MiniDisc Hacking | Hacker News Reader

MiniDisc Hacking

sharoma.com

128 pointscrtasm64 comments

I'm a minidisc collector and continue to make mix tapes and copy CD's, records, etc. The cases are about 1/3 the size of CD yet big enough to make great art. Despite the appearance of the disc, it is a very different technology from CD and a single minidisc can be erased and re-recorded multiple times. I can re-arrange tracks with little effort, or add/eliminate single tracks. I'm making a Louis Prima mix tape as I type this.

I also have multiple recording decks from pro to esoteric. I have a lot of portables including field recorders.

In the age of streaming and digital players why do I do this? Joy. It's just fun and I enjoy very much listening to the final product. I love the thoughtful hardware and beautiful art that can be made to go with the discs.

Can we even still find minidisc and players new?

You can import discs from Japan for about $1.50 a piece. Players/recorders aren't that hard to find on Ebay, I even found one at a local "reuse center" but I did have the laser burn out on my NetMD recorde, tried to get another on Ebay, and the laser was burned out on that one.

You can buy new discs on Amazon. While there are many minidisc players on eBay, my best finds are on Craigslist. Why? Demographics. The old guys who find them in a shoebox in their closet think they might be worth $20. I’m not exaggerating- I travel a bit and in large or small towns I’ll scan local CR for “minidisc”, “mini disc”, “minidisk”, etc. I recently acquired five players from a single seller in Bend, OR for $50. All in nearly pristine condition.

I buy empty minidisc clear cases from Japan (similar to CD jewel cases) on eBay. I have a photoshop template for printing card stock on my Epson that allows me to create art and graphics that fits perfectly in the case. Once the completed minidisc is placed inside it fits like a glove. I find it all very satisfying.

I also bought a Sony MXD-D3 ( hard to find and expensive on eBay) so I can quickly rip an entire CD. Or I can use the “Rec-it” button and just capture a single track.

One of my other decks is a Tascam MD-301 MK II which has a keyboard port so I can easily tag albums and tracks with text that dances across the player screen on most playback devices.

All of this is so cool. I’m in Australia so minidisc gear is still damn expensive here. Having said that I have a marantz cm6000 that can auto rip a CD.

Sadly the minidisc half doesn’t record anymore :(

I have to put in the metadata on my other Sony deck using the rotary encoder :)

You should put this on a blog. Would be cool to see

This miniaturization and attention to detail is reminding me a lot of model trains and the model building hobby in general. Sounds fun.

Discs? Yes. Still made in Japan.

Players, no. But MiniDisc was ubiquitous in almost every country except the USA, so they're still relatively easy to find.

> MiniDisc was ubiquitous in almost every country except the USA

Definitely not in the former USSR. We skipped MiniDisc entirely, going from cassettes to CDs to MP3 players.

Definitely not in the UK either

What! I grew up in the UK and it was everywhere. For years you couldn't get on a bus or a train without seeing someone listening to MiniDisc. The little inline remotes were very obvious.

They stuck around for a long time, only finally being killed by the iPod.

Indeed.

I even had a MiniDisc car stereo. So much better than CDs, you could just let them rattle around in the glove box and they didn't get scratched.

And it wasn't the first iPod that ended up killing it. Circa 2004->2006 minidiscs were still super common.

Around 2001 pretty much all my friends had one. I owned 3 over that period (a friend destroyed one, the other me: skating falls were tough on them!)

They were easily the best format for portable music until mp3 players got their capacity problems sorted out.

They were amazing for copying music and making mixes. No one ever bought a new release on MD to my knowledge. You bought the CD and copied it onto MD. We also used them to record our band practise sessions.

What about portable CD players that could play MP3s connected to a car via a cassette adapter? :D

MP3 CDs were definitely a thing, including ones people burned themselves, but I don't think I've seen anyone use a cassette adapter. Most people put aftermarket CD stereos into their cars.

American-designed cars often had nonstandard sizes for car audio even before fully integrated entertainment systems became common. My 2001 Chevrolet has an odd, not-quite-double-DIN-sized space. If I wanted a screen for it, I would have to do some physical modifications to the dash or buy one that has a smaller main unit and a screen that sticks out from the unit (to avoid other overhanging things near it). For now, I'm happy to keep using the Bluetooth unit I put in it fifteen years ago.

I bought a sony mzrh1 around 2007

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Sony_mz_rh1.jpg

It was discontinued a couple years later. The software to download & upload files from/to the disc stopped working past osx snow leopard. The windows sonic stage program was absolute garbage. It sits unused in a drawer. Sony refused to open-source their code and the encryption/decryption can't be reverse engineered because you need cryptographic keys.

Don't trust sony. Their hardware may be superb, but they have abysmal execution when it comes to software.

There's an entirely web-native replacement for upload/downloading tracks now https://stefano.brilli.me/webminidisc/ It's based off the reverse engineer minidisc python libraries and, imho, is super impressive. The author even figured out how to dump atrac data off any netMD capable deck (not just the MZ-RH1).

Minor note: ATRAC extraction on non-RH1 models and Hi-MD support is only available on the fork at web.minidisc.wiki (Web MiniDisc Pro).

  font-size: 2vw;

Got to be the most annoying way to set font size. Completely unreactive to page zoom, have to shrink the window to make text readable.

Use reader mode.

Decided to not read the website because of that.

thanks!

Page is completely unreadable for me, too. What a stupid idea.

Is this a desktop browser issue? Here on Android neither Firefox nor Chrome make the text unreadable, and zoom works just fine for me.

Pinch-zooming works great, but cmd+ doesn't.

I see what you mean now. Not sure what's more infuriating, the weird hardcoded font size that doesn't get overridden by zooming, or the two methods of zooming in a browser view that seem to work entirely independent of each other.

Yeah, it obviously increases with screen width so wide screen definitely have an issue. Px is still the best.

No problem changing font size in Safari

Yes, only div sizes should be set as such. For font sizes px is the best option.

Hi there. I shall make changes to the style sheet soon. When I first published this page in 2006, I never encountered any issues or had any complaints about the font sizing until now. I had completely forgotten that I used 'vw' and in fact had to look up what it even did. I must've had my reasons at the time...

Anyway, thanks for bringing it to my attention!

Excellent memories of much simpler times... Minidisc was a great technology but the advent of flash memory was ineluctable.

Off topic but I see ”the advent of” more and more these days. Yet when I look up the word, the definition is a religious holiday. In this particular instance I see that you use another very obscure word, so I’m going to assume it’s something people say to try and sound smart, despite it not being the correct word

Recent and related:

A Repairman's View of Portable Minidisc Recorders (2000) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37807786 - Oct 2023 (48 comments)

I wish minidisc had survived. I like physical media and think that was the perfect size.

While the recorders aren't produced anymore, the blank recordables (non-HiMD ones) still are. There's enough demand somehow I guess in Japan market (look for MDW80T if you want brand new ones).

I heard from Techmoan very recently that production of the last ones was shutting down this year.

I wish Sony didn't hobble the mini disc format against storing data in it's paranoia against piracy.

It could had been the next floppy disc of its day.

By the time HiMD rolled round, Sony seemed to have figured this out - the 1GB MDs store data, and the players can reformat the older discs into a data storage format, so there exist players that you can boot from. Far too late, of course.

Yes. Yes there is. MiniDisc platinum is new software that works with “Net-MD” models and allow USB connections. I have cassette/CD/minidisc bookshelf system in my home office (also in my downtown office!) with this feature. I also have several small portables with Net-MD.

I recommend a YouTube channel called “Techmoan” which has several incredibly well presented minidisc episodes.

Great memories of MiniDisc, being that the local radio station was my chosen hobby in the 90's. Playing commercials and jingles off of musicassettes was tedious and they were prone to wear. MiniDisc, being programmable and digital, solved much of those problems for us. Yes, some people had PCs with SoundBlasters, but that too was in its infancy, and we laughed at neighboring radio stations where the PC would crash in the middle of the night, and do silly things for hours. No, we on the other hand, had MiniDisc, and proud of it. (Until the whole local radio station thing collapsed. This was in Belgium, and most of those stations got gobbled up by networks soon after.) On top of all that, my early Sony MDS player had that dial that let you position and then edit your things really precisely, which opened up a whole new world of jingle editing for the teenage amateur radio geek.

Despite the rosey memories, it encoded the audio in ATRAC. I don't want a lossy audio format in my life.

(2006) maybe?

minidisc.org..... tstation forums...wow, it was definitely a time. Nestled nicely in the period where mp3/digital and CDs overlapped and the rise of piracy etc.... mixes and albums (and in certain scenes, live recordings) on minidiscs galore. Then no more CDs basically and straight digital files to digital players.

I love my MiniDisc player. The discs are so cool, and so satisfying to pop into a player.

Quick, someone call Techmoan

Anyone has thoughts on ATRAC (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding)? The compression system used to store audio data in MiniDiscs?

There isn't a way to simply record and read FLAC natively from these, right?

can't they make minisd drives? this format was so perfect. also one thing even better than flash drives, with my player I could just plug in the mixer into the machine, and record our jam sessions, like 4 hours, or something. and then you had these stylish discs. There were also some movie experiences when data was exchanged, and it looked just so good. nowadays flash drives don't have that.

I wonder if there's a way to get the digital audio in ATRAC format out of these discs, into proper computer files, without decoding it.

Yes, it is now possible on many Sony Portables thanks to firmware reverse engineering efforts and custom homebrew code. Most of the functionality is available directly in Web MiniDisc Pro.

See https://github.com/MiniDisc-wiki/md-firmware And https://github.com/asivery/netmd-exploits/

Very nice.

I am hopeful many will leverage this work to properly extract and archive audio from MDs that would otherwise eventually be lost with the media.

Links!

> Web MiniDisc Pro (WMDpro)[0][1] is a web app that can copy (almost) any audio file onto a Sony MiniDisc using the NetMD USB protocol. It can also manage tracks, erase discs, and enable new features that extend the MD format. It is a complete replacement for Sony's SonicStage (except Hi-MD modes.)[2]

[0] https://web.minidisc.wiki/

[1] https://github.com/asivery/webminidisc

[2] https://www.minidisc.wiki/guides/webminidisc

h/t Sir68k

https://github.com/Sir68k

[2] is out if date. Hi-Md is now supported.

Thanks for that info. I was quoting from the linked page but haven’t used the tool myself because I don’t have hardware (yet).

Has anyone made any headways into MD DATA itself and/or trying to dump from a portable audio player?

I'd love to see what I can pull from some MD DATA stuff I've got from an old DATA EATA and a Sharp Viewhunter camera that I just can't track down the damn weird proprietary cable for that shoots on MD.

Not yet. There have been some experiments with this in mind, but nothing practical yet that allows dumping data discs. Considering that we have large control over the firmware, it should become possible with more work (and time).

There are those days you really appreciate the Firefox reader view :D

I could have but I just tiled the firefox window to one side of the screen.

very strange website design, font size seems to be a function of the window pixel width. changing the browser zoom level doesn't seem to do anything, so i'm stuck with a very large font size on my widescreen

Yeah, you're not kidding! I don't think it was their intent to force 'boomer mode' text.

I had to manually edit the stylesheet to change fontsize from 2vw to 1vw and it looks fine (reader mode is a workaround too). My guess is they did this as a shitty workaround for high PPI screens that run 200% scaling, but on more common pixel density screens we get beachball sized text.

I agree, it is kinda weird. For anyone curious, the relevant css property on the site is:

    body {
      font-size: 2vw;
    }

This sets font size to be 2% of the viewport width, which means if the text is too big you can try resizing the browser window to be narrower to make the text smaller.

My god. HTML was a mistake.

If I draw something poorly does that mean pencils were a mistake?

I, too, was very confused by this.

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