hey everyone it's Colin how's it going like with a lot of other retro audio media there's renewed interest in minidisc but because of how this format changed over time there's a bit of confusion about what you need to do to get started so this time let's talk all about this format and what you need to know in order to decide if getting into this is right for you [Music] [Music] thank you the minidisc was launched in November of 1992 which places it at 30 years old which is kind of crazy for me to think about if you're curious about the history of this format what it's all about where it succeeded and where it didn't be sure to go check out my documentary all about it it'll answer a lot of those questions this video is meant to be more about the Practical concerns of if you want to even get into this format to begin with because it did evolve over time and I think that's causing a lot of confusion on the part of people who know practically nothing about minidisc minidisc was really meant to be a digital replacement for the compact cassette highly portable but also a key component to it was recordability you weren't limited like with compact discs at the time of being able to only buy and play back pre-recorded media having recordable disks was a key part of the format now that said you could of course buy pre-recorded disks these are actually fairly uncommon and at least these vintage ones are going for a decent amount of money so unless this is a format you really want to get into probably avoid the pre-recorded discs you're much better off just recording them yourself thankfully you've got a lot of options for doing that and most MD recorders that are out there available to buy are of kind of the older variety and those are going to be devices from 1992 until they late 90s or so the initial batch of discs came in 60 and 74 minute varieties although 80 minute discs became available a bit later on typically recording a mini disk at least in the initial version of the format involved pressing record on a recorder and play on your Source device and then just waiting while it copied over in real time most people recorded through an analog connection and that was pretty much your only option if you're bringing over something like a vinyl record or a cassette tape although some devices offered optical digital input and on these Portables it's usually a white mini jack connector on home decks it would have been like a toslink connector that's really kind of the biggest bummer about looking at some of this older Hardware these days is that if you do want to record disks yourself with players and recorders from this era you're kind of limited to that real-time experience now some people actually like that so if you're interested in that and getting kind of the full mini disc experience looking at an older recorder can be a really good way to not only get that experience but also save some money that said a lot of people these days are kind of impatient and if they want to get into minidisc it's to listen to newer music they just want to experience the format and thankfully in the late 90s Sony came out with an evolution to this format that makes things quite a bit easier in the late 90s MP3 players started hitting the scene and Sony decided to respond in kind with a new I guess evolution of minidisc called netmd along with netmd came a new format for minidiscs called mdlp minidisc Long play the whole idea was that it got you more run time out of a disk than just the standard 60 or 74 or 80 minutes like you had with the standard play discs that came before and you could get mini disk Hardware that was mdlp compatible but didn't have netmd that said netmd is really probably the biggest impact on the minidisc ecosystem and what a lot of people today are going to want to look for the main reason why is it added a USB port to the recorder for the first time you could hook one of these directly up to your computer and using software on it digitally copy the audio straight onto a disk it would bring over the track title and album information for you and you can mix the quality of music so you could have a disk that held as much as you possibly could LP2 doubled the recording time in lp4 as its name suggests quadrupled it so up to 320 minutes of music if you use one of these standard 80 minute discs and that was the other big thing is you could do netmd and mdlp on standard minidisc media and by the time these came out disks were only a couple of bucks each now at the time netmd was actually a really compelling option because the early MP3 players of the late 90s typically used flash memory but flash memory was very expensive back then and you didn't get a whole lot of it maybe a couple hundred megabytes at most so you could only fit you know a couple dozen songs really some players had the ability to expand the storage but it was very expensive to do so so minidisc being able to effectively reuse existing media that cost only a couple of bucks each and still get you hours of run time granted at reduced audio quality well that was pretty compelling but by the early 2000s that still wasn't enough because devices like the iPod and other hard drive-based music players really started to gather people's attention and so Sony launched the final version of minidisc and it's called high MD the big difference with this is that it came with New Media these held one gigabyte of data and so you could get much more audio on one of these than you could on a previous disk the thing is by the early 2000s people were just done carrying extra stuff in their pockets the appeal of an all-in-one MP3 player with a built-in hard drive like an iPod or a creative Nomad jukebox or something like that well it was just it was too compelling and so high MD sadly it never really got the attention that I think it deserved so you're not going to find too many of these out there in the marketplace okay so let's say at this point you think this format's really cool you want to get into it the first decision you need to make is basically do you want to be able to record disks yourself or do you just want to buy pre-recorded ones what's interesting about the pre-recorded scene is that it kind of had two phases to it yes you could buy pre-recorded disks from back in the 90s and early 2000s and they kept making them until the early 2000s the problem is these are very collectible these days so they go for a decent amount of money like this one cost me I'd like to say about 50 bucks several years ago it probably goes for even more now the other limitation of course is that you are stuck listening to music from specific eras and while there were a decent number of releases on pre-recorded minidisc it wasn't nearly as wide of a selection as you could get on cassette or CD not all of the record labels got on board with doing pre-recorded mini disks now that said certain Independent Artists and music genres have really embraced minidisc as a format because of its retro futurism and so we're starting to see new music getting recorded to minidisc again they're not pressed like the original pre-recorded disks were these are on regular recordable MDS and so this is what people really are kind of collecting now when they want to get into pre-recorded minidiscs of course you're limited in terms of the genres that you can listen to it's mostly electronic music things like vaporwave and Future Funk that sort of thing though there is some hope that potentially some other artists and genres may get into it as well time will tell but this scene definitely does keep growing this is a pretty good like mini disc modern mini disc pre-recorded collection but there have been hundreds of releases at this point from just the last few years so it doesn't seem like there's any signs of that scene stopping otherwise recording discs yourself is pretty much going to be your path forward and you can get recorders in both portable and home form factors the big difference though is that the home units very rarely supported net MD so if you're thinking that the convenience of recording from your computer over USB is the most important thing to you the home recorders are probably best avoided but if you're interested in that linear recording experience buying a home deck can actually be a really good value there are obviously much less in demand because they're not portable and we've become a very portable Centric Society but also a lot of these have a design flaw that not many people are aware of especially these Sony models from the mid 90s or so this is an MDS j320 but many other models that Sony made around the same time use the same Drive mechanism and what happens is the drive mechanism eventually loses the ability to accurately report to the rest of the device whether a disk has been inserted or not the fix is actually fairly simple so if you're handy with simple Electronics repairs and I've done a video all about this be sure to go check that one out if you're interested in this you can get these things working again this very deck had that problem and now it works fine it only took a few minutes to fix it up and an awful lot of these are going to experience that so that could be another really good way to save money too is to buy a known broken deck especially if the seller says oh yeah it just keeps freaking out thinking that I've put a disc in when there isn't or vice versa just a couple of minutes of your time and practically nothing in terms of materials cost you can get one of these up and running again if you only want to invest in one piece of mini disc Hardware though a portable is going to be the way to go if you like that linear recording experience where you're doing it all yourself kind of old school style there's a decent number of these kind of all-in-one portable recorders to choose from this is an mzr3 this is one of my favorites I've actually had this one for a long time it's really solidly built this thing's all metal top and bottom so it's got a nice heft to it it uses just regular double a batteries but it's fully featured in that you've got all the editing controls and whatnot on here like you would on a home deck plus it's got a whole bunch of really nice audio i o so not just a line out and a headphone jack but analog and optical digital audio input decent battery life it's got Mega bass and all of that here's another model from the later 90s this one's the mzr 37 I actually did a video All About kind of restoring the this one it's very similar um you know you slide the disc in through the top it takes a pair of double a batteries it's got the same audio i o microphone input which was really popular among concert Bootleggers back in the day they love mini desk just because of the portability and the good battery life and just how discreet it was you could kind of sneak them into concerts when you weren't supposed to but it still also offers really good audio editing capabilities so if you want to start out with listening to pre-recorded disks and then maybe later on think about recording some of your own a recorder like this might be a good way to do it because the non-net MD recorders go for a lot less money they're just less popular because of the inconvenience of having to record in real time so you're going to save some money another step up could be to look at some of these kind of uncommon less popular mdlp but non-net MD recorders and this is actually kind of my daily driver minidisc I really only use it for playback but what I really like about this unit is that it's very small and compact it has a screen built in it can record if I need to but it also takes regular double a batteries in fact just a single one and you'll get dozens of hours of playback on a device like this these were very efficient in terms of power now if you really don't care about recording discs yourself and you're only going to go with pre-recorded ones that you buy from others that opens up your options quite a bit and can save you a serious amount of money because there were a decent number of playback only mini disc Portables on the market for many years here's one that I had from in the mid 90s I'd like to say this was around 1996 or so this is the MZ EP 11 and what you'll notice about this one is there's no screen on it this is when they really started to push to make minidisc as portable as possible so what Sony did was they basically made the screen external and you would get a wired remote control with it so on the remote then you could see you know track and title information the run time the volume level all that sort of stuff plus it would give you playback controls over the device so you'd have play pause and track forward back and volume up and down you'd plug your headphones into the end of the remote and then the remote would plug into the headphone jack on the player and have this little proprietary connector and over time they got even smaller to the point where they were barely bigger than the discs themselves and could just fit in the palm of your hand obviously for a player this small and thin they leaned pretty heavily on using the remote control but most of these devices also included some basic buttons on the side so you could at least get your typical transport controls volume up and down play pause forward and back skip tracks so the remote control really was kind of optional with these players that's a good thing because the remotes often got lost over time and so sometimes they cost as much as the player itself and they're not necessarily always compatible with each other so if you really want the remote maybe try to find a player that comes with one otherwise it could be a bit of a crap shoot to buy Us remote separately and just hope that it works the other thing to keep in mind with these super small players just as cool as they are is that they use a different kind of battery they needed these so-called gum stick style batteries which were very thin and flat and they were rechargeable which was great but the problem is they're becoming harder to find these days they are still being produced but only by a couple of Manufacturers and the quality is kind of all over the place so that's going to be something to keep in mind with these ultra thin Ultra small players something I like about this MZ ep-11 is that it takes a regular double A battery and Sony was by no means the only company to produce mini-diz Hardware there were a lot of other manufacturers that got on board and licensed the technology over the years here's another really cool unit this one also can record it's manufactured by sharp but it does go to show more about that whole like proprietary battery situation most players used standard gum stick batteries but a few models like this sharp decided to kind of go their own way with these larger gum stick batteries that were more or less proprietary to them same thing with this Iowa this is a really cool device I like this one I like the styling of it but it even goes more overboard with a very proprietary lithium ion rechargeable battery most of the gum sticks were nickel metal hydrides so that's going to be something to really keep an eye out for if you're looking at one of these really pocketable players or recorders is that if you are going to get into the situation where you have to use rechargeable batteries because they can't accept a standard double A make sure at least it's a regular gum stick instead of one of these proprietary ones now some people have kind of gotten around these by 3D printing enclosures that can put a regular lithium ion cell inside and if you're really handy that could be a cool way to go about it but for the majority of people who just want to get into this format kind of no must no fuss well trying to avoid these proprietary batteries is going to be really important now some manufacturers offered an interesting workaround in the form of these add-on battery compartments some people call them battery side cars the idea is that you'd still drop a gum stick battery inside the body of the main player but you could stick this on the end and drop in a regular double A battery to increase your run time that said across all these players that I've used and seen you're not required to have the gum stick in there for the side car to work so if you can buy a player with one of these side cars that could get you around the whole gum stick thing and just use regular like double A rechargeables the downside is that these were usually proprietary at least to the brand if not the model so you couldn't take one of these off of say a sharp player and drop it into a Sony or vice versa but if you've got your eye on a player that doesn't come with a working gum stick but has the sidecar that could be a good way to go if you either just want to play back discs or maybe if you want to get into having multiple minidisc devices and this can be your main on the go player the big problem with pretty much any portable recorder or player though is battery leakage and these portable ones with the gum stick batteries are unfortunately no exception even though they're rechargeable the gum sticks can still leak if left in for a long period of time and sometimes that's something you can fix and other times the leakage gets so far into the internals of the player that it's pretty much unsalvageable and that's unfortunately the case with this one in fact I bought a whole bunch of portable players in a big lot from Japan and only a couple of them were ones that I was able to fix that said if you go that route you might have some really cool options to just buy a whole bunch of these Portables like if you really want to get into it buy a lot of like unknown condition portable players import them from Japan because that's the country where minidisc was the most popular and have your hand at trying to fix them you might get lucky for the vast majority of people though that just want to experience minidisc for the first time want a lot of flexibility and don't want to invest more than they have to going with a portable net MD recorder is going to be my strong recommendation and there were a couple of different versions of these over the years this is what they call a more basic or uploader type of recorder in that you notice there's really not a whole lot of i o on it at all really just a headphone jack and a USB port and that's because this thing doesn't offer any sort of linear audio recording you can't hook this up to a cassette deck and record in real time or anything you're limited to really only recording two disk through USB and we'll talk about modern options for doing so a little bit later these of course are going to be the least expensive though because they were the most basic they were the most limited brand new these generally sold about 100 bucks or so like they were not super expensive devices but a lot of these models actually are still very compelling these days for the reasons like we just covered and that this one takes a standard double A battery so you don't have to worry about the whole gum stick thing yes battery leakage can be a concern on some of these the Plastics like you can tell this one's pretty yellowed that can be an issue if you care about Aesthetics but this one is mostly plastic it still feels fairly solid and it's fairly compact but it's going to be a more durable type of device just because there's less that can go wrong with it the circuit boards inside are a lot simpler you do have to worry about the longevity of the mechanisms inside these recorders and that's true for anything minidisc they are miniaturized components of course so you know if you get a player that's got a whole bunch of miles on it I may be more likely to fail than not but generally I've found these to be Fairly reliable now if you do want the ultimate and flexibility they actually made more advanced net MD recorders that had analog and digital inputs on the side so this is kind of going to be like a hybrid between an older style player where you have the options for linear recording this one's got the microphone Jack and the optical input and all that but it also still has the USB port so you can upload from a computer this one's even smaller and thinner but of course that means it's going to rely on the gum stick batteries although a lot of these still have the connectors on there for if you can find or dig out the double A battery sidecar these I think are a good option but they're going to go for a lot more money so this is going to be a bigger investment in the ecosystem what's nice about the netmd era though is Sony went back to having the screens generally on the devices they still often support having a remote control but you don't need the remote control to get the full functionality out of the device you've got enough buttons and controls on the face plus the screen to pretty much do everything you need to do without the remote so you really don't need to worry about the remote being missing when buying a device like this and that just leaves us with high MD Hardware sad to say it's difficult for me to recommend a newcomer to the format to get into one of these yeah it's really cool that you can fit so much more music at high quality on one of these and what's really neat is because of the capacity of the disk High MD finally gave you the option to store uncompressed audio on here so you could get truly CD quality sound bypassing a track and all of the lossy compression that said because of their relative scarcity they go for a lot of money on places like eBay these days you could drop hundreds of dollars for a player especially the ones with an LCD screen on there instead of an OLED because the lcd-based players are going to last a lot longer most of the OLED players those screens have long since failed the other thing that sucks is the cost of the media these discs even used go for like 30 bucks each these days so unless you're really willing to commit to this format and throw a lot of money at it it's just difficult to recommend getting into high MD despite how cool it is if you're going to get into recording your own disks you're going to need some blank media on which to do it and thankfully there's lots of good news in that regard partly because well they still manufacture brand new disks yeah it's kind of crazy to think that 30 years after the launch of the format one that's been really quiet for the last 15 years or so until picking up they've still been manufacturing brand new media the entire time minidisc was huge in Japan and there are still no doubt a lot of people there that love to use this format so they never stop making disks there's really only one variety still being made and sold and if you want to get your hands on some of these you have to import them from Japan which can be kind of expensive especially if you consider like import duties and all that sort of thing but if you want brand new discs this is how you do it you can buy a whole box of them what I like to do is buy a whole bunch of used discs the coolest thing about minidisc is that it was rewritable not just recordable you can reformat the disk whenever you want it and start fresh and re-record over it over the years a ton of disks have been sold so if you buy a lot of disks that have been used just erase them and reuse them what's also kind of cool is especially if you buy discs from another country like these are all bought in a big lot from Japan you might discover some cool new music in the process maybe it's your cup of tea maybe it's not but if they're used they chances are haven't been gone through and erased they usually just get sold in these big bulk lots of just kind of as is you may get one or two dud discs in there that have been physically damaged but in my experience the vast majority of these discs that you buy are in perfect shape and they erase and re-record just fine maybe you'll discover some cool new music along the way if this is a format you really want to get into and especially if you think the variety of media is really cool just all the different styles and everything that you can get well buying a bigger lot you'll definitely pay less per disk and you'll get a much cooler experience okay finally let's say you buy a netmd recorder and you've got a bunch of blank disks how do you actually get music onto here using your computer well back when these were new you needed to use a piece of software called Sonic stage Sonic stage sucked and no one liked using it it was always kind of a pain it was slow it was kind of buggy it was limited in what you could do because it was very let's just say cognizant of copyright protection because remember Sony wasn't just an equipment manufacturer Sony was also a recording label in a movie studio and all that other stuff big conglomerate it is possible to get Sonic stage running on a modern Windows PC it's very painful thankfully there's another way what most people have turned to these days is this really neat tool called web minidisc and of course I will include a link down in the description as to where you can find it and information all about it but in short it's basically a reverse engineering of how computers talk to net MD devices and it lets you upload music from your computer's hard drive all in a web browser it runs in Chrome when you copy the files from your computer to the disk they never actually leave your hard drive it's not being uploaded to some service in the cloud or whatever and they keep adding new features you've got the ability to record not just in those higher LP2 lp4 modes but also in standard play mode so you can record Backward Compatible disks that'll work on any minidisc player that's the path forward which is just super exciting because it totally breathes new life into this Hardware you're not trapped using that proprietary software anymore and having to do all sorts of just like wrangling to get it to work on a modern system it's just gonna work from now until well forever you know some people do have concerns about the longevity of this format and rightly so it is proprietary even though Sony licensed the technology out to a whole bunch of different manufacturers ultimately Sony still owns it and they haven't produced new Hardware in many years we still do have blank discs that you can buy brand new but who knows how long that'll last and even though there's a ton of hardware and a ton of disks out there these are Optical based so lasers can fail other small miniature components inside can fail over time some people have had luck being able to repair these devices but in other cases they're just too far gone and have to become Parts machines and that's a big difference compared to other newly popular retro formats especially like vinyl or cassette and that those two are Open Standards it doesn't cost a manufacturer really anything or have any barriers to producing say a new turntable or a new cassette deck you can still buy brand new blank tapes and they're still being manufactured as well even though your options are kind of limited unless Sony decided that this was an interesting enough format for retro purposes to really start reinvesting into you sad to say it does have kind of a finite lifetime I just don't Envision Sony producing new hardware again anytime soon practically or if ever that said a lot of people love to trash talk minidisc as being a failure and I completely disagree with that if you call minidisc of failure that means you're only looking at it through your own experience and in my research and experience of dealing with this format for literally decades it was far more popular than people tended to realize was it a flop in the U.S yes it was pretty close even though I have vivid memories of being able to go into electronics and even discount stores like Target and being able to buy brand new blank discs it wasn't that obscure of a format even though you and your friends probably didn't use it but in places like Japan and to lesser extent Europe it was still a huge hit so there's a lot of Hardware out there and a lot of blank media still to be bought so don't overpay for this kind of stuff a regular playback or you know non-net MD recorder this should set you back maybe 75 bucks these days if you want to start getting into netmd which I definitely recommend as your first device something like this one of these uploader only probably a hundred to 150 or so and blanks a couple of bucks each if you buy them in a big lot you can usually get several dozen of them for less than 50 bucks that's a very economical way to get media High MD is really the big exception I just do not recommend this format just because these can go for hundreds of dollars and for purposes of people wanting to get into minidisc for its retro futurism it just feels so compelling compared to other Retro Media formats at least in my opinion High MD just kind of takes you out of that realm it feels too modern whereas something like this well this just feels really cool anyway if you liked the video I'd appreciate a thumbs up and be sure to subscribe you can follow me on social media at this does not comp and as always thanks for watching [Music]