about time outs on macOS during download).

I have both Net and Hi players and a collection of older ATRAC3. If there is anything I can put any of these resources toward (running tests, etc.), I’ll see what I can do.

Thank you for a great project that allowed me to finally (25 years later) pursue my interest in MD.

This brings back some great memories from 2002. My daughter had just been born and when I was up doing the night feeds I used my PlayStation 2 with its optical out to transfer my CDs onto my MiniDisc player. It was a slow process (real time) but it was so great to have all the track details automatically included rather than having to manually name the tracks on the player.

This was before Sony's NetMD software and I couldn't afford a HiFi MiniDisc unit at the time which would have made life simpler. Also many, many hours playing Final Fantasy X on the same PS2. Great times!

I soon moved onto an iRiver CD-MP3 player which was much easier to work with thanks to being able to burn my own CDs. Audio quality wasn't as good as the MiniDisc but considering I was listening to it in an office with ear buds that wasn't a big deal. Then onto an iRiver HDD based MP3 player and finally I got an iPod.

There is still something so cool about MiniDisc though. Feels so CyberPunk, even today it is like living in the near future when you hold one in your hands.

> There is still something so cool about MiniDisc though

Agree. I really wanted one for years, I even had some blank discs to fidget with, but when I could finally afford one the iPod had come out and I bought that instead. Part of me still wants to buy a MiniDisc player and some discs, but I try to keep the amount of stuff I own down to the essentials, and vintage electronic doesn't really make the cut.

TechMoan on Youtube have a few videos about the MiniDisc format for anyone interested.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU3BceoMuaA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sabtaoTCSKQ

IIRC MiniDisc was big in Japan when it came out, and a lot of artists draw on that 90s-era Japanese aesthetic projected into the future. A lot of cyberpunk art features devices that look and function like MiniDisc devices + discs.

A lot of vaporwave/synthwave and adjacent artists do limited minidisc releases for the aesthetic, too. Nobody's pressing them any more, but there's a UK company whose name I forget that does mass copying and UV label printing on rewritable blanks.

I had a few mini-disc players in the late 90s. I had about an hour commute in to work in those days and it was awesome not to lug around tapes or the shock sensitive, constantly skipping, CD Walkman.

I managed to find a fairly cheap "all-in-one" hifi that had a minidisc drive in it too, so transferring was easy, but lacked the track naming, and it would only transfer at 1.5x speed.

Those minidisc players took a bit of a beating. In the end I replaced it with a Creative Nomad Jukebox (http://www.iretron.com/blog/posts/technology-flashback-creat...). That was a revelation. 6GB of MP3 storage meant I could rip all of my CDs and take them with me.

Sony seems to have a habit of producing some really great technology and then woefully mismanaging it by having short term thinking and failing to learn from rivals.

It had so many advantages at the time, but the equipment involved in recording to it was so expensive it was hard to get the labels on-board. If Sony had been willing to drastically subsidise the recording equipment and got the labels on board they'd have had so much more chance to make it in the market. When you're leaving it for your target consumer to wrestle with "How do I get my music on to it", and requiring specialty hardware purchase or complicated hacks, you've sort of lost the market already.

> the equipment involved in recording to it was so expensive it was hard to get the labels on-board.

Source or speculation?

If b, then, to add:

I don't think for a major (or even medium/minor) label this was the issue - at the time the labels had a real concern about mass high quality digital copying by consumers destroying their business

I was a young guy getting started in the music industry around this time... At the first studio I worked at, we used MiniDiscs all the time to do professional audio work. It was often the way we stored productions and the way we distributed them to other partners.

That said, any sort of mass production of MiniDiscs for the consumer would have been laughed away due to the costs.

> mass high quality digital copying by consumers

This has likely been a facet of the music industry's concerns ever since the cassette tape[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio#Dat...

this is specifically the reason minidisc is built around a lossy compression codec so there would be at least some generational loss from copying.

Sony themselves were/are a label and this led to deliberate worsening of their electronics at times.

Were disc->disc transfers not digital? I would expect to not have to decode/encode (and thus suffer loss, if the encoder weren't deterministic) if you're transferring disc to disc.

There were workarounds like TOC cloning to keep the transfers digital (by making the device think it was playing something from an analog source, not a digital one, so it would allow a digital copy over SCMS), but those were not possible on all devices. And even the digital transfers were over SPDIF, not direct data transfer (so it depended on the quality of your encoder chip).

There was one way around this: the MDS-W1 (http://minidisc.org/part_Sony_MDS-W1.html) could move tracks in raw data format between discs. Of course, it erased the source track, but if you did this twice (it defragmented as it went) and then TOC-cloned, you could have two identical MD's. They're available on eBay, but they're $400-500 and ship from Japan, so good luck powering one if you're in Europe.

It really was a lovely format that was crippled by the music side of the company. 170 MB on a rugged, infinitely-rewritable, non-accidentally-erasable format that was smaller than a 3.5" floppy?

If you had MiniDiscs spread all over your desk you had to be some cool hacker.

Around a similar time I bought my first MP3 player with a 16MB sd card. I think I could fit 3.5 MP3 songs on there and I had to figure out a way to edit one song so they could fit.

Are you saying that the PS2 actually sends the track names over the optical cable? I remember always having to painfully enter these via the player buttons later on.

Not always. Shockingly (or I guess not shockingly by todays standards) some MiniDiscs have copy protection on the track listing! However a majority of CDs I owned with CD-TEXT would happily label everything correctly. This was the reason I used my PS2 rather than my regular CD player which also had optical out but did not do the CD-TEXT.

I have read that CD-TEXT data is not transferred over optical however it most certainly worked for me. I made at least 100 MiniDiscs this way. Perhaps it was something special with how the PS2 did things that was not to the standard? Who knows. I have searched for information but never found anything concrete except for a few others who agreed with me that it did work as they used to do it the same way. Nothing official sadly.

Amazing bit of information, thanks! This would have saved 12 year old me quite some time. I think I never owned a CD that had CD-TEXT on it, or if I did, I had already given up on doing real-time transfers via my PS2 at the time.

A Sony-proprietary extension sounds plausible, given their track record of developing pleasant niche features like this, especially between devices in their ecosystem.

(Sonic Stage and Real Player were both horrible, but could transfer a full album in a few minutes over USB.)

MiniDisc lover here. Great tutorial!

For those of you who're still using MiniDiscs daily, I've just released a SonicStage replacement app that works in the browser thanks to WebUSB and WASM.

Here's the link to the project: https://github.com/cybercase/webminidisc

and here's a short demo of how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Frs8qhw0g9Y

Hope you like it!

LOVE IT! Thanks a bunch mate. Works like a charm. Used: https://stefano.brilli.me/webminidisc/ Cannot compile it, cause npm is fucked and and my nodejs fu is meh....

I just downloaded a whole album, 1h:09m long via Youtube-Notube->m4a. Uploaded the m4a via https://stefano.brilli.me/webminidisc/. Works perfectly... Thanks again

Happy everything worked well for you.

Actually, building this app was a lot of fun :)

Out of curiosity. Did you use code from the linux-minidisc project? Would be great to see if our code was used in such innovative ways.

Of course I've used it!

And I've created a small npm package that contains all the code that I've ported from the linux-minidisc project to JS.

https://github.com/cybercase/netmd-js

Actually, not sure if you're the right person to ask, but how did you manage to reverse engineer the "uploading" part of the protocol?

I mean... I'm not new to reverse engineering of communication protocols. I've done that in the past, and I've always relied on some "trick", like disassembling binaries, flip a debug flag, and assemble them back into a new binary that printed logs that the original dev left there.

Did you use something similar? Of did you manage to put your hands on some part of the source code of Simple Burner/Sonic Stage?

by the way. I wouldn't be able to write my app without your hard work. so thanks!

I'm so excited to try this out, thank you so much for building it!

Halfway through the video, we were just about done and then you did it on a phone! Great work and great demo!

Thanks! Happy you enjoyed the demo :)

WHAT!?

Never, ever would I have thought I'd see the day that I can stop maintaining that old Windows laptop which is the only device (I did try VMs) capable of still running Sonic Stage.

And all in the browser! This is fascinating! Thank you!

Nice tutorial. I loved MiniDiscs back in the day, they were so futuristic. I had a portable Aiwa MiniDisc recorder long before I could burn CDs. I used it for everything - copying CDs, recording live music, field recordings. Some day, I'll have to rescue all that old stuff, so this tutorial is greatly appreciated.

I remember using them over CDs purely because they had that ghost-in-the-shell anime-scifi feel, although burning a CD was much less pain than converting & writing to my Sony MD player

SAME!

Added bonus that it's what Neo uses in the first matrix movie to give some software to the guy who knocks his door in the opening scene.

I always wanted to use minidisks as a data medium, but it seems like it was never really possible.

For the sake of suspending disbelief at the film I like to imagine that Neo encoded the data into the audio channels, but that would be super slow to load.

There was MD-Data. 128 MB per disk IIRC.

Seems like you're right but I never-ever saw this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzwtCBj5jEs

Although it seems like it's not really minidisks.

Yep - this was a somewhat common format for pro-audio hardware in the early 2000s.

I think there were even 4- and 8-track MD recorders IIRC.

At least some Hi-MD (and I think Net-MD) decks can format and use regular MD media in data mode, behaving as a removable drive and storing about 300MB (by modern standards, very slowly) on a 74-minute disc.

That capability postdates The Matrix, so I've been assuming small files and some sort of deniable, purely acoustic steganography that's resilient to ATRAC compression.

I had one as well and it was very cool... but could never use it regularly over my Discman simply because ATRAC sounded so horrible! MP3 was the first audio compression which was even remotely acceptable. Still, it was very futuristic and I loved it for what it was. Now DAT on the other hand.. that was the bomb.

The original Sony minidisc separate had unprotected spdif out which might be an alternative for some, I also looked at getting a minidisc data drive but they are hard to find.

I myself used this [1] project with a NetMD recorder to move music on or off a disc.

[1] https://github.com/brenthuisman/linux-minidisc

God, the minidisc players were such beautiful devices. Way ahead of their time. It's too bad Sony didn't bring them to the US market in full force. I remember buying one online in Yen and having it shipped from Japan. It was my first international transaction as a kid.

It feels like the project uses "download" and "upload" the wrong way.

Surely transferring files from the disc drive to the pc using a piece of software on the pc should be considered "downloading"?

Depends on your frame of reference. Industrial programmable logic controller (PLC) programming environments I've worked with also use "upload" for uploading program from PLC to PC and "download" from PC to PLC.

Might be related to the fact that PC is usually placed on top of wiring cabinet, so PC is located upwards from PLC :)

So.. in this way:

The Minidisc Player is the world. As such you download content or data from the real world down to it, and you upload data up to the real world from it.

But, the software that performs the transfer runs on the PC, and it is the one receiving data. Even Wikipedia defines "downloading" as "receiving data"...

They are commands sent to the MD to perform. Imagine the NetMD protocol was something like SSH with `[command]` specified.

Agreed, "download", to me, means that the computer on which I'm initiating the action will receive the data. If I'm clicking a "download" button on the PC, I expect the PC to receive data.

Minidisc hardware was great. I bought a Hi-MD recorder when they were introduced to record some interviews and was really impressed by the hardware.

The software was terrible as were the restrictions placed on it. All the copy restrictions and forcing ATRAC on people long after it was clear that MP3 was superior really killed the format.

Oh wow, i am suddenly struck by horrible flashbacks of the hours spent transfering files with Sonic Stage in my teens, and how it would bring my old pc to it's knees purely by running idle :D

Thanks for that little nostalgia trip, i think i need to go dig out my md player now.

simply seeing the program icon gave me that same flashback. i remember saving up for a minidisc player too at my first job making minimum wage and finally getting it, my first big purchase as a teen

Still use my Minidisc almost daily. I prefer older equipment, but boy they're both getting expensive to get discs and tapes. Check out platinum md for a sonicstage replacement

I recently transferred my collection of MD recordings, but not using NetMD, getting a MD Deck with SPIDF output off ebay for cheap, and feeding the digital signal to a Focusrite Scarlett audio interface. This seems to ignore any copy protection bits. Resold deck for same price afterwards.

I still have a bunch of MiniDiscs but my player stopped working. Can anybody recommend a place to buy a new one ? I've looked at some of the usual places but haven't found any.

I had a very nice minidisc player / recorder I imported from japan around 2001. It cost a fortune. I think I still have it and the minidiscs somewhere but not a clue where.

Nice. I love Mini Discs, and especially Mini DVDs. They're great for archival storage. I would just keep them, not migrate to something else.

Stability of the physical media aside, keeping anything you intend to ever read again on an obsolete storage format makes no sense when you consider that the number of working readers/players in the world decreases with time. The only reason I have my Apple II-era data is because I keep kicking it onto newer storage formats.

WOW. This is sweet. I have an RH1, and a ton of Discs. Off I go!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com