Hacker News Reader

Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

> The only downside of CDs was that you couldn’t record from the radio and Napster eventually solved that better than radio ever did.

This was far from the only drawback with CDs especially early on, at least in mobile applications: the media (and thus player) is bulky, cases are fragile (in part through increased leverage), it has low resilience to physical damage, and before memory prices hit low enough for significant buffering the slightest g forces would lead to skips.

MDs were real progress on that front. Shame it was quite expensive and the digital models were hobbled by horrendous software. And obviously flash-based pmps then smartphones are their lunch entirely.

View on HN

I remember my first “portable” was so bulky it came with its own carry case like a hand bag.

You had to step very lightly when using it as it was just itching to skip.

It would also eat through batteries like no one’s business.

MDs are just another example of Sony screwing it up by making things proprietary and keeping it to themselves instead of creating an ecosystem (memory sticks were another example, although they didn't offer quite the same advantages). It's really a shame, I think if Sony would have gone about this differently they likely would have put off the emergence of MP3 players for a long time.

And it could have been the successor to the floppy

There were already plenty of “successors to the floppy” in the dustbin of history (floptical, Iomega zip, LS120, …). None of them was competitive as a distribution format, or at all once CD-R became widely available.

I was in college during the time, but I remember all of these digital art students had iMacs and these clear+blue FireWire zip drives they used to carry around between classes and home.

Yeah, and the MiniDisc was the only one that could have come close. Sony already had computer MiniDisc readers/writers, mass production with pre-recorded content, (fairly) large volumes.

They just never connected these things to each other. It could have been a great standard and we would have been plagued to this day with them. :)

In some ways it's even better than USB flash. There are no read-only flash drives, for instance. It's also a problem that you mosh "data" in the same port you mosh "keyboard" or "spy device". We gained a lot with the USB paradigm but we lost some things, too.

MiniDisk! I loved that format. Great physical size. I suspect my love is all about nostalgia for the future, because when they came out they were foreign (at least in the US) and fly.

After using minidisk I was sure that LS120 would succeed. The formats of cartridged optical disks mostly removed the annoyance of scratched disks. Now the only place I see optical disks in a cartridge is at the library where they put some CDs in a cartridge to use in a special drive.

You mean like the Zip drive? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive

In principle, maybe, but Zip disks were errorprone, didn't store music for portable players, and were rather large and cumbersome. Minidiscs were even smaller than floppies and more robust.

It’s a funny comment because those formats only existed to be proprietary. Sony learnt the wrong lessons from CD, which they co developed with Phillips. They saw the success of that format and wished they were getting royalties on the underlying tech.

They then wasted billions and decades in formats other companies wouldn’t touch because they had fees attached. Minidisc being a prime example. Sounded worse than CDs, cost the same. Had a recording feature people already had with cassette.

MD was quite conventient for recording (interviews, ambient ...) and with random access much better than cassettes.

> has low resilience to physical damage

No it doesn't. As a child, one time I tried to make a CD unplayable and literally couldn't do it. (Sandpaper didn't do the trick.)

The real issue was the skipping when you tried to use a portable CD player.

> No it doesn't.

Yes it does.

> As a child, one time I tried to make a CD unplayable and literally couldn't do it. (Sandpaper didn't do the trick.)

Either child you was incompetent or your player was very good at error recovery, because I personally saw a number of car CDs thrown out as the car’s stereo was unable to read them anymore.

They must’ve had a really robust kind of CDs wherever you lived, then. Like everyone else, I wore out a lot of discs simply by storing them outside their case.

Do you mean the OG audio CD's made at the audio CD factory, or those newfangled CD-R's?

Both, until I discovered the toothpaste-buffing trick.

Did that work? I heard everything already, from it being a wonder solution to it destroying the discs even further (if i had to guess they used the kind of toothpaste with little stones in them?)

you were probably scraping the thick transparent side, not the side with the label? the data is immediately under the label. the clear side can be surprisingly scraped up and still read properly, though I'm not sure how!! I have some CDs that I thought were ruined because of how scratched up the underside is, and they play just fine. Pretty sweet! Then I have one or two where the label side got a scratch taken out of it, and indeed, you can see right through the disc at those points - unrecoverable damage. Conversely a scratched up underside can simply be buffed/polished smooth and the disc will read good as new. I actually have one disc that cracked in half (a singular crack from the center to the outside edge, not spanning the total diameter of the disc)... and it actually plays without any skips (though surely depending on quality of the player and its resilience to read errors). I couldn't believe it at the time. A single piece of masking tape to hold the edge together was a sufficient "repair".

I worked in a CD foundry in the early 1990s. Scratches that were not tangential (perpendicular to the radius) were irrelevant, as the basic CD encoding scheme provide something like (IIRC) 30+ bytes of data parity protection. If the scratch width along the track wasn't longer than that, it didn't exist.

If it did exist, some toothpaste rubbed tangentially around the CD on your fingertips was often enough to buff it out, at least as far as the 30-byte limit cared.

It was a phenomenal jump in data integrity, built in at the recording level. Sure, you could encode even floppies with that scheme... but your computer didn't, natively.

CD pickup detects changes in the reflected light due to the reflective pits. As long as the scratches are significantly bigger than pits they will create lower frequency attenuation to the reflected light which won't affect the high frequency signal coming off pits. You will get occasional errors when crossing into and out of a scratch but that's just a few samples, likely those won't even make it through through the speakers. I have not tried but I imagine a very fine sandpaper could create the scratches at high enough frequency to interfere with the pickup.

But the label side is indeed very fragile as you can easily damage the reflective pits, only covered by a layer of paint. It's as same as a simple mirror, where the thin layer of reflective metal is very well protected from the front but is only covered with paint in the back.

CD goes in the microwave

Reply on news.ycombinator.com