Re:The Web MiniDisc App (2020)
by turtlebits on Friday April 09, 2021 @02:11PM
(#26753928)
MD Data exists, it was slow and expensive.
Not sure why someone hasn't done it recently, but I'm not surprised they didn't do it back then. At the time of MD's popularity, it probably wouldn't have made much sense to compete with zip and jaz drives unless you could make them much cheaper, and I doubt they could have with MD. Portable audio that wasn't as finicky as CD but was higher quality than a cassette was the real killer functionality.
The USB functionality came fairly late in the MD's life, I think. For the vast majority of MD devices, you could only get data in or out via audio connectors, which, even if digital, is incredibly slow and unwieldy - there's no transport control from the computer! It'd work like the tape drive on a C64.
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retox 9 hours ago [–]
I think it's a real shame that there is no way (as far as I know) to use re-writable MiniDiscs in the same way that CR-RWs, for storing generic files.
HiMD does exactly that. It’s a FAT-formatted mass-storage device.
I had a mz-n707. It had functionality to record, but as far as I could tell, there was no way to read the audio data back over the USB interface.
Can anyone in the know give a quick explanation why that is the case? I appreciate it's a moot point now with the extreme price of MD-RWs, but every now and then I'm reminded of them and get upset. It's probably out of the question now that there's an MD resurgence like cassettes are enjoying.