I’ve been a fan of MiniDisc for awhile. My primary recording unit is my DR7, bought back in 2003, and as is typical, it still serves me fine to this day.
I had a Nomad Jukebox 3 that worked well as a recorder, but it didn’t have the onboard editing features of MiniDisc, and let’s face it, plastic HDD-based players just don’t stand up to abuse. Aluminum and magnesium MiniDiscs do, and it’s not uncommon to see people using 10-year-old units at shows.
The only real hassle with MD has been the issue of how to get the recordings onto a computer from the disc. Traditionally, MD units have no sort of computer connectivity, so the only way to upload recordings was to do so in real-time through a line-out/line-in recording, therefore losing one of the most important aspects: the fact that the MD original was a digital recording.
Sony came out with a stopgap solution called NetMD, which appeared to create more problems than it solved. Continued...