It's been two years this month since the first launch of the wiki, and I'm beyond happy to announce that the number of unique equipment entries on the MiniDisc Wiki has broken the four digit mark and now stands at 1225 pages at time of writing. In addition, there are 100 devices on our Missing Pages list, meaning that we expect our equipment pages to reach 1350 or more.

This is much greater than the 900 devices we originally expected, and cements the Wiki's position as the largest collection of MiniDisc equipment anywhere on the internet. We couldn't have done it without the hard work and dedication of dozens of MD fans adding pages, photos, corrections, and guides - thank you to every single person!

All of these additions have been in less than a year, as we had very little activity until the introduction of our Struct databases in March 2021 (read our first of these updates here - very quaint) That means that we have been adding more than 3 equipment pages per day throughout 2021.

Around 250 of these recently added pages are “stubs,” so there's a lot of work left to do to find more details, photos, and manuals. We're also moving these pages into tidier namespaces, so some URLs are set to change.

Other page statistics

Our 60+ unique contributors have added:

  • 289 portables
  • 169 decks
  • 232 bookshelf units
  • 84 boomboxes
  • 339 auto units (many need expanding)

Analytics

In the previous year (Feb 17th 2021 - Feb 17th 2022) Google reports:

  • 18,493 unique visitors
  • 130,073 page views
  • 150+ users per day since Christmas 2021
  • 148 different countries

Social media

  • 384 Twitter followers
  • 316 Discord server members
  • 5181 Subreddit members
  • 7 Patreon supporters

The MiniDisc development scene is working on some incredible projects! As a community, we're blessed to have so many talented programmers building software to make the MD experience much more enjoyable, or to better understand the MD format.

While the wiki takes no credit for any of these projects, we want to bring attention to them:

Web MiniDisc Pro

Web MiniDisc Pro is an enhanced fork of the original Web MiniDisc, with new features and support for more devices. Hosted as part of the wiki.

CD-to-NetMD

CD to NetMD is a desktop application for Windows, Mac, and Linux that supports ripping CDs (and CUE files) to MD. It supports CD Text, online lookup, and some gapless recording.

Remote reverse engineering

Several developers are working together to reverse-engineer and recreate Sony MD remotes. The protocol(s) are complicated and there is a lot of work to still do, but incredible progress has already been made.

If you haven't already, pick up a copy of the instant classic Sony MiniDisc: The (Not) Forgotten Format That (Never) Failed documentary from This Does Not Compute on VHS from Pacific Plaza Video - quantities are limited!!

Things are underway! We're awaiting a response to the email sent to the MiniDisc Day organizers, and have a series of 30th anniversary stickers made for our own events. Over the next month we'll be reaching out to record labels and content creators to try to arrange for some cool collabs.

We're playing with the idea of our increasing our social media presence with more content - actually using our Instagram account (@MiniDisc_wiki) as well as video content including device showcases and a video tutorial on how to use and contribute to the wiki. Your thoughts on this (and any other ideas) are greatly appreciated.

  • about/updates/2022-02-18.txt
  • Last modified: 2 years ago
  • by specialk