Big updates this month:

  • 750 equipment pages
  • New equipment start page
    • More equipment sorting pages
    • Disc export search
    • Data cleanup
  • MD to PC guide
  • Contribution guide
  • Press & marketing section
  • MiniDisc gallery

Let's get started!

By our estimates, we now have more than 80% of all MiniDisc equipment documented in some form. Unlisted devices are harder to come by as they become fewer, but our goal of having a page created for every piece of equipment ever built is coming closer and closer.

The equipment start page has been completely rebuilt with a new layout and buttons for filtering. We hope this will make finding devices and navigating through our 750(!) equipment pages easier.

More sorting pages

On that note, there are new custom filters on the equipment start page to show only devices that meet a common criteria: NetMD, slim players, decks, Hi-MD, and more. The detailed equipment listing also supports custom filtering.

Of note is the Export search, which lists all known devices that can export a disc to a digital format faster than real time. Please help us expand that list based on your knowledge.

Data cleanup

As we've mentioned in previous updates, we're trying to clean up and keep our Equipment database fields as correct as possible.

To this end, we've finally completed the move to the “Control” field for all USB connections, mostly for NetMD but with some exceptions.

The guide on backing up your MDs to a PC is now complete.

This guide should be useful to anyone looking to backup their MDs, whether they're old mixtapes you made in the 90s or obscure music you found when buying a lot of discs. If you want to backup the audio from a MiniDisc to a PC (and to re-use the disc) then check out our guide before you begin.

Our contribution guide has been expanded to cover more aspects of our wiki software and how to add content to the wiki. We aim to make contributing as easy as possible and always encourage more additions or corrections. Please don't be shy with editing pages!

One aspect of the MiniDisc format we're excited to preserve is the marketing material, magazine articles, billboard ads, and anyting else that covered the MD format during its commercial run. The section is currently empty, but we look forward to filling it with lots of archived material very soon.

We're playing with the idea of making a gallery page with all of our featured photos. If this is something that interests you, please let us know!

If enough photo submissions come in for the featured photo on the wiki front page, we may move to a weekly schedule for the photos. Please keep submitting your best shots of your collection or using MD in the wild.

Our aim of documenting every piece of MD equipment ever made is making amazing progress. With growth like this, our target of approximately 900 devices by Q1 2022 is looking more and more likely.

The MD community is alive and active, especially on our Discord server. From there we talk retro tech, coordinate wiki additions, and keep track of each change to the site. It's likely the most active MD chat room on the web, and we'd love to hit 200 members by the end of 2021.

To support our site hosting and admin costs, please consider a small contribution via our Patreon page. All support is appreciated and helps keep the wiki ad-free and sustainable for years to come.

Thank you so much to every member of the wiki team, who have put untold time and effort into finding and adapting all of this material. Although we aim to make adding content as easy as possible, some community members are going above and beyond to archive hundreds of pages for everyone to access and benefit from. We wouldn't be where we are without them.

  • about/updates/2021-10-07.txt
  • Last modified: 3 years ago
  • by specialk