Funny how this format keeps coming back into some sort of limelight every so often ...
Flash drives and portable NVME SSDs are awesome but they just look boring.
The Zip Drive also never looked as cool both the drives and the disks looked rather boring compared to the minidisc.
Having a self contained case, and a pretty small size that can easily fit in your palm was pretty practical. We’d go on road trips and it was nice to be able to eject a cartridge and just put it on the dash or whatever.
Same as with a tape, making a recording was sort of time consuming because you couldn’t just drop files and burn to disk). Unlike a playlist that has infinite capacity, when recording to disk you had limited capacity so needed to make more careful editorial choices in your mix.
It was really nice giving or receiving a mix that a friend had taken the time to make :)
It's probably thanks to the matrix and the format being out of my reach as a teenager but oh so cool
... you are on to something here.
(I mean, look at how many movies it shows up in :)
I am convinced, if one looks hard enough a MiniDisc -has- to be found in some TNG episode :)
Sony’s memorystick flash storage did kinda look like the isolinear chips from TNG tho, back in the days where it was Sony or compact Flash/SmartMedia, the memorysticks also won on looks I swear I think that Sony was the only company that actually cared about how things looked in the 90’s and early 2000’s until Apple under Steve Jobs went through the whole look and feel first phase.
Good call. That'd fit better with the "timeline", in that retro-futuristic way :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(hardware)#/media/File:C...
Ironically it also helps that self-recorded MDs were the more common option, so the discs aren't covered in labels/printing. (I have one modern prerecorded MD release, and while the printing is neat in some ways, it doesn't have that futuristic side as much)
I hadn't thought of it, but you are right.
(Then again cassettes were also mostly always used "naked" - as in, copied and devoid of labeling ... ... and they never reached MD-level cool :)
... though they might have seem like a very futuristic thing when first introduced.)
(though I'd say that flash drives can be cool if you treat them as James Bond spy gear and get drives disguised as everyday objects or jewelry)
Linux it works ok though.