i've fallen in love with the format recently and bought my first player, a panasonic sj-mr200. now i'm looking for a cheap netmd player just to copy songs over easily from my computer. there's just something about the design of the media itself that i love and the preservationist in me is happy to see what people were recording in the 90s and early 2000s.
anyone else have any experience with the format, during or after its heyday?
My dad had a whole load of them; he found them to have the same kind of practical features as cassette tapes, but with way better audio quality and with the conveniences of more modern features too. He used to put CDs he liked onto Minidisc, leaving out the tracks he didn't like, and cutting out the parts of songs he didn't like too, or combining ones which were split on the CD into single tracks, things like that. He also put all the singles he liked onto them too, for playing in the car or while he was painting wargaming figures or whatever heh. And he could just swap songs out if he found he didn't like one after a while or such.
I helped him back up the things he had on Minidisc onto the computer that he didn't have elsewhere recently, and then sold it all. Personally, I appreciate the appeal for sure, but in this day and age they don't really offer me anything that digital storage and editing doesn't. So I wasn't too fussed about keeping them. But they are really nifty.
I backed them all up through TOSLink for the record; naturally I had to do editing to split the tracks apart and put all the information in, but there wasn't too much so it was fine, and it was lossless in as far as what was on the Minidisc :P (though the Minidisc codec compresses a bit but hey that was already done heh)
NetMD sounds neat though; certainly convenient if you want to use them regularly or don't have many discs; save sitting in front of your recording setup waiting for them to copy over in real-time like my dad used to do :P
I wanted to get into them much later on as a replacement to the size factor of full sized CD players (with all of their lousy so-called skip protections that did nothing half the time), but alas. It came and went so fast that it never crept down in price after the market for it fell through to MP3 players and the way of the iPod.
Maybe one of these days, when funds look good and I'm itching for the portability of it, I'll try to get my hands on a player and some blanks to burn some tracks. n.n
I'm interesting in diving in. I have a lot of experience with other formats both of similar vintage and older, and I enjoy seeing how they compare and where their best usecases are for me. I think the thing that will get me over the edge and involved is when I find that green and white 2000 Cadillac DeVille DHS I'm looking for with the CD/Cassette/Minidisc radio option that the dealer brochure I got with my old white one mentions.