Hacker News Reader

Comment by sizzle | Hacker News Reader

I remember feeling like I was living in the future every time I listed to music on my Sony MiniDisc player while friends where still using their portable CD players with easily scratched disks before mp3 players became affordable and ubiquitous in high school.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc

View on HN

Not so lucky here. hated minidiscs from the moment I bought a recorder. I got an imported MZ-R90, fairly late into the cycle expecting maturity, which would persistently overheat when recording for some reason. Playback was reliable however but the limited ability to record meant that I only listened to about 5 discs worth of music for about 5-6 years. Prerecorded minidiscs were prohibitively expensive and very limited in availability in the UK as well.

Eventually, as I was stubborn as hell, it got replaced by an iPod shuffle when they first came out. Bar a stupid couple of weeks with an awful Sony Ericsson phone it’s been Apple all the way since.

Freedom from having to maintain and record media is the biggest win though over time, not the hardware. Apple Music saves me hours a week managing music for 5 people in my family.

That was an "ignorance is bliss" time, when everyone was enchanted by the sleek design of the MiniDisc and its players. But once MP3 took off, everyone started talking about lossy compression, and people suddenly realized that the ATRAC codec used in the 1990s MiniDisc players was flawed, and often said to be comparatively poor.

I remember when we were all rocking walkmans/aiwas and just accepted the mediocre sound quality of our mix tapes. CDs were ubiquitous but most portable players were prone to skipping and there was no economic way to create mix tapes on CDs for us. The day I bought a portable Sharp mindisc recoder and created the my first digital CD to Mindisc mix via an optical connection was eye opening. I cannot overstate what a game changer it was in creating portable CD quality mixes.

Quite ironically, these days you can get audio processing plugins for DAWs (digital audio workstations), which lower the quality of your audio to emulate the lower audio quality of cassette tapes.

I remember the kids who had minidisc players. Usually spoiled cause they were expensive and didn't have much prospect for future use, so it took parents who didn't mind wasting money. And typically used it to feel superior to other kids, cause it was different and apparently didn't skip. (My best friend had one, and he was pretty spoiled - we abused it trying to make it skip - they definitely do skip if you hit them hard enough). But kind of disappointed when it came to actually finding music to listen to. While the MiniDisc might have been superior tech, it doesn't really matter if record companies won't produce media for it. I'd make fun of my friend for having a player that didn't skip but not having any music for it.

If I remember correctly, it wasn't the mp3 player that made the MiniDisc a nonstarter format, it was CD burners that came out a few years before mp3 players that actually did it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com