Sony Will Cease Shipping MiniDisc Devices in March

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People still used this format?
The last time I saw one was in 1999 - When games men was still around in Australia and before the second extension of my local plaza was under construction. The mini discs used to sit just behind the counter.

I was 8. I'm 20 now..

Kinda makes me remember how awesome I felt when I had the money to go and buy a new gameboy game.
 
I always thought that the minidisk would have made an excellent replacement for the floppy disk. It's about the same size and in a protective case like a floppy but it is optical and can store allot.
 
LOL, yeah I bailed close to 10 years ago. I thought I was so lucky to get good prices for my player and disc's because I thought it would be discontinued within months.
 
Some of the best portable players-- MDR900 during the late 90's and early 2000's before mp3 players killed it.
While the make and sound quality was exceptional, it was more of the "WOW, what IS that!" effect everytime I pull out my super slim Sony MD's. Or to use the stick remotes! (those those are so well made).
ahhhh! I miss the 90's
 
Minidisc was a great low-cost option for portable sound recording, which is how I used it.

These days, it can't hold a candle to flash-based recorders. I'm surprised they weren't phased out years ago.
 
There was a time when people thought the mini disc was going to be to format of the future as opposed to MP3's and such... Optical media was cheaper than flash. I never had one of these but I did have plenty of portable CD players to throw around. One of which was a Sony Walkman which no matter how hard I moved it would just NOT skip!
 
Oh, Sony and their unique formats. Only domestic markets save these lines for a while. Until global trends supersedes them. But nice job on Blu-Ray though. That was a tough fight.
 
Loved my minidisc players. All my friends had CD players and those things would eat two AA batteries so fast. The minidisc players I had ran 40 hours (some players were even higher then that) on one AA battery. Lots of songs and lots of space (for the 128kb/s MP3s of the time), and the later models let you use the MD as a USB drive. I could shake that thing really hard non-stop while playing and it didn't miss a beat. What I always liked to point out was that any anime from the mid 90's all the way to well into 2008 that had a what looked like an MP3 player in it was actually a MiniDisc Player, but some of the english dubs or subtitles would just say MP3 player.

FYI Sony Gold Blank MiniDiscs go for about $4 each on ebay at the moment, been watching there prices for a few months for an obscure format idea I had.
 
Actually alot bands that play at clubs and pubs etc use to (and a few still do) use minidisc for their backup tracks/recording live gigs as well as qutie a number of small DJs because the recording quality is simply better.

Yes you can get better equipment for recording live gigs or higher quality backing tracks but it all costs $$$ and i'm not talking about bands that go on world tours just people that noone jas heard of that only do local places to make min wage or less, it was alot cheaper to use minidisc then even a laptop setup with the appropriote gear.

I would suspect now a basic qulaity digital setup is so cheap compared to 5 yers ago that even people that would have used been using minidisc back then have no reason to keep using it now and hence the drop in use and Sony finally stopping production, but up untill a few years ago Minidisc was still the cheapest option for high quality backtracking and live gig recording.
 
Woah! I didn't know these were still around. I picked one up in 1997 and was the shiz because of it. All my friends were wowed. I even got a CD player with an optical out to connect it to the MiniDisc recorder digitally. Then we hooked up a microphone to it and had it recording in my carall the time. We made a mix of crazy crap we said and laughed our butts off. It was good times.
 
I still have a high-end ES MD deck (working and in great condition) in the man-cave and a bunch of disks I'd recorded back in the day. I remember how stoked I was when I got the deck back in 1999. You could record tracks and edit them...woohoo. Wow, those were the days.
 
Apparently they are going to invent a solid state device that plays music from mp3 files. Some please tell them what has been going on for the last decade!
 
Just a few weeks ago I saw a couple of high end full-sized MD decks (and also a couple of Phillips DCC decks) for €5 a piece at a local used good shop. I was really tempeted to get one because they where really cool and quite expensive back then.
 
[citation][nom]susyque747[/nom]I always thought that the minidisk would have made an excellent replacement for the floppy disk. It's about the same size and in a protective case like a floppy but it is optical and can store allot.[/citation]
Actually back in the early '90s there was a disk drive called floptical drive which was a drive that could read optical 3.5" floppy disks. On the outside, these optical floppy disks looked just like a standard 3.5" floppy disk but they could keep considerably more data. Moreover, the floptical drives that could read and write to these disks could also read and write to normal 3.5" disks. So there were two sets of read/write heads in those drives.

These floptical drives were found in newer generation Commodore Amigas (Amiga 3000 and onwards) and Workstations from Silicon Graphics (particularly on Iris Indigo, Indigo2 and Indy).
 
I used to use one alot in 2004-2008 when i got my ipod, it worked great, took alot of abuse and was very happy with it, now htough i can't imagine swapping disks like i used to have to do. still it in my obsolete but cool gadget bin next to an origional palm pilot and a qualicomm phone i got in 2006
 
Er, wrong. The Amiga 3000 never came with a floptical drive. At best, the later made units (before the 4000 series) and the 3000T included the 1.8mb floppy drives that could read PC 1.44mb and Mac 1.Xmb disks. The floptical drives came in various formats, some in traditional 3.5" cases or the successful Iomega ZIP format. (which I finally went through 20 such disks last year, dumped them to my desktop, erased then gave away with the hardware on Craigslist.)
 
So, if Sony is going to do one last shipment of these MD devices in March, how do we get our hands on one? And which model(s) are they? I'd like to purchase one for my collection.
 
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