MD - how reliable Have you had any issues

[paulears]

Over the years, I have had many cases of other people reporting that they had lost disc content, but it had never happened to me until today - when I suddenly got the fatal words "Empty Disc" in the window. The 3 people in the room had all heard of it happening, but none of us could come up with a reason, or a process that we were doing that made any sense.

 

It would be useful to see if out of those people on here who have had a fault like this, we were all doing similar things - or if it is a random kind of issue that just 'happens'.

 

Feel free topost up any comments - I had a Tascam 801 CD player that was able to repair a few discs that were 'blank' - but I'm not aware of any others - if you know a machine that is good at fixing them, we'd all benefit.

 

Moderation: I've now added the not applicable options as if you've not had any problems, as the never question didn't work (thanks Peter and others)

[Andrew C]

Several years ago, I had "issues" with a particular model Sony MD player. The mists of time have erased which model from my brain...

 

Sony denied the problem even existed, even after I had taken a third machine to the local repair "contact" with exactly the same symptoms. "Blank Disk" on the display, when it patently wasn't as it had been used the evening before!

 

To this day I don't really know what caused them to become unplayable on Sony machines, and it is interesting to find out years (5-10) later that there are other machines afflicted.

 

Could the laser fail 'on' heating the disk to the Curie point, allowing stray magnetism to disrupt the ToC? Is there another mechanism for the recording to become unstable?

[iamchristuffin]

Most of the times I have had a 'Blank Disc' was my own fault - I was editing the names of many tracks in one go, getting bored of cycling through the menu options over and over again, when I didn't really think about what I was doing, and stopped on 'Erade Disc'. I didn't realise it at the time, and pressed 'Yes', so I lost the MD!! :) Can't blame anyone or anything by myself for these! But the only time it has happened which wasn't a persons fault was the first time I worked a show outside of my school - I'd recorded in MD Long Play on a Tascam MD350 at school, while the Sony MD Player at the venue didn't support MDLP, so it showed 'Blank Disc'. I had to tech without half the cues, but I recorded them again the next day!

[dan slv-tech]

ive had discs erase, firstly on a sony machine and more recently a tascam MD301, not a happy bunny, given up on MD now as its not as reliabe as I believed it was, I tend to use a hard disk recorder now

 

dan

[Lamplighter]

One of my earlier MD shows had 98 effects, all heavily edited on the same disc. It was pretty full. I was taken ill and handed over to another user who phoned after a couple of performances to say one effect had vanished. I checked the disc and found this was so. The particular effect only appeared once in the show and had been ok through rehearsals and at least one performance. Since then I limit the number of effects per disc, spreading them over a number of discs if required. I also copy the final layout of each disc to a new show disc so the tracks are in order and minimal editing is left on the final disc. I have had no lost tracks since adopting this strategy. I am still using the machine on which the loss occurred, though to be fair most of the editing is now done on computer. I have lost the odd track during editing but would put "operator error" at the top of the list of probable cause, along with old git syndrome.

Brian

[p.k.roberts]

Never had the problem myself, but I know others who have had to resort to this with some success ...

 

http://www.minidisc.org/cloning_procedure.html

 

BTW the poll doesn't work with the 'Never' option.

[MarkPAman]

Like Andrew C, I've had problems that I was able to put down to a faulty machine. Possibly it was a Sony too, I don't remember, but any recording or editing (I voted editing as that was what I was trying to do first) resulted in a "Blank Disk" message every time.

I only let it mess up one important disk, others were just for testing. My final solution involved a hammer and a skip!

[Andrew C]

Very Old Thread And no, I don't know why it came back as "threaded" either! :)

 

Moderation: Fixed it so the link isn't threaded, and I'll looking into fixing the search issue soon.

[peternewman]

Oops :). It would appear I've found a bug in IPB, which has resulted in me clearing all the vote totals, I'm assuming however it will still think you've voted, so if anyone encounters that, if they'd just like to send me a short PM I'll perform some database jiggery pokery and allow you to vote again. :)

 

Moderation: - it's ok, my browser had cached the page, so I put them back - so alls well - paul

[gnomatron]

bah, I voted "never" and then remembered that I have had a couple of discs erased during recording! however that was on a portable player that was on it's last legs and which I replaced shortly afterwards. It had problems writing the TOC, which corrupted the disc such that the data wasn't recoverable - or at any rate not with any kit I had access to. Your problem could be something similar.

 

I've had far more problems with MD hardware than with discs themselves though, but that's largely due to using small portable players - lots of small moving parts to go wrong, and pockets to batter them about in.

 

The newer sony models with USB links are pretty good, they'd maybe be a good solution for show discs - you could do all your editing in software and then keep the original on your computer. (along with all the other vital data you couldn't bear to lose...)

[Pete McCrea]

Happened once on my old MD Walkman. Twas one evening whilst deep in the bowels on the Uni Library revising for a Structral Analysis and Design module, listening to some DnB from an Essential Mix taped off Radio 1, when all of a sudden the machine stopped. It proceeded to make some random noises like a Laser Head trying to find it's place on the disc, then stopped. So I tried to play the disk again- no Joy. Ejected the disk then put it back in, to which it proudly proclaimed it to be a blank disk....

 

Never happened again since. That said I haven't listened to a Minidisc since I finished my Degree just over three years ago. However I do want to get some of the old tracks onto iTunes so might have to dust my MD301 off.