hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2259.txt

Episode: 2259
Title: HPR2259: Minidiscs: A Response to HPR 2212
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2259/hpr2259.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 00:30:02

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This is HPR episode 2,259 entitled Milidisk, a response to HPR 2,212.
It is hosted by John Culp and is about 17 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summary is, response to HPR 2,212 with my own uses and recollections of the awesome
legacy medium of the Milidisk.
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Hey everybody, this is John Culp and Lafayette Louisiana, and a long time since I recorded
anything, but we're on Marty Goa break right now, I thought it was time.
I'm walking past my truck right now and this is not going to be an episode about my truck
and I've got to confess, I did something bad.
I know I'm supposed to make an HPR episode for everything I do on my truck, but I recently
repaired something on there without recording.
And it was mainly because at the time I was doing the repair, my next door neighbor was
either mowing his grass or weed whacking or something like that and it was just this really
loud sound.
It would have not been very good, but what I did was fixed a coolant leak that I had traced
to what I thought was the thermostat and the gasket around that thermostat.
So I ordered a thermostat and this crazy RTV, is that what it's called?
This silicon stuff in a tube that you apply kind of like you're putting icing on a cake
or something and it creates a gasket.
So I got some of that stuff and I got a new thermostat, pulled out the old one, scraped
off all the old gasket residue.
So it was nice and clean, put the silicon gel gasket kind of thing on there, let it set
up for a while, then put the new thermostat in and then put the thing back together.
And it took a little time because I had a bunch of coolant that was kind of like spilled
all over my engine and took a little time for all that stuff to drip off.
After about four days, I could tell that it had worked.
There was no more leaking of coolant and now it's completely dry under my truck.
So I'm glad about that.
And the whole thing, it only costs maybe $17 or $18 I think for the thermostat and the
gasket stuff.
So glad about that.
What I wanted to talk about today was it's kind of a response episode, man I'm sorry,
it's windy like that.
I didn't think it was this windy.
I'm going to try to shield the microphone from the wind.
It has a windscreen on it.
This is my $2 microphone and it's got a windscreen, but it's blowing enough right now
that I'm worried it won't, it won't quite shield out the wind.
I just hear the sound of a, I thought I just heard a, I just walked across the bridge
over the coolant and I thought I'd just heard a waterfall crying out, maybe not.
Anyway, I'm doing a response episode to somebody, I'm sorry, I don't remember the name
right now.
It was a guy who did an episode about mini discs and I wanted to respond with my own
story of mini discs and it begins when I was in graduate school.
I want to say probably 1998 or so was when I first heard about the mini disc as a technology
and it was because I was working in the field of musicology which has a sort of sister field
called ethnomusicology.
Now ethnomusicologists as part of their research very frequently have to go out and do fieldwork
and the fieldwork involves making recordings of either interviews or musical performances
or both and I remember the ethnomusicology students and one of my faculty members talking
about this crazy new thing that was really really small and made incredibly high quality
recordings called a mini disc that you could take out into the field, it had a long battery
life and you could store lots and lots of recorded audio on these little discs.
And so when it came time to do my own sort of field research where I was studying the
music of a composer from Argentina and I got a dissertation research grant to travel
to Buenos Aires for three weeks and I used part of that money to buy myself a mini disc
recorder and a high quality digital microphone.
So the recorder that I got was a sharp MD702 and it was a portable kind.
They also made rack mounted kind of like component type mini disc recorders and players as
well.
The mine was one of the little bitty ones.
It could fit in your pocket although it was kind of thick.
The microphone was a Sony stereo digital mic, I forget the model number, I could probably
look it up when I get home.
But it made amazing recordings and I really liked a number of things about it.
I wanted that the recording was very clean sounding.
It's like there's no tape hiss or anything like that.
I liked the fact that the device itself was very small so I could tuck it into one of
the pockets of my shoulder bag, microphone likewise.
It came with a little mic stand that I could use if I were conducting an interview.
I could just put it on the table there between us and it would not be anything intrusive.
And I also liked the fact that you could do pretty easy digital editing of your audio
files on the thing using the device itself.
You could split tracks, you could join tracks, you could cut out bits of audio by splitting
in two different places and then deleting the part in the middle.
And you could also put labels on the tracks so that the digital readout would show the
names of the tracks on there.
So it was a great medium, I really, really liked it and I've got probably 30 little mini
discs still that I left over from my research and various other things.
The other context in which I used mini disc was the year that I was working as an overnight
radio announcer at a radio station in Austin, Texas.
That's where I did my doctorate was at the University of Texas at Austin.
I got a job, I got a part time job at a local publicly funded radio station called 89.5 KMFA
that played classical music 24 hours a day.
And I was hired right at the time when they decided to go to 24 hour programming.
Because apparently up until that time they kept the programming going up until I don't
know midnight or 1 a.m. and then they would start up again at 6 a.m.
There's a guy coming up behind me and some vehicle, I can hear him approaching.
But when they decided to go to 24 hour programming they needed to hire people to work the overnight
shift and I was one of those people.
And so there goes the guy in the vehicle.
So I went in to interview for the job and I had to record a little audition tape and
they had me record it on a mini disc.
And one of the things they were looking for was, you know, I had the kind of knowledge
that was harder for them to train, you know, I intuitively understood all of the different
things you needed to say about a classical music recording when you were playing it or
when it was finished, you know, who the conductor was, who the solos might have been, the name
of the orchestra, which movement we heard or any of that kind of thing.
And I could also off the cuff talk about interesting musical or historical background
things about them because my training was in musicology.
So that part of it was no problem.
But the part that the program director wanted here was how I sounded on microphone.
And so apparently he thought I was okay on the day of my interview they actually let
me go live right on the air after listening to my tape.
He said, yeah, put them on the air for the next break.
And so right during the mid-day time, I don't know, noon, one o'clock when a lot of people
are listening, they put me for my very first time live on the air.
And I'll tell you right now, my heart was pounding.
But I pulled it off okay, the program director liked what he heard, so he hired me, eight
bucks an hour.
That's not a lot of money, but if you're going to have to work for eight bucks an hour,
I don't know that any, there are very many jobs cooler than getting to be on the radio.
So I really enjoyed that.
I worked overnight shifts.
And then when the daytime folks either were out sick or when on vacation, they would hire
me to cover their slots as well.
But where the mini disc comes in is at that time, this radio station anyway, did not use
the old cart system for the promotional segments and stuff, you know, little advertisements
and stuff like that.
What they used with mini discs, in the control room, they had two commercial grade CD players
to play the music.
And then right on top of each one of those was a rack mounted mini disc recorder and
player.
And on the mini disc, they would have promotional items either public service announcements
or announcements about underwriters for the programming or upcoming events, promotional
things for various special programs they had all during the week.
And so in between the musical numbers, I would have to read out some of the spoken announcements,
public service things, community news, the weather.
And then I would usually play something off of a mini disc as well.
And then also some of the weekly programs, like there was a guy who did a program called
want to say pipe dreams or something, there was all organ music.
And he always produced that show and then mixed it down to mini disc.
And so when that time came, usually it was like two o'clock in the morning when the replay
of his show would come on.
I would pop in the mini disc and hit play and it would play for an hour and then it
was over.
And I remember one time.
I was actually able to kind of save his show.
Something had gone wrong in the transfer of the program over to mini disc or something
where once it got to a certain beginning of a certain track, it skipped all the way to
the end of the disc instead of playing the next track and it wouldn't stop doing that.
And they had left me a little note with the mini disc saying something's wrong with
this, if it doesn't work right, get ready to play something else.
And so while some other music was playing, leading up to the time slot for this, I listened
to what was happening on the mini disc and found the spot where it kept skipping.
And I got out, either I used my own mini disc recorder or I used the one there, but I
found the spot that was one second before the end of the track and split the track right
there and then deleted the one second segment that led into the problematic bit.
And then from there on, it played perfectly.
So I kind of was able to save the show by doing a little bit of on the fly editing on
the mini disc.
Nowadays I suspect they probably just use wave files or MP3 files or something like that
instead of any kind of physical medium.
But at the time we used CDs, we used mini discs and backups for the database, we're actually
done on tape and part of my jobs as the overnight guy was to go in there and swap out the backup
tape from the database computer.
And then even that was, that's it.
No, I should tell another story about the mini discs and that is when I went to Argentina
to do my research.
I have my suitcase stolen.
Now my mini disc recorder and my microphone and my cable and I think a couple of discs were
all in my shoulder bag that I had with me, but my suitcase had the AC adapter and it got
stolen.
And so I was there with my recorder and no way to charge it up.
I walked all over Buenos Aires trying to find an electronic shop that could sell me
a little AC adapter and I finally found one and it worked okay while I was there.
But then when I got back to the States, it had the wrong kind of plugs.
Now you couldn't plug it into our walls and so I found a battery case on eBay that would
let you attach this little gizmo to the device and then just run it from AA batteries.
So that's how I used it from there on.
At some point, I don't remember what prompted me to try it, but at some point I thought I
wanted to try to make a USB AC adapter for the thing.
And so I took a USB cable and cut off one end and soldered on the little adapter plug that
fit into the mini-disc recorder.
I soldered that onto the, you know, the plugless end of the USB cable that I had cut.
I've actually got a video on YouTube showing pictures of this and me talking about
and stuff.
And then I would plug in the USB cable to a computer that gives what five volts of power
and that actually worked.
And so I kind of improvised a USB power source for this sharp mini-disc recorder.
It worked for a while, but, you know, I had intended to record this episode on the sharp
mini-disc recorder, but it wouldn't boot up anymore.
I think it's dead.
So it goes, you know, not going to be too upset about it.
We've got other things to record with now, including the phone in my pocket, which does
a great job.
Anyway, I think that's probably about all I wanted to say about the mini-disc recorders.
They were very important to me at one time in my life, and for a while now I've done
without them completely, but it was a pretty cool kind of technology.
All right.
I will talk to you guys later.
Bye.
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