Convenient, yes. Sounds great too. But far more prone to physical damage (scratches, etc) than tapes or records, in my personal experience. Lost count of the number of times a $20+ movie was destroyed after being in a childs hands.
Mini Disc or cassette seemed better because there were a case around the support that was making harder to damage it. If for some reason, a cassette was broken, it was still possible to move the tape to another case (tricky but not impossible, nice little hacks needed).
People got too fascinated by the shinny colorful reflection of CDs.
fascinated by the shinny colorful reflection of CDs
And then later on even more fascinated with the production of all black cd's etc. To be honest, I like those as well, probably just beacuse it's something different.
And yes there's something to say for the sturdyness of MD and the 'openness' (almost open-source like lol) of tape.
Mini Discs use a different process than burnable cds. I think its more robust, but I can't verify. My 20 (yikes) year old minidiscs all work fine, when I dug them out of storage and tried them.
Tapes can go too. Depending on the binder the tapes have to be baked to restore them. (Video and audio tapes may suffer from this).
When CDs came out people really liked them. They sounded great and didn't involve the care needed with records or tapes (cleaning records and tape pinch rollers... ug). You could skip to any track without flipping it over. Minidiscs came out many years after cds.
Records probably are the most archival since its music in physical form.
Convenient, yes. Sounds great too. But far more prone to physical damage (scratches, etc) than tapes or records, in my personal experience. Lost count of the number of times a $20+ movie was destroyed after being in a childs hands.