Great memories of MiniDisc, being that the local radio station was my chosen hobby in the 90's. Playing commercials and jingles off of musicassettes was tedious and they were prone to wear. MiniDisc, being programmable and digital, solved much of those problems for us. Yes, some people had PCs with SoundBlasters, but that too was in its infancy, and we laughed at neighboring radio stations where the PC would crash in the middle of the night, and do silly things for hours. No, we on the other hand, had MiniDisc, and proud of it. (Until the whole local radio station thing collapsed. This was in Belgium, and most of those stations got gobbled up by networks soon after.) On top of all that, my early Sony MDS player had that dial that let you position and then edit your things really precisely, which opened up a whole new world of jingle editing for the teenage amateur radio geek.
By the time HiMD rolled round, Sony seemed to have figured this out - the 1GB MDs store data, and the players can reformat the older discs into a data storage format, so there exist players that you can boot from. Far too late, of course.
While the recorders aren't produced anymore, the blank recordables (non-HiMD ones) still are. There's enough demand somehow I guess in Japan market (look for MDW80T if you want brand new ones).
Yes. Yes there is. MiniDisc platinum is new software that works with “Net-MD” models and allow USB connections. I have cassette/CD/minidisc bookshelf system in my home office (also in my downtown office!) with this feature. I also have several small portables with Net-MD.
I recommend a YouTube channel called “Techmoan” which has several incredibly well presented minidisc episodes.
