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Comment by aphroz | Hacker News Reader

Actually MD was everywhere, except in the US. There was a Vaio computer with integrated MD drive and you could store data and audio on it.

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Ah yes, the mysterious Sony Vaio PCV-MX2 - I still want one of these even though it would probably be completely useless nowadays.

LGR has a nice video about it:

https://youtu.be/UQSKWOw-sZc

There was also a Vaio laptop that had an MD drive, it didnt support data though:

https://www.zdnet.com/product/sony-vaio-pcg-nv109m/

There was a small window between heyday of Tascam 4-track cassette recorders and the emergence of modern digital recorders/PC interfaces when Yamaha's 4- and 8-track Minidisc recording consoles were a great and relatively affordable home/amateur recording option, fairly popular in the US. Sadly there is no digital out(!) so when I recently transferred my old tracks to digital I had to send each channel with a separate unbalanced(!) analog line. It's also prohibitively expensive to track down new MD Data discs (the MD audio discs which were far more common would only support 2-track recording instead of the full 8).

I thought those minidisc 4 tracks were great, but the compression on them could be a bit nasty

That explains why, looking back, I never got a satisfactory distorted guitar tone, but those were also the days of listening to 128kbps MP3's so half the time we didn't know any better.

> ...Sadly there is no digital out(!) so when I recently transferred my old tracks to digital I had to send each channel with a separate unbalanced(!) analog line.

MD audio was compressed with proprietary ATRAC, so sending it out would only make sense if the other end supported it. On the other hand the analog audio would clearly be more compatible.

However, those MD decks supported TOS link for input, but had some bits flipped to disallow CD digital recopy.

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