[jonjon10002]

I jumped to MD in 1997 because I was still using cassette for mobile music consumption. Because of the media size, there wasn't a pocketable portable CD player, and skipping was a problem (that got fixed later) so I never switched to CD for mobile use.

Compared to tapes, MiniDisc was a godsend: no eaten tapes, random access playback, smaller size, better sound, song titles, and it was just so cool looking. I also used a MiniDisc a lot to record and transcribe meetings at work. The live audio recording was excellent.

The main disadvantage I ran into was that even with an optical digital connection, recording a 60-minute album from CD to MD took 60 minutes. I seldom ran into recordable media or prerecorded titles in the wild, even in New York (although Tower carried them), but there were lots of good online stores back then to buy blanks and new players.

I stuck with it until 2002, when the second-generation iPods showed up. It was easier to carry one thing, and not a player and a bunch of loose discs. I still have a giant anvil road case with a few hundred of them in storage, although who knows if they delaminate or turn into oil over the decades.

[throwanem]

A few years back I bought a couple of assorted batch lots off eBay from people selling out of an old collection, or just selling an old collection wholesale. Some new discs still in the cellophane, too - mostly Neige, but I have a couple of Color Club ones in there somewhere. I still have my own small collection bought with high school summer-job money, too. And I have exactly one Hi-MD disc, that came with the MZ-RH1 I bought for ripping - an accident, I think that must have been, since the price I paid matched other player-only sales and didn't include the $60 or so that Hi-MD discs were going for around the same time.

Most failures I've seen have been mechanical, whether due to mistreatment by a prior owner or, with a couple of the TDK ones I bought as a kid, the glue that holds the case window in growing brittle with age.

The media itself, like flash memory, is perishable with enough write cycles, and I think I've run into two discs so far that were mechanically sound but unreadable. Certainly I never had that kind of failure back in the day, and I must've rewritten some of those discs a few dozen times - they weren't cheap then, and summer-job money only stretches so far. Certainly if there are any common failure modes comparable to sticky-shed syndrome, I haven't run into them.

Granted, it's been a couple of years; I wrapped most of the really intensive research once I got my ripping setup in place a little while before the pandemic kicked off. (For unencumbered full-quality digital ripping, you need an MZ-RH1 specifically, plus SonicStage iirc 3.4.3 and some drivers I had to dig a bit to find. I keep meaning to rehost that stuff somewhere along with a howto, but there's lots of other ways I have to spend my time of late - I'd be happy to hand the whole package off as a zipfile with my notes, if someone were interested.)

So I might be overlooking something at this point, especially without referring to notes, but my overall impression is entirely that, given a working recorder or player, all or nearly all of your discs should still be perfectly usable.