Gammitin (Ben) 💾Before the doom scrolling screen epidemic kicked in. 💽🎧🎵🎶
Wiredfire@Gammitin I loved MiniDisc soooooooo much. I did eventually concede that MP3 had it beat but it was a glorious 5 or so years that it reigned in my personal music world!
Nazo@wiredfire @Gammitin I completely missed out on MDs and sometimes kind of wonder what it felt like. Though being basically owned and controlled by SONY kills it for me anyway. Still, it was a really neat tech for the time.
@nazokiyoubinbou @Gammitin It was great, if niche. Folk kept comparing it to CD when it wasn't intended to replace that. Compared to the cassette tapes it was really superseding it was basically all the benefits of cd (track skipping, track names etc) with much better audio quality than tape, but not as good as cd. For portability it was a great trade-off
@wiredfire @Gammitin Didn't they use some form of ATRAC3? I guess lossiness of a level putting it below CD would have been by design for fitting more and to help avoid buffer underruns. I think ATRAC3 and its successors is actually able to sound pretty close to CD quality at the expense of being larger and maybe less compatible. At least I know later implementations like whatever they used in the PSP SDK got pretty impressive. (I think that was based on ATRAC3 Pro? I don't remember... Ah, proprietary stuff...)
@nazokiyoubinbou @Gammitin Yeah ATRAC3 was when MD picked up the traction it did. Was at least as good quality as your average MP3 of the era, and absolutely good enough for most people's on-the-go needs. Again considering it was competing with cassette rather than CD it was more than good enough heh. I really wanted MDs to be used more as data discs too.. they were miles better and more robust that a floppy or zip disc and hold round 150mb or so