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Comment by lxgr | Hacker News Reader

They definitely are mysterious, but to me, magneto-optical media (such as MiniDiscs) take the cake.

Written magnetically (while heated by a laser), read optically (by a much weaker laser), and somehow all of that fit into a pocketable player powered for 10+ hours by a single AA battery!?

Unlike rewritable optical media, opto-magnetic storage also seems to have effectively unlimited rewrite cycles. It's a real shame they never became a popular data storage option, mainly due to Sony's paranoia stemming from also owning a huge music and film division.

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Music-wise, lossy compression takes place via a proprietary codec (ATRAC). It isn't viable for data storage (neither was CDR(W)). Trust me, I had data loss due to all of these. Just use LTO with some parity data.

Not sure I understand, are you saying that you were using MiniDiscs or other MO media and were experiencing bit rot?

Making ATRAC the exclusive and mandatory codec for MiniDisc Audio was another typical unfortunate Sony move but in my view doesn't discredit the strengths of the physical storage medium.

Honestly, I wasn't being specific. I like a specific music genre, and within this music genre some unique content was saved to DAT and Minidisc. The DATs were lost, and so the only available medium has been based on Minidisc.

So your data only survived in a lossy format, because MiniDisc, but it did survive, also because MiniDisc? The quintessential MiniDisc experience :)

That's the thing. It wasn't me. Someone in the scene received it from original artist, and he put it on minidisc, this was end 90s. Those who appreciate the genre, love these hidden gems, but it is only available as lossy due to minidisc (and MP3). Back then, FLAC did not yet exist, but CD did. Regarding MP3, codecs (including LAME) improved a lot over the years. The overal quality of the LAME presets, nowadays (and this has been tge way for more tgan a decade), is good enough compared to lossless, something double blind tests confirm.

In this case, I believe you are right: I don't think the data would've survived without minidisc. But in other circumstances where the user did not know minidisc is lossy?

In the end, a lot of these hidden gems have been (re)released because lost tapes (and, I suppose, HDDs) were found which is neat.

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