Dissecting a Dummy Promo MiniDisc | Hacker News Reader

Dissecting a Dummy Promo MiniDisc

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30 pointsecliptik15 comments

I just love all the attention MiniDisc is getting again in the 2020s.

MiniDisc is truly how the future of audio would have looked like in a parallel universe.

Did anyone ever use them for data storage on computers? IIRC they held about 200MB so they'd have been a welcome (and robust) upgrade from Zip drives.

I know there were "different" disks for the Yamaha multitrackers, but I'm not sure what was different about them.

Sony did release drives, DGR looks at one in this video for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzwtCBj5jEs . It's yet another example in the weird graveyard of replacements for the 1.44MB floppy that didn't catch on.

Neo did.

MD Data[0] had a capacity of between 140 MB and 1 GB depending on the version.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD_Data

Back in the day I was all about minidiscs, I seriously wanted a data drive but it just never happened unfortunately.

I have contemplated and sketched out what would be required to build a slot loading sd card reader. Ultimately, I believe a vertical mount door loading mechanism* is cheaper, more reliable, and certainly has a decent aesthetic.

* much like a vertically mounted cd player

Yes, it’s disappointing, but I chose to publish this anyway to counter publication bias, and to maybe motivate someone else to come up with a different method to analyze what’s on these dummy MiniDiscs!

Fantastic.

The use for a dummy disc is odd isn't it.

Dummy boxes for retail stores that keep the real discs behind the counter wouldn't need any disc at all.

Dangerous is probably a really early MiniDisc as it was a recent album at launch in 1992. Perhaps it was created for launch promotions, trade shows etc. where they needed to show physical MiniDiscs and packaging but hadn't actually mastered and manufactured the real deal yet in quantity?

IPR licences are complicated and maybe Sony did not have contracted rights to the music on MD format but had committed $$$ to the campaign? Maybe Jackson had good lawyers when he sold them the catalogue!!

Are MD pressed or recorded? It might be interesting to see if two Michael Jackson promo discs are identical.

Pre-mastered MDs are pressed and the format is physically similar to CDs. I would be interesting to put this disc under an optical microscope, I assume it would look similar to a regular pre-mastered disc but perhaps it's actually a recordable MD (which look very different) or some kind of R&D experiment.

I took a bunch of optical images of MDs and other formats here for reference:

https://everydaything.substack.com/p/a-pre-mastered-minidisc

This can be done non-destructively with an inexpensive epi-illuminated microscope.

Very cool article, I hope he can rig up a way to dump the raw disc contents and poke around them at some point

Maybe there's something interesting in there..

My guess is it’s some weird pre-MD format that a weird prototype MD writer from R&D could access.

Sony did make MD data readers/writers very late in the age of MD. I have one in a drawer somewhere. (Because it looked cool like in the matrix.)

Exactly why I had one as well. I never felt more sci-if than using my MD player. I actually miss that thing. The build quality was amazing.

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