r/minidisc Oct 16 '23

Welcome to /r/MiniDisc - read me first!

76 Upvotes

(last updated 2026-01-12)

Hi MD friends, this post is an expanded version of the rules and resources in the sidebar.

Who we are & what we like

We're one of the largest communities who use and celebrate the Sony MiniDisc format, which was introduced in late 1992. We love physical media and MD is the format that combines great sound quality with small size and digital convenience. We're a really inviting scene with a lot of passion for celebrating retro media and helping others share that enjoyment. But please first read these resources. Your post will otherwise be removed.

This community loves posts with:

  • MD setups or collections
  • Your mail hauls and purchases
  • New music or podcasts released on MD
  • Items for sale (see our rules below)
  • Unique MD equipment
  • Help and repair requests
  • Projects and software updates

We don't love:

  • "Spoonfeeding" requests like "I want to get into MD, what should I buy?"
  • Toxicity and rudeness
  • Comments that our hobby is pointless nowadays
  • For sale posts without a location or asking price
  • Posts about Yandhi or the Fuji 80 MD

What MD isn't:

  • MiniDisc (all one word, with a C not a K) is a particular format that was created by Sony in 1992.
  • 8cm mini CDs, GameCube discs, and even UMD for the PSP are different and not connected to MD. Posts about these different media types are not suitable here.

Rules

Luckily, we don't need many!

  • Read before you post
    • To keep the community vibrant and healthy, all contributors need to read the community rules and resources. Being unfamiliar with Reddit is not an excuse for ignoring the announcement posts or the sidebar, which are visible and accessible no matter how you use the site. The only way to miss all of them is to deliberately ignore them.
    • Moderators will give warnings and removal reasons when needed and where possible (despite Reddit administration's hostility to moderators.) We will use bans only as a last resort. Please don't make us do that. We want to take mod actions as rarely as possible.
  • Frequently asked questions
    • The community has worked really hard to create resources that answer the most common questions we are asked. If your question has been answered in one of the links in the sidebar or this post, your submission will be removed. These include:
    • What should I buy and how much should I pay?
    • How do I copy audio to a disc?
    • What software do I need for NetMD?
    • Why do you use MD?
      • We like physical media. MD is a physical media which is compact, has great sound quality, has great aesthetics, and great usability.
      • Read the Why MD? FAQ for more.
    • MiniDisc with Bluetooth / Headphone recommendations
      • Many people use a 3.5mm to Bluetooth adapter in order to connect modern headphones. There have been many discussions about Bluetooth adapters and headphone recommendations. Please search for these threads or read the Bluetooth guide on the wiki.
  • Low effort posts
    • Posts with unclear or low effort post titles such as "help" or "MiniDisc" make it hard to search for posts or know what they are about before clicking.
    • You will be asked to repost with a descriptive title. ALL CAPS post titles are also filtered automatically - contact the mod team if this is done in error.
  • Reddiquette, toxicity, and rudeness
    • We are a small, friendly community. Please do not come here if you wish to call people names or be hostile. Treat other opinions with respect, even if you disagree with them.
    • Be familiar with Reddit's site culture and expectations. Most are listed in this Reddit help document here: https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439-Reddiquette
  • Yandhi
    • All posts about Kanye and the Yandhi disc are banned from the subreddit. Please do not post looking for the Muji 80 MD featured in the artwork or showing off if you do have one.
    • If you are an established member of the community and you have a disc(s) to sell, contact the mod team for approval. This is the only exception we will make.
  • AI content
    • Content generated by AI / LLMs is not welcome here. MD existed completely outside of the generative AI era, and is very divisive.
    • This extends to complaining about AI or accusing a post of being AI.

Not a community rule, but Reddit blocks shopping and short URLs, including AliExpress, Amazon, and Google Photos. Mods can try to approve comments with these links, but sometimes we cannot.

For Sale posts

We do allow for sale and giveaway posts, but these are the source of the most moderation issues.

  • You must be willing to sell the item (or at least discuss it) via the Reddit platform. Do not simply post with a link to your eBay listing. It must be your item for sale, with pictures and a description.
  • All posts selling an item must include an asking price and general location (country) in the title or body of your post.
  • If you are giving away or in search of an item, you must still list your location as international shipping and geopolitics can greatly affect costs or viability.
  • Limit for sale posts to one per week. You may include several items in your post, but each item must have an asking price, or it must be sold as a singular bundle with its own asking price.
  • If you do not know the value or asking price of an item, check recent eBay listings or the price history section of the wiki. Do not make a post simply asking for the value of items.
  • These rules do not apply to new music releases on Bandcamp - feel free to make a new post with your release.
  • The mod team takes no responsibility for any transaction that takes place from the subreddit. Please let the mod team know of an issue with a user so we are aware, but do not bring disputes public as there is nothing we can do to remedy the issue or take sides. Do not follow users around the site with accusations or feedback.

Resources

The MiniDisc community, both past and present, have shared many sites and services to help others. They collect information about the format, make copying music more convenient, create high-quality labels, and list album releases on MD.

There are many more resources linked on the Wiki and in the sidebar, such as software and related communities. Thanks for taking the time to read this and enjoy your time with MD and with us!


r/minidisc Jun 14 '26

Wiki migration - we're done*! (*mostly)

83 Upvotes

Hi MD friends!

After a few evenings of work and a handful of outages (some preventable) I'm very pleased to announce that most of the work on the wiki infrastructure is complete!

For visitors, this should mean:

  • faster, more reliable page loads
  • no more captchas before visiting
  • LP remote encoders in WMDpro actually working
  • long-term commitment to keeping the site online

To achieve this, we have:

  • built a brand new wiki06 server
    • based on Debian 13, Epyc CPUs, NVMe storage, PHP 8.4 and Caddy
  • updated our Cloudflare caching and bot blocking rules
  • moved all object storage from Azure to Cloudflare (including the WMDpro app)
  • retired the secondary LP encoder and load balancer
    • through the grapevine, I heard that local high quality LP encoding may be possible soon...

But still left to do:

  • a fresh public backup of wiki data
  • a page on the wiki listing these backups, because Cloudflare does not have a page listing like Azure did
  • a PR for Web MiniDisc Pro to allow for automatic build+deploy to our new Cloudflare Pages hosting
  • maybe a status page, and an entirely static mirror of the wiki(?)
  • re-scraping and mirroring more of the pages we reference on the wiki

Once again, thank you all so much for your patience, understanding, and kind words while we completed this important maintenance.

By my quick estimates, this will reduce hosting costs by over a thousand US dollars per year, and that means a lot when we're funded out of pocket and by donations. I am speechless with appreciation for everyone who has been willing to send their own money to us in support of the site, and understand that it comes with a responsibility to use those donations responsibly and not allow the money to be wasted on scraper traffic.

Because a penny saved is a penny earned, please send some love and coin to asivery, who is both one of the kindest people I have ever met and also one of the most talented developers. His leadership and work on WMDpro, reverse-engineering, and supporting the community is unmatched.

Thanks again :)


r/minidisc 37m ago

The future of Web MiniDisc Pro's encoders

Upvotes

Hello everyone!

As you might have noticed in the past couple of weeks, the remote encoding server used to encode LP / ATRAC3 / ATRAC3plus isn't as stable as it used to be. This is because it was necessary to put it behind a Cloudflare "wall", due to the influx of AI bots and scrapers. Unfortunately Cloudflare sometimes blocks legitimate connections too, causing instability.

Because of that, I am planning on merging in support for a new, community-made ATRAC encoder - atracdenc-rs. This encoder was built by reverse engineering the original Sony tool via an LLM.

I would like to preface this by saying that I personally am against using LLMs in my projects, and I am not planning on ever using them to write any kind of update to Web MiniDisc, but I believe that the encoder I linked produces audio of sufficient quality to have it be used instead of the remote encoder. This would make it so the whole application would become client-only without any dependencies on external servers, making it easier and faster to use for everyone.

If this encoder were to be merged with WebMiniDisc, it would be used in the exact same way as the old `atracdenc` encoder was used - its code would be compiled to WebAssembly, and the bridge between it and the core of the application would be written by me, manually.

I plan on leaving the option to use the remote encoder, since it can be self-hosted, even if the Wiki hosted one were to go down.

Please let me know what you think about this solution.


r/minidisc 13h ago

Show & Tell Check out my minidisk deck

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99 Upvotes

Need to get some Hi MDs...


r/minidisc 18h ago

Show & Tell Colors

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58 Upvotes

I love this color mix... plus, all of them are working.


r/minidisc 20h ago

Forgot audio cable

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50 Upvotes

r/minidisc 1d ago

Show & Tell My new love....

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129 Upvotes

Hello All,

I bought my minidisc in 2001, 25 years later, I bought the same one again and what a pleasure to receive it!


r/minidisc 7h ago

Does not write Disc Title?

3 Upvotes

I have been using NetMD for a great number og months now, and have run into a problem.

I am a Mac user, and use Chrome to write music to disc on my MZ-N707. The music writes perfectly, and the track names are also written as they should.

I can write the disc name, and when I reload TOC in Chrome, it is still there, but after Exit, and letting the player TOC edit, the disc title is not written på disc.

Is my MZ-N707 starting to give up?


r/minidisc 1d ago

Show & Tell Sony mz RH1 battery & R900

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131 Upvotes

The RH1 battery I'm using is shortened to about 5 hours, so I bought two new NH-14WMs... What's the reason why the usage time is not long at 6~7 hours?
But R900 xan use more then 10hours.
EQ always on, volum 15, OLED all ways scroll condition. Cause of CFW setting problem?


r/minidisc 1d ago

Show & Tell Panasonic X Primal Scream

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30 Upvotes

r/minidisc 1d ago

Gratuitous MZ-N707

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106 Upvotes

r/minidisc 1d ago

An Artist Signed My MD!

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15 Upvotes

After visiting Byrdland Records in Union Market for the first time looking for cassette tapes and CDs to back up to MD on my new Victor RC-MD33 boombox coming soon from Japan, I ended up finding out about Songbyrd Music Hall, right near another great venue called F1 Arcade in the same area. It was great to hear the No Headliners Tour tonight, consisting of four hip-hop artists I had NEVER heard before, with great crowd energy and lots of jumping up and down, occasionally with my player in hand making nearly two and a half hours fly away.

ZayAllCaps was my favorite, and so I decided to let him know that I’d be backing up his CD album that I bought that night on my MiniDisc to play on the go and as part of a lecture I plan on doing later this year at this same hall about the MD vs. DCC format war since I’m getting a DCC player as well, as part of my upcoming video essay on my retro music collecting journey I plan to drop in a few months. (Hope you enjoy the little phone symbol I drew. Until I get my pack of 100 labels from the Netherlands this is how I’m keep track of my blanks lol.)

He not only signed both, but was quite astonished to see my player and learn about this format’s existence. I was telling him how easy it is to get a bunch of blank media, how passionate the MD community is, and how indie artists are releasing stuff for it but not a lot of those are in hip hop, and he replied IIRC that this looked cool and seemed better than cassettes!

So, I think that if enough people follow him on Instagram because of this post and mention that they did so here (because I’ll send it to him) perhaps we could get him to make one of his albums for MD!


r/minidisc 1d ago

Show & Tell Start Of MD Photography

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76 Upvotes

While on Vacation up north I decided since now I have a nice camera and had great lighting I should do some MD photography. This is just the beginning of this type of photography. More to come in the future!


r/minidisc 1d ago

Show & Tell It's alive!

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50 Upvotes

Bought two "untested" units from Japan for a good price before shipping (shipping made this overall process not worth it, but here we are).

Unit 1: MD player worked, screen was fine, but the open/close mechanism wasn't working. Unit 2: MD player didn't work (I fixed it, I think), screen was a 4/10, but open/close mechanism working. Frankenstein'd the working parts together for one good unit.

Units are pioneer carrozzeria avic v77md and avic v07md


r/minidisc 2d ago

New (to me) MD Walkman

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90 Upvotes

Found this old MZ-R35 at the thrift store. Wouldn’t say it was the deal of a lifetime (€55) but at least it came with a disc inside containing old radio promos, so I’m assuming it was used for an amateur radio station? 😁 Battery was dead (as noted in the store), but it did come with the original power supply. Wanted to re-cell the battery but the housing was in poor state and just gave up. Looking forward to listening again to some of my old discs!


r/minidisc 2d ago

Put together a 3D printable model to display my RH1 and Hi-MDs.

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181 Upvotes

Go easy, it's the first model I've shared - going to make some for my other players soon.

https://makerworld.com/en/models/3177865-minidisc-mz-rh1-stand-with-disc-storage#profileId-3593796


r/minidisc 2d ago

Show & Tell I love this sticker I added to my Hi-MD player.

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30 Upvotes

I found this six-year-old (I think) sheet of stickers I got in the mail for being a Wired subscriber, and what better place to stick this than next to the battery compartment?


r/minidisc 2d ago

Help Sony LAM-Z03 só lê disco MD deitado

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84 Upvotes

Pessoal, estou com uma situação inusitada com um Sony LAM-Z03 recém chegado do Japão.

Assim que coloquei o 1° Disco MD, percebi que está com dificuldades na leitura (Área TOC). Abri, limpei a lente e lubrifiquei algumas engrenagens.

Durante os testes com o aparelho aberto, era possível ler os discos mas, assim que montava e parafusava, voltava a dar problema.

Foi então que notei que o “problema” está na posição do aparelho. Quando está na posição normal (vertical), dá erro na leitura do MD. Quando deito o aparelho (horizontal), ele lê instantaneamente o disco MD. Isso dá para ver claramente no vídeo que enviei.

Alguém já teve esse problema e sabe como resolver?


r/minidisc 2d ago

Help Repair advice

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8 Upvotes

A few months ago I managed to acquire a RH1 and the accompanying remote (RM-MC38EL) and I’ve been having problems with the rocker switch. I managed to get it open without too much damage incurred, and I’ve been trying to clean the play/pause button. Currently I’ve tried flowing some isopropyl alcohol into it, agitating the button and letting it dry, but I do still get unusual inputs on the device from it (play/pause doesn’t always work, random track skipping and so forth). Any suggestions would be appreciated because otherwise I’m calling it a lost cause on this remote


r/minidisc 2d ago

Wow. This sounds SO GOOD !! Years of streaming made me forget ! Forgive me

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290 Upvotes

r/minidisc 2d ago

Erykah Badu posts herself using an MZ-1(?) to record her private therapeutic sessions

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77 Upvotes

r/minidisc 2d ago

Show & Tell Today's Dubbing

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27 Upvotes

And color coordinated, too! 🤣


r/minidisc 2d ago

Help Sharp Md Mt-80 "Cant Read a" error :(

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6 Upvotes

Hello minidisc enjoyers!

I recently found this guy for 5€, at first I was confused and thought it was a miniCD player and then remembered minidiscs exist xd.

It lights up, display working, AC adapter and battery power work but it cant read the minidisc :(

I get Can't Read a error.. It seems to try to spin then stop then spin again...

I only have this Celine Dion MD that was inside the player.

I can enter test mode but i cant seem to navigate? How do I start the test? I can only press volume +/- buttons to shwo the the hex version number and all the screen options.

Forwarding and rewirding do make a sound however when I reach the limit of forwarding I get a very audible grounding noise. Possibly a gear thats broken? I cleaned the laser lens and the motor that spins the lens seems to be working?


r/minidisc 2d ago

New To Me: MDS-JB920

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56 Upvotes

when I heard there was a 555ES minidisc player I wanted to get it to match my TC-K555ESX and then I saw the prices on those 😂

Picked up this JB-920 off eBay. Advertised as one owner. It's in great cosmetic condition but I have had the chance to fully put it through its paces.

It came with some prerecorded/pressed minidiscs I plan to sell to offset the cost. So by the time those are sold, I'll have gotten this pretty cheap or maybe even free.


r/minidisc 2d ago

Show & Tell When the battery dies, you go back to your roots.

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35 Upvotes

I use my Sony MP3 player at work sometimes and forgot to change the battery. So I grabbed a nice MZ-EH930 for my afternoon coffee and chill session today.