When the Future of Music got stuck in the Past

Posted by Mike
A picture of a mug with a funny slogan on it relating to MiniDiscs

T=shirts and gifts available now at The Temple of MiniDisc

I’ve still got two working MiniDisc players, plus a portable MiniDisc Walkman that I haven’t checked on recently, but I’d put money on it working just fine even after all these years.

I can’t help but feel a certain fondness for the MiniDisc format. Maybe it’s because of the countless hours I spent back in the 1990’s painstakingly naming every track on my MiniDisc archive of band recordings and rehearsals, plus all the many compilation discs recorded from my CD collection. It wasn’t easy, but it had to be done. It was also very important to make a full set of MiniDisc versions of all my mixtapes from the 1980’s.

Who knows how many hours I spent designing little covers for them. Or printing out tiny little tiny stickers for the edge of each MiniDisc, so I could find them more easily when scanning through a bunch of them on a shelf. And when I say ‘shelf’, I mean one of the shelves on the special MiniDisc case I made out of wood and screwed on to the wall next to the hi-fi. So yes – I’ve got many happy memories of the MiniDisc glory days.

I still think it’s a real shame that the MiniDisc format never really caught on though. What was once hailed as the future of digital audio recording, is now consigned to the dustbin of history. The Betamax of music.

Anyway, to keep the memory alive, and in the full and certain knowledge that the MiniDisc revival is just around the corner, I have added a few new designs to The Temple of MiniDisc – my online store where you can find lots of lovely t-shirts, hoodies, hats and loads more. Quality merchandise honouring the legacy of the greatest recording format of all time.

The Temple of MiniDisc is powered by Spreadshirt, but I’ve embedded it in a page on this site, which seems to work quite well. If you have any problems, or something doesn’t look quite right, let me know. Or you can visit the Spreadshop site minidisc.myspreadshop.co.uk here instead.

Thanks!

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