MINT YOUR OWN DISCS....

As someone born in the mid-70's, i've been witness to several changes in technology and trends, especially in the world of musical playback formats. When i was a kid, vinyl and cassettes were the way we all heard music: CD's, although launched in the early 80's, didn't become popular with - and affordable to - the wider public until the end of the decade, and of course the MP3, the downloadable music file, and the iPod became a dominant force by the middle of the 00's. Some formats were dead ends commercially, such as the Digital Compact Cassette and the DAT (Digital Audio Tape) were generally used only by musicians and recording studio types. The DCC (created by Philips) was considered to be in competition with Sony's shiny new Minidisc, which was like a smaller CD housed in a square cartridge, like a floppy disk. Like the CD, it was launched several years before it - or the equipment needed to play it - became affordable to the general public, although it didn't catch on as successfully as the CD, as very few albums were released on the format. Record companies were generally not interested as CD's were already dominant and cheaper to make. So the Minidisc became promoted more as a superior replacement for the cassette tape, which it certainly was: it was claimed that you could re-record on them almost infinitely, search time was far quicker than on a cassette or even the CD, you could edit/split/combine tracks, and from 2000 onwards the ability to extend the recording time by 4 times (the MDLP or MiniDiscLongPlay), with little change in sound quality. Perfect for creating mixtapes! I'd been reading about them for a while and was quite intrigued by the possibilities of making my own compilations, as well as recording programmes from the radio - i've been listening to documentaries, dramas, etc on Radio 4 for years, and not just music-related stuff - and in the Autumn of 2000 i went into the Sony store in Nottingham to buy a new stereo system. To my joy, they had one with a MD player/recorder built in, and one that could be programmed to record by timer. I snapped it up, along with a box of blank Minidiscs, and within the hour i was back at home discovering what my new toy could do.

A Sony CMT-CP505MD system, it would see me in good stead for the next 12 years. The sound was great, and the possibilities for creating my own library of mixtapes and radio programme collections excited me. One of the benefits would be a chance to edit down the collection of CD singles i'd amassed over the years. At this point in my life, i was still buying a lot of singles, but storage room was running out fast, room i needed for my ever growing album collection (which at this point was entirely on CD, no vinyl or cassettes). Plus compiling all my singles on these new miniature wonders would allow me to sell them on. So the cull began. Being an ordered type,  all but a few treasured singles were recorded alphabetically across about 10 or so MiniDiscs, which took some considerable time! I also started creating yearly "best ofs", compiling favourite singles, b-sides and album tracks. I had a lot of time on my hands back then, especially working nights. I also began recording music documentaries, comedies, science shows and so on from Radio 2 and 4, and being able to record over them time and time again without any drop in quality or tape snapping and unspooling was a godsend. I would spend hours recording, entering the track and artist names, program titles, editing and clipping. It would be a year or so before i bought a portable MiniDisc player, so listening to my collection was consigned to the house for now, but i didn't mind. I never really got into buying pre-recorded albums though, partly because there wasn't a lot of choice - the only two i had were Free All Angels by Ash and Origin Of Symmetry by Muse - and partly because i saw it mainly as a replacement for blank C90's.  I don't have the stereo, the portable, or any MiniDiscs now, leaving the stereo at my Dads when i moved in with the missus, a move that also necessitated a cull of my CD collection due to less space. The MiniDisc, generally unloved by the wider public, was left to die quietly after a few years, and in 2013 Sony stopped producing players although blank MD's can still be bought. The iPod and the download took over and i was not immune to their advances. But for a few years the MiniDisc provided a mixture of nostalgia for the cassettes of my younger years combined with modern tech and CD quality.