Little audio editing I made 20 years ago, with this blue SharK : Jaws Bond
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Yeah, my MD collection was retired once the R-09 came out. Still have a MD deck with optical out and 2 or portable ones and an infinity of the disks with many many live shows/Dj sets and field recordings. I got the bug from reading a Future Music interview with Skylab around 2000âŚ
I remember seeing those Marantz recorders in catalogs when I was a kid, I donât think they were around that long but I bet theyâre good, Marantz made some really nice stuff. That meter bridge is sweet.
EDIT: when I dug my Minidisc walkman out to take that photo I decided to test it to make sure it still works (I havenât used it in a few years) and the first disc I threw in was some random recording of a show I played probably 8 or 9 years ago. The recording quality is pretty impressive, especially since back then I was just using an old, late 80s Radio Shack brand stereo electret mic I found at the same thrift shop as the recorder. Iâve got to dig that thing up again, to, because to be honest it kind of sounded better than the Zoom H5 I use now.
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MZ-R50 is the one I can vouch for, the red/orange one in the middle. See if they have the AA battery adapter for it too.
This was the most recently MiniDisc topic I could find - whoâs still using them / collecting them in 2022?
Still using my Sony NH1 here, rebuilt new batteries with a 3D printed tray and some new LiPos.
The pre-recorded albums sure have gotten to some silly prices recently. Nice to see some replacement Jewel Cases being manufactured too.
Man I wanted to love minidisc so bad, I had a few portable units but they kept getting wanky so I ended up returning them, the other downside was the software for managing you music⌠that was a horrible experienceâŚ
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Minidisc was my Teen Years so it has a special space for me. Never had a unit fail, recorded hundred of discs and always wished I could afford a pre-recorded album.
I had a cool Sony separate with both a CD and MD drive that did 4x speed dubbing and let me title with a big keyboard remote. Loved it.
Beaucoup Fish on MD! Thatâs a thing of great beauty.
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I loved MD! I owned three or four portable MDs. That chunky early Sharp one, and some Sonyâs. I forget which models.
I currently have a shoebox with about 50 discs, but no player.
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That Sharp 702 was my first unit! Bought from Ritcher Sounds as an Xmas present.
My day to day is now a Sony NW300ZX HiRes Walkman but my NH1 gets plugged into the studio monitors regularly
Hereâs my Sony deck. I used to have it as DAC in my audio set up but it became impractical once a lot of Bandcamp files started to be encoded at 96, as the DAC can only downsample from 48. Probably the most âcredâ disc I have is an interview I got to do with Will Oldham in the mid or late 90s when I volunteered for a local community radio station, with Dirty Three doing a sound check in the background! I also have some recordings of a couple of gigs that stand as a testament to how awful the music I played was. (Itâs better nowâŚ.right? 
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pretty sure that all the multitrack/portastudio MDs require MD-data media to record 4+ channels. Not a common item these days
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Ya. The minidisc was great. SUPER bad timing for it tho. It coulda been strong had the MP3 player taken a little longer to come out.
I was so stoked when the Sony MD came out. I got the second gen one. It was great for snowboarding. But fucking heavy. The MP3 player was so much better for activity. I canât believe I was launching jumps with that MD brick in my jacket. It hurt like shit when you fell on it.
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It had a good run for a number of years before MP3 players took off.
The audio quality between MD and MP3 (low bit rate was common at the time) was really clear to me and it wasnât until the iPod Photo that I finally picked one up.
They really screwed the pooch on the price of Albums tho. Charging a premium over CD with far less market share and a much smaller library.
Shame they werenât able to lead with the 1GB MiniDisc over the original 160Mb ones. Those just came along too late.
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I found it frustrating that they didnât work as generic removeable storage. USB keys and SDs werenât common/cheap/available then. As a nerd and into music, I often wanted to carry data/apps, as well as tunes, with me.
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Iâm just comparing it to the run, say, the Walkman had for example. MD was short in comparison. Yes sound quality was WAY better. But it sucked for doing anything active. And changing discs on the slope sucked. Still better than the forever skipping portable CD player, but still, an utter pain in the ass.
Yeah, it was a focused product. I mean, you couldnât do that with a cassette either and it was still miles ahead as a format
Sony branded a number of their MD players as Walkman. My 300zx is still branded Walkman.
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Later models of Minidisc records could be used as storage devices over USB. The 74-minute discs could hold about 269mb and the Hi-MD discs held about 1gb.
One portable recorder model that supported this was the Sony MZ-NH1. See page 74 of the manual for documentation on this feature.
There was also a separate MiniDisc format called MD-Data that was made specifically for data storage. The Sony MDMX4 multitrack recorder is an example of a device that used the MD-Data discs.
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