MiniDiscs rant.

[Hunter33]

I was entertained by the 16 bit vs 24 bit thread and I was going to post something (in that thread) about MiniDiscs but I realised I was ranting.

When I first started playing guitar I used cassettes to record riffs a lot.
Then I moved into jamming and I still have cassettes of live sessions recorded with some cheap ass built-in-mic tape machine that was placed in the middle of the room. SOme of those recordings are still great (to me) simply because there was I believe some sort of natural compression where 5 audio sources would fight for a place on the tape through one mic. lol.
The placement of the tape recorder was the difference between a good or bad recording, I knew nothing of mic placement back then except for the knowledge I gained from those sessions.


I switched from tape to minidiscs a good 5 or more years ago.
Sony MiniDisc portable recorders (the small hand-sized ones) were new back then and being able to record a few hours of audio without dragging around a box of tapes and a big clunky tape recorder was appealing to me.
I invested.
This was also a great gateway tool into understanding the difference between sampling rates and conversion.

Why the hell have they stopped making Minidiscs or are they just rarer to find? I went out last month to get some new ones and could not find one store that sold them. I eventually found some in a backstreet market but it was like finding gold.
The abundance of mp3 format playback/recording devices available was astounding, it seems they have taken over the consumer market in place of the minidisc recorder.

I have minidiscs that are older than some of my cd's now and they work fine whereas the similarily aged cd's have developed 'marks / scratches etc' and have become partially / totally unreadable. They need constant backing up due to unreliability.

AFAIK Minidiscs are fine for portable recording on a 16bit/44.1 sample rate level. You just have to watch the audio isn't clipping or it cuts out.
Minidiscs have a plastic protective cover. Other than this, they are sort of mini cd's but this what makes them worth the money imo.

Just seems stupid to me that cd's sell in their tons whilst this Minidisc format is disappearing when its a more reliable format than cd in the long run.

Feel free to raise points as to why I'm wrong and Minidiscs, as a format, should just die.

PS: Please move to a more relevant forum section if you feel its in the wrong place.

[fmw]

Mini discs have been replaced by compact flash cards and other types of memory. You can still buy a handheld recorder. It just uses memory cards instead. These recorders will output WAV files so can make CD's with them - or minidiscs if you still have some.

[Hunter33]

Thats my point.

We are being pushed more and more to keep data moving from one medium to another instead of having a solid reliable means of keeping it in one place.

Record data and transfer to your pc from your flash media/mp3 player/whatever (takes up space). Eventually, transfer it to an external backup drive (if you have one) and then eventually record it onto DVD or CD which are unreliable in the longrun.

Or, record it onto MiniDisc and leave it there (copy from as and when needed).

With TB sized drives becoming the norm now, the worry of running out of space is less and less. However there is always the concern about backing stuff up as what happens if that drive dies suddenly? You could lose all that data, unless you back it up..and so it goes on.

Just voicing my concerns/ranting about the way its all going.

[fmw]

A mini disc isn't any more reliable than a CD and it is less reliable than data stored and backed up.

[Hunter33]

A mini disc isn't any more reliable than a CD...

Well your entitled to your opinion, but going from my own experience thats not the case and minidiscs ARE actually more reliable than CD's.

This is not scientific but based on experience.
If we were to look at this logically a minidisc is always inside its plastic case whereas a CD has to be exposed to play.
You're telling me that theres no difference in reliability between the 2 mediums when one blatantly has a better way of preserving its integrity than the other?

You drop a minidisc, its fine, you drop a cd you could scratch it.

...and it is less reliable than data stored and backed up.

Depends on what storage medium you are comparing it to.
If you are referring to HDD's then you didn't get what I meant in my second post.

With TB sized drives becoming the norm now, the worry of running out of space is less and less. However there is always the concern about backing stuff up as what happens if that drive dies suddenly? You could lose all that data, unless you back it up..and so it goes on.

Anyway, meh, you don't have to agree with me, I just had a rant I needed to get out.

[fmw]

OK, whatever makes you happy.