Music is a key component of my life, I have it on in the background when I am working, I use it as motivation at the gym and I relax to it after a busy day.

Over the years music has been a constant companion but the format or method of listening has changed.

My Music Beginnings

I was too young to have really been around originally for vinyl (though I do remember listening to records with my family at home, Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version Of The War Of The Worlds with Richard Burton being a favourite), when I was a teenager in the 90’s my music format of choice was CD, and I have fond memories of visiting the local independent music store (the now long gone Funhouse Records) after my Saturday job to buy new music and chat to the owner.

Owning MiniDisc The First Time Round

By the time I had gone to uni a new and quite interesting format had come on the scene, MiniDisc, a small (about 3 times smaller than a CD) rewritable and portable disc. And by the time I was in my third year it even had the capability to write directly from a pc to the disc (NetMD). It offered CD quality in a futuristic and what you might now call cyberpunk style. I absolutely love it, I had a portable player, a hifi unit and even a head-unit in my car.

The iPod

But all things move on and later the next year the iPod was in general availability and it absolutely decimated the MiniDisc player. The iPod was a revolution in portable music even though at the time the MiniDisc player offered far superior audio quality. I was an Apple user and I soon moved over and regrettably sold on my MiniDisc hardware.

Mobile Phones & Streaming

Following that there was the integration of iPods (or iPod like music players) in phones, then came streaming, with Spotify, Apple Music et all, both of which I have used and continue to use to this day.

Vinyl Resurgence

I was however happy to see the resurgence of vinyl in the late 2000’s and I have amassed a reasonable collection in my older age. I think one of the many reasons I enjoy vinyl over streaming is it requires some active choice to select an album, place it on the record player and engage with the listening. It is also enjoyable to have a tactile physical object, an artefact rather than something just in the ephemera.

My Return To MiniDisc

So skip forward to this year, and I found myself needing to get some family recordings extracted from a MiniDisc (for nostalgic and preservation reasons). I had a player that had come with the discs but it was a bit temperamental (iffy audio socket) and did not have NetMD so it would have been trickier to extract the audio (but still possible, I was being lazy really). Off to eBay and a hunt for a NetMD player, well this was where it all started….

Three players in (two portable and one hi-fi separate) a very active community on Reddit, some very creative Etsy label makers and I have another physical media that I am now using. I have even been stretching my programming skills by tinkering with some of the wonderful open source software for NetMD players.

I am sure there is some nostalgia here that takes me back to when I was a student but I am genuinely enjoying curating my music onto discs, playing around with the excellent new software and taking time to listen to music in a physical format in a way that I can create (It is not like with vinyl as I can’t press my own records). It has even made me build up a local digital music library again, which is something that I have been meaning to do and is a good counter to streaming where you own nothing.

So this is my round about way of saying MiniDisc is not quite dead yet and I am enjoying it still being around, here is to many more years of enjoyment of this quirky but excellent format.