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Comment by ssharp | Hacker News Reader

How would you have done this? USB wasn't around in the mid-90's, so you would have needed something that plugged into a serial port.

Would that have been that much worse than just running a 3mm cable from the MiniDisk headphone out to the computer's mic/line in? Or was Sony somehow preventing that?

I played around a lot with music trackers (production tool) during this time and often did the reverse so I could hear my productions on other stereos or in the car -- that is running computer output to a tape deck and recording to tape. This was obviously before CD burners were affordable.

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The very first player, the MZ-1, had S/PDIF digital outputs:

https://imgur.com/a/1mn81tN

But it had an "SCMS" copy protection scheme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc#Copy_protection

I think some Minidisc players had digital audio as SPDIF or TosLink.

I'm not certain though; it's 20 years since I last used mine, and I wouldn't have had anything to connect it to except analogue audio.

For sure they had! Had a Sanyo MD player and I certainly did digital audio transfer via Toslink.

I assume they are talking about the USB-enabled MD players of the early 2000s

Correct!

> How would you have done this? USB wasn't around in the mid-90's, so you would have needed something that plugged into a serial port.

Probably the NetMD series which supported compressed storage onto “data” MDs.

While I never had a use for transferring off of MDs, the software used to manage MD contents was indeed one of the poorest I’ve ever had the misfortune to interact with. Even the worst eras of iTunes (which had generally been pretty shit especially on windows) does not come close to the utter dreck and absolute disaster that was SonicStage.

Was hoping someone would mention SonicStage. Sony forced you to use that awful software if you wanted to add music to your Walkman flash memory based MP3/4 players before they eventually gave up and let you just drag-and-drop as if it were a USB stick on newer models.

That software made iTunes on Windows feel fast.

USB wasn't around in the mid-90's

USB 1.0 was introduced in 1996, which is very much "mid 90s". Then again, it wasn't very popular and at 12Mbps for "full speed", it would not have been very fast.

I don't recall seeing USB (granted, this was my limited view as a teenager at the time) until the late 90's and I don't think I had a PC with USB until at least 2000 or 2001.

My girlfriend at the time started college in Fall 1999 and got a new laptop. She later got a CD burner and I remember it hooked up via serial port.

It definitely took a few years to see it become common. Mac may have been the first to really push it, but that would have been late-90's as well, post-Jobs' return.

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