In fairness a good few years back MP3 did overtake minidisc in terms of practicality for me, and I switched.

I can now fit *all of my music* on my phone on a 256GB sd card. + I can listen to it on my phone which I'll carry anyway to use as a phone, so one less thing to carry.
+ I can have several backups of my music in different places.

Digital is really the ultimate (literally) format imo. It should never go defunct.

One of these days I'll write a native Android app so I can listen to my music *exactly* how I want.. atm using 'Neutron' which sorta does everything.. So everything I want + loads of other shit I dont want and with a horrible UX.

Still minidisc were the best for a long time.. I used to bootleg gigs with a minidisc player and small lapel mic type thing with a tiny AA battery powered pre-amp. They sound great! The minidisc player compressed and amplified recordings.

I honestly like the sound of ATRAC compression and have tried to find a way to do it on a desktop just to get that sound as an effect, but it doesn't exist as far as i can tell. There was an free ATRAC3 codec floating around IIRC but no first gen ATRAC anywhere to be found. I wouldn't pay money for a lossy-compressed file but as a creative effect Minidisc compression definitely has its place.

Back in college one of my professors brought in his big, high end 1980s studio monitors and a top of the line DAC and set up a blind comparisn between Minidisc and uncompressed CD audio to demonstrate the problems with lossy compression. The thing was, everyone in the class including him could hear the difference between the Minidisc and the uncompressed audio but we also unanimously preferred the Minidisc. something about the way ATRAC compression sounds is really pleasing.

The problem with Minidisc is that if you tried to record live music with it, the bass would resonate with the disc and make it sip, I don't think I ever successfully recorded a live show without at least a couple of bass-related skips.

My experience was that minidisc players came on the market shortly before the first ipod. I know the existed before that, but popularity was limited. Everyone else had discman players.

Cool thing about the minidisc player I had was that I could just copy anyone's CD while we both listened to it in class, and neglected important education.

Sheet music and an oud or gtfo

I was the coolest guy in class the day after I got my Sharp MiniDisc-player. So 5 for nostalgia. The player fell apart rather quickly, though, should have saved up for a Sony model.

I had a mini disk player in high school