I jumped to MD in 1997 because I was still using cassette for mobile music consumption. Because of the media size, there wasn't a pocketable portable CD player, and skipping was a problem (that got fixed later) so I never switched to CD for mobile use.
Compared to tapes, MiniDisc was a godsend: no eaten tapes, random access playback, smaller size, better sound, song titles, and it was just so cool looking. I also used a MiniDisc a lot to record and transcribe meetings at work. The live audio recording was excellent.
The main disadvantage I ran into was that even with an optical digital connection, recording a 60-minute album from CD to MD took 60 minutes. I seldom ran into recordable media or prerecorded titles in the wild, even in New York (although Tower carried them), but there were lots of good online stores back then to buy blanks and new players.
I stuck with it until 2002, when the second-generation iPods showed up. It was easier to carry one thing, and not a player and a bunch of loose discs. I still have a giant anvil road case with a few hundred of them in storage, although who knows if they delaminate or turn into oil over the decades.
A few years back I bought a couple of assorted batch lots off eBay from people selling out of an old collection, or just selling an old collection wholesale. Some new discs still in the cellophane, too - mostly Neige, but I have a couple of Color Club ones in there somewhere. I still have my own small collection bought with high school summer-job money, too. And I have exactly one Hi-MD disc, that came with the MZ-RH1 I bought for ripping - an accident, I think that must have been, since the price I paid matched other player-only sales and didn't include the $60 or so that Hi-MD discs were going for around the same time.
Most failures I've seen have been mechanical, whether due to mistreatment by a prior owner or, with a couple of the TDK ones I bought as a kid, the glue that holds the case window in growing brittle with age.
The media itself, like flash memory, is perishable with enough write cycles, and I think I've run into two discs so far that were mechanically sound but unreadable. Certainly I never had that kind of failure back in the day, and I must've rewritten some of those discs a few dozen times - they weren't cheap then, and summer-job money only stretches so far. Certainly if there are any common failure modes comparable to sticky-shed syndrome, I haven't run into them.
Granted, it's been a couple of years; I wrapped most of the really intensive research once I got my ripping setup in place a little while before the pandemic kicked off. (For unencumbered full-quality digital ripping, you need an MZ-RH1 specifically, plus SonicStage iirc 3.4.3 and some drivers I had to dig a bit to find. I keep meaning to rehost that stuff somewhere along with a howto, but there's lots of other ways I have to spend my time of late - I'd be happy to hand the whole package off as a zipfile with my notes, if someone were interested.)
So I might be overlooking something at this point, especially without referring to notes, but my overall impression is entirely that, given a working recorder or player, all or nearly all of your discs should still be perfectly usable.
Because if they had a choice of paying someone to answer questions for free or paying them to develop features that generate revenue, which one do you think they pick? Yes, there's the whole narrative about customer satisfaction and call deflection and quality and whatever else. Every FAANG's got rooms full of people looking at data stream in, and they all say "I bet if we do nothing, they'll just throw it in the garbage and buy a new one."
If you want a fast answer to a question from Microsoft, have your company pay two hundred grand a year (or more) for Unified Enterprise Support. They will be more than happy to spend hours on the phone with you working on your exact problem. One time I had them set up a conference call at two in the morning to show a team how to set up some byzantine Platform Builder installation, in Korean. Money talks.
In about 2002, I had a Handspring Visor Prism, running PalmOS. I bought the VisorPhone, which was a cellular phone add-on that plugged into the back. It was somewhat ungainly, and didn't work well as a voice phone. It also had a separate battery, so you had to charge it on its own. I could use it as a cellular modem, but there wasn't a good practical use case for it, because there were only half-baked web browsers and few apps that used data. You could dial in to your desktop computer over the modem and sync remotely. It was fairly useless, but was the early precursor of what eventually became the Treo, and showed that the combination of cell phone and PDA was a good idea.
Gopher was a pretty brief blip in my career, but I remember being insanely excited about it for about three months of 1991.
Apple's OpenDoc was a pretty neat idea, until I actually tried it on an anemic Centris computer in 1996.
And I still have a few hundred MiniDiscs and a couple of players in storage. From 1997-2002 or so, those were in daily use on my subway commute, until the iPod came along.
Interesting - I'm curious if the small labels doing releases are using recordable magneto-optical MDs. (I'm assuming so.)
In its heyday, there were a limited number of prerecorded releases, mostly from Sony. They didn't use M-O discs, and were pressed aluminum/plastic inside the shutter case, similar to a CD. They were supposedly much cheaper per-unit, but with a high setup cost.
I still have a handful of the prerecorded ones. My favorite is Pink Floyd's _Delicate Sound of Thunder_, which was two MDs in a special dual case that fit no storage system ever imaginable. Just looked these up on eBay, and I think I figured out my retirement plan.
Look up the history of FM broadcast automation for more on how this worked - it's fascinating. Starting in the 60s, companies like Drake-Chenault started implementing these Rube Goldberg-esque analog systems that involved tapes with subaudible tones at the ends of songs that would trigger a relay system playing other tapes or cartridges with commercials on them. Stations would subscribe to a service that would send them new tapes with the latest Top 40, AOR, or MOR hits, and then they'd record carts for local ads, weather, and news.
I'm a manager. (Sorry.) I do a weekly Friday "Ask me anything" on Zoom that's basically a free-form training session where people reporting to me (or other teams are fine, too) ask about how to do something or how we should be doing something, and we walk through it in video.
One reason I started this is we had a mix of junior people, people who came in from acquisitions, and people who had changed tools and weren't sure of best practices. This stuff was supposed to be documented in wiki pages, and a lot of times it was, but when we'd run through it hands-on, we'd find details that weren't documented or had gone stale.
Another reason is that formal written-in-advance training sessions are overbearing for everyone involved. They take too much time to prepare, too much time to give, nobody pays attention because they don't like being talked to, and if things go off script, the presenter has to scramble to adapt. It was better for someone to say on Monday "I need to know more about how we're supposed to be doing GitHub PR reviews" and then on Friday, I'd have a post-it of notes and we'd fire up a browser, go through a fake PR or look at an old one, and maybe talk about pain points or what isn't working.
Also, we'd record these and store them for posterity, and so people in other time zones could catch them later.
Seldom, except when we on-boarded new people. This was mostly to counter when the folks on one continent would feel left out when folks on another continent were given custom training, and the feeling that institutional knowledge was being hoarded by different teams.
(In reality, they were doing a lot more off-boarding than on-boarding in my last year there. And thanks to agile and daily releases, nobody had any free time to do less important things like training, days off, or sleeping.)
NASA first addressed this during the Skylab training. They sent two of each crew to a 14-day crash course at an Air Force dental clinic, where they took volunteers and started pulling teeth from patients.
What about a list of open-source projects in the Ukraine to support?
Of course I'd chip in a few bucks to sponsor companies on GitHub. But I can imagine there are enterprise companies that work in an OSS repo that are going to have bad resource problems and may struggle to survive (literally).
I realize there's an issue with a learning curve, and I'm just a dumb tech writer, but I'd seriously throw a few hours a day triaging out GitHub issues or doing whatever else I could to help.
I personally think the ideal is combining WA's and CO's requirements about salary bands in job-listings and CA's law about excluding previous compensation in hiring decisions.
Previous compensation matters to the employee, it's only a wage-suppression technique from the employer's side.
Compared to tapes, MiniDisc was a godsend: no eaten tapes, random access playback, smaller size, better sound, song titles, and it was just so cool looking. I also used a MiniDisc a lot to record and transcribe meetings at work. The live audio recording was excellent.
The main disadvantage I ran into was that even with an optical digital connection, recording a 60-minute album from CD to MD took 60 minutes. I seldom ran into recordable media or prerecorded titles in the wild, even in New York (although Tower carried them), but there were lots of good online stores back then to buy blanks and new players.
I stuck with it until 2002, when the second-generation iPods showed up. It was easier to carry one thing, and not a player and a bunch of loose discs. I still have a giant anvil road case with a few hundred of them in storage, although who knows if they delaminate or turn into oil over the decades.