It’s late 2024 or even early 2025, and you’ve either just packed the Christmas decorations away or you’ve spotted your old MiniDisc collection in the loft whilst searching for the missing plug for outside Christmas lights, and you’ve decided to have a play with the physical medium again.

Here’s a quick run down of whats available in 2024/25 for Mini Disc lovers.

Well how do you get songs from your computer on to the mini discs?

Aux Output in to Line In

Very simple analogue recording - from a source device in to the MD Recorder. You should be able to use the track sync feature to auto generate different tracks - Audio input levels are driven by the source (playing) device if the Aux / RCA output is not a line out connection, becareful on turning it up too loud.

Optical Output to Optical In

Digital Output from the source device to an digital input on the MD recorder - of the none software version ways of recording audio this will be the best quality, but its still real time playback.

Track sync will work and create new tracks on the MD In correspondence to the audio being played.

NetMD

Audio files are sent to the MD Recorder, in the same fashion you’ll send MP3’s to you iPod.

CD will need ripping first and then transferring to the MD, which takes a little bit longer than MP3 / Digital files.

Quality of the audio matches the best quality the MD Recorder can reproduce.

You can try and get BeatJam or SonicStage up and running, or look a PlatinumMD or CD to MiniDisc. WebMD Pro is a chrome browser based tool, to record tracks or even if your MD supports it download the music back to the PC.

Can I even buy Mini Discs still?

Yes… Yes really you can!

The first stop is eBay its a wash with blank used and new recordable discs, but prices aren’t as cheap as the used to be, spurred on via a resurgence in the movement and artists from the Vapourwave and Synthwave genre releasing albums on them.

Second stop - Yahoo auctions Japan, Mini Disc is and was massive in Japan - there is a whole story for another post as to why it was so popular, but its a somewhat untapped source from discs.

Third stop - Sony still make brand new discs - in the form 80minute clear discs. Aimed at the Japanese market, but with some googling you can get them in the UK, Europe and other regions. Expensive but box fresh brand new.

Are used discs Okay in 2025 and beyond?

As physical mediums go, its very hardy the whole concept of it was to be portable, it mixed the best parts of cassette with the best parts of compact disc.

The way TOC (table of contents) works it’ll exclude the bad or damage sectors on discs. You’ll loose a couple of seconds total recording time.

What you should look for is discs?

The half’s are starting to split or come apart or damaged / loose sliding doors on the disc, this can cause damage to the recorders / players and its not worth risking due to the sheer number available.