MiniDisc Commercial 1997

The MiniDisc, or bootlegs' best friend!
Orphans of portable DATs, we were happy to record live concerts with cassette tapes (MC): they were cheap, they were compatible with any player, but tape noise was terrifying.
Then came MiniDisc: as comfortable as cassettes, they really sounded great! They weren't too expensive, they used rewritable media, lasting 74 minutes: in two and a half hours, you would stop recording only once (and the battery lasted even longer!).
On MiniDisc you could adjust the input volume, avoiding saturation, and there was no tape rustle: recording at low volume had no side effects!
The problems, alas, were not lacking: unlike the cassettes, the MiniDisc recordings skipped at every bump (and we were using them at live concerts!). Also, they didn't have digital outputs: how could we copy files to hard disk, now?
Many people resigned themselves and connected their PC to the headphones output, as if it were an analogue cassette recording: a real disgrace, the quality degraded a lot.
Someone else, like myself, also bought a tabletop MiniDisc player, which costed like hell, but had an optical output: in this way, I could copy digital data without loss, but it was very slow (1x).
Finally, just before MiniDiscs disappeared from circulation, a few models with a very standard USB output had finally been produced (hallelujah!). Finally, a quick and convenient copy!!! Everything fine? NØ: the files had .ogg extension, they were coded with a thing called ATRAC, and, at the time, there were no conversion programs! So, making them wave or mp3 (that is, something normal) without losing quality was a nightmare.
Anyway, we did it: thanks to MiniDiscs, we have the recordings of some concerts that made history!
The advent of recorders that save on common SD cards (such as Edirol) made obsolete anything else: from the mid-zero years we finally have recorders that do not jump, save in wave, have all kinds of controls and also record four or five hours straight without running out of space or battery.
But let me thank the faithful friends of the best concerts of my dirty life: long live the MiniDisc!!!