minidiscs are a good sweet spot if youre looking for something physical. theyre not too big so you can fit a few discs in your pockets. the player itself can easily fit in your pants pocket as well. any minidisc player that has webMD netMD support will let you add or remove tracks using a web browser. theres the LP mode that lets you fit more music on a disc
I would legitimately switch back to one of my old MD players in an heartbeat if I had access to a decent software to load music on. Those little wired remotes with LCD screens were when technology peaked, IMO.
Any recommendations for an alternative to SonicStage (or whatever Sony’s proprietary crapola from back in the day was called)?
yea! those remotes were definitely handy back in the day when you would be out and about with it, but i mostly just use it at home these days so i dont have the remote attached.
webmd.pro is what i use. it runs in any chrome browser. its a bit on the slow side but i cant remember at this point whether it was always slow to burn to these disks.
but as long as the minidisc player has “netMD” on the front it should work with that. the only other thing you have to do if youre on windows is install this driver
theres also ElectronWMD which is basically just webmd.pro packaged into a desktop app. that may or may not have the driver included, i havnt tried it yet
I haven’t been able to find something quite like it available already - so I do wonder if there would be enough demand to kickstart a Bluetooth/wireless DAC/receiver remote to bring back that tactical functionality…
But anyway - thanks for the heads up! I’ll check it out in the morning and see if I can connect my N910 and NH1.
Come to think of it, I hope I can find the correct cables, and that they still work… wish me luck!
this guy is using a transmitter with his minidisc, im sure any transmitter you could find would work
seems like kind of a chore having to charge 3 separate things though. if someone would just do a kickstarter for a new minidisc player that had bluetooth built in and usb-c to power it i would buy one in an instant!
the minidisc i have now uses mini usb to transfer data and then has a weird 3v charging port, and the cable for that doesnt work anymore so im just stuck with using AA batteries to power it now. its a bit of a mess. these days it would be just a single usb-c port that would handle all that
good luck with your minidisk journey anyway if you head down that road haha
Physical media yes, CDs or DVDs no. Most discs I burned are probably unreadable by now. I remember my favorite artist explaining how he probably had to stop making music because it just wasn’t financially viable. So I decided to buy all his albums (I had all the albums in mp3 format for years). Its about 10 years later, all the CDs are lost or destroyed (most in my car). I still have a NAS with the original mp3s I downloaded 20 years ago.
Yeah, I burned 100s of music cds as well about 20 years ago, and stored them in those books with slots. They weren’t stored in a car, but still about a quart of them doesn’t play anymore, and I am sure it won’t be long before none of them will. All my store bought cds of the same age or older still works fine though.
Homeburning is not a good physical media alternative.
Homeburning can be surprisingly robust as a backup method, and as an option of physical media, but I’d still keep backups on an actual NAS as well. There’s also a ton of variables that affect the lifetime of a burnt CD, like dyes used (cyanine - phthalocyanine - azo), lamination quality, storage and the burner used. Especially the quality and intensity of the build has a surprisingly strong effect, despite things being set in a standard – you can get a lot more storage life out of a CD burned using a quality 5.25" burner compared to a budget slim drive.
Also early discs based on cyanine had a notoriously short shelf life compared to the later archival quality discs, around 30 years or so in optimal conditions (and typically a lot less), so much of the stuff burnt in 90’s and 00’s has already began deteriorating. More recent quality discs can last over a century if stored properly, but the older ones can’t.
DVDs can also often have issues with delamination, meaning that especially the outer rim of the disc can start exhibiting bit rot quite early if you’re using low quality media. I’ve noticed even new discs having signs of early delamination between the two disc halves (DVDs have the data layer in between two acrylic discs, unlike CDs which have it on the backside directly under the reflective coating). I’ve also experienced a lot of issues when burning multilayer DVDs that might affect how long they last in storage, so for actual backups I’d prefer using a single layer disc instead.
But as per reasons for still using discs – they’re an unparalleled cold storage solution. With proper care you can actually leave them be for decades and be sure the data is still readable, unlike with SSDs which will lose their data when unpowered for a long period of time. Tape is a good option, but not really viable for consumers – also tape needs more active upkeep, since you typically have to copy over the old data to new media every 20-30 years or so (promised life in archival is 30 years, after which it might not be possible to get new drives for reading the tapes). Optical is also king when you need to transfer data into air-gapped environments, since with optical media it’s relatively easy to audit that what’s burned to the disc is unalterable. There’s a reason why I still keep a full install set of Debian handy.
We should go back to doing it, physical media is where it’s at.
minidiscs are a good sweet spot if youre looking for something physical. theyre not too big so you can fit a few discs in your pockets. the player itself can easily fit in your pants pocket as well. any minidisc player that has
webMDnetMD support will let you add or remove tracks using a web browser. theres the LP mode that lets you fit more music on a discI would legitimately switch back to one of my old MD players in an heartbeat if I had access to a decent software to load music on. Those little wired remotes with LCD screens were when technology peaked, IMO.
Any recommendations for an alternative to SonicStage (or whatever Sony’s proprietary crapola from back in the day was called)?
yea! those remotes were definitely handy back in the day when you would be out and about with it, but i mostly just use it at home these days so i dont have the remote attached.
webmd.pro is what i use. it runs in any chrome browser. its a bit on the slow side but i cant remember at this point whether it was always slow to burn to these disks.
but as long as the minidisc player has “netMD” on the front it should work with that. the only other thing you have to do if youre on windows is install this driver
theres also ElectronWMD which is basically just webmd.pro packaged into a desktop app. that may or may not have the driver included, i havnt tried it yet
I haven’t been able to find something quite like it available already - so I do wonder if there would be enough demand to kickstart a Bluetooth/wireless DAC/receiver remote to bring back that tactical functionality…
But anyway - thanks for the heads up! I’ll check it out in the morning and see if I can connect my N910 and NH1.
Come to think of it, I hope I can find the correct cables, and that they still work… wish me luck!
this guy is using a transmitter with his minidisc, im sure any transmitter you could find would work
seems like kind of a chore having to charge 3 separate things though. if someone would just do a kickstarter for a new minidisc player that had bluetooth built in and usb-c to power it i would buy one in an instant!
the minidisc i have now uses mini usb to transfer data and then has a weird 3v charging port, and the cable for that doesnt work anymore so im just stuck with using AA batteries to power it now. its a bit of a mess. these days it would be just a single usb-c port that would handle all that
good luck with your minidisk journey anyway if you head down that road haha
Physical media yes, CDs or DVDs no. Most discs I burned are probably unreadable by now. I remember my favorite artist explaining how he probably had to stop making music because it just wasn’t financially viable. So I decided to buy all his albums (I had all the albums in mp3 format for years). Its about 10 years later, all the CDs are lost or destroyed (most in my car). I still have a NAS with the original mp3s I downloaded 20 years ago.
Yeah, I burned 100s of music cds as well about 20 years ago, and stored them in those books with slots. They weren’t stored in a car, but still about a quart of them doesn’t play anymore, and I am sure it won’t be long before none of them will. All my store bought cds of the same age or older still works fine though.
Homeburning is not a good physical media alternative.
Homeburning can be surprisingly robust as a backup method, and as an option of physical media, but I’d still keep backups on an actual NAS as well. There’s also a ton of variables that affect the lifetime of a burnt CD, like dyes used (cyanine - phthalocyanine - azo), lamination quality, storage and the burner used. Especially the quality and intensity of the build has a surprisingly strong effect, despite things being set in a standard – you can get a lot more storage life out of a CD burned using a quality 5.25" burner compared to a budget slim drive.
Also early discs based on cyanine had a notoriously short shelf life compared to the later archival quality discs, around 30 years or so in optimal conditions (and typically a lot less), so much of the stuff burnt in 90’s and 00’s has already began deteriorating. More recent quality discs can last over a century if stored properly, but the older ones can’t.
DVDs can also often have issues with delamination, meaning that especially the outer rim of the disc can start exhibiting bit rot quite early if you’re using low quality media. I’ve noticed even new discs having signs of early delamination between the two disc halves (DVDs have the data layer in between two acrylic discs, unlike CDs which have it on the backside directly under the reflective coating). I’ve also experienced a lot of issues when burning multilayer DVDs that might affect how long they last in storage, so for actual backups I’d prefer using a single layer disc instead.
But as per reasons for still using discs – they’re an unparalleled cold storage solution. With proper care you can actually leave them be for decades and be sure the data is still readable, unlike with SSDs which will lose their data when unpowered for a long period of time. Tape is a good option, but not really viable for consumers – also tape needs more active upkeep, since you typically have to copy over the old data to new media every 20-30 years or so (promised life in archival is 30 years, after which it might not be possible to get new drives for reading the tapes). Optical is also king when you need to transfer data into air-gapped environments, since with optical media it’s relatively easy to audit that what’s burned to the disc is unalterable. There’s a reason why I still keep a full install set of Debian handy.
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