I still have a portable MiniDisc recorder but it’s very difficult to find a perfectly working second hand HIFI element now.
I don’t
I’ll watch later but I didn’t find it particularly more practical than a tape deck! But I dubbed all my minidiscs from the radio and then manually added track stops, which probably wasn’t what everyone did ahaha
(I put this into a separate thread to not distract the video list thread too much)
Actually I did, mostly because of random access to any track and because you could rewrite them without the medium suffering. But I never used it for more than a replacement for tapes. I never did purchase any MD release. And even for blank MDs I only had a few, and overwrote them with new music (mostly from CD, sometimes from radio).
It definitely was an improvement over tapes, but not so much to convince people to use it. It became obsolete before it could become relevant. Nonetheless I’m actually surprised it was around till 2013, staying around for 20 years is actually a decent success. And the video shows MD was surprisingly successful in some niche areas.
I also used it as successor of cassette, for my compilations to listen to during my metro, train or bus commute.
But unfortunately my unit (a SHARP portable recorder) was not working very good.
I was quite annoyed because I ruined myself to buy it and the shop where I bought it replaced my faulty unit against another faulty unit without updating my invoice serial number!
I was a teen-ager, I didn’t know I should check these kinds of things.
So when I brought my replacement faulty unit in for repair again, they said no, it’s not the same serial number as your invoice.
So I used this machine that ruined me and that was regularly skipping sound.
I forced myself to use it a lot, still, instead of my flawless AIWA Walkman, just because I ruined myself.
I was happy with my MD compilations and offered my Walkman to a cousin and sold my double deck cassette hi-fi set to get some money.
MD hardware has always been a rare and expensive stuff in France.
But I still loved MD, despite my bad luck.
My friend got perfectly working players/recorders.
I could then never have the means to buy another one, except recently when I bought an inexpensive second hand portable Hi-MD SONY unit.
I also bought 2 or 3 attempts of hi-fi or mini hi-fi sets (of course it’s always second hand, now), but 2 were broken and the third one was in perfect conditions BUT it was destroyed during postal transport (it can only play commercial optical MD now, not my homemade recordable opto-magnetic MD).
When I started working and went to Japan (I work where I work because I always dreamt of going to Japan since little child), I loved MD even more.
I saw many MD albums on sale, a thing I never noticed in France, but didn’t buy any as MD for me was a home made compilation cassette.
But their MD hardware in Japan, oh my god, super fancy, super complete ranges of stuff from MD sized walkmans with funky colours, ghetto blasters, to astounding mini hi-fi sets and hi-fi elements.
It was very affordable like it had really replaced the cassette, over there!
I just came back home with a couple of (inexpensive but beautiful) Sony neige white transparent MD, and some other funky colours that I would never find in France.
My main experience with MiniDiscs is second hand of people using them to record jam sessions or tunes from others in the folk/trad. scene. I can definitely see how it was a much better option that using a tape cassette or, uh, I can’t even think of other remotely viable alternatives at the time. (Pretty much everyone uses their mobile for this purpose these days.)