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Lee Hanken
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hpr_transcripts/hpr2259.txt
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Episode: 2259
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Title: HPR2259: Minidiscs: A Response to HPR 2212
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2259/hpr2259.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-19 00:30:02
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---
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This is HPR episode 2,259 entitled Milidisk, a response to HPR 2,212.
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It is hosted by John Culp and is about 17 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
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The summary is, response to HPR 2,212 with my own uses and recollections of the awesome
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legacy medium of the Milidisk.
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This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honest host.com.
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At 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
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Better web hosting that's honest and fair at An HonestHose.com.
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Hey everybody, this is John Culp and Lafayette Louisiana, and a long time since I recorded
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anything, but we're on Marty Goa break right now, I thought it was time.
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I'm walking past my truck right now and this is not going to be an episode about my truck
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and I've got to confess, I did something bad.
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I know I'm supposed to make an HPR episode for everything I do on my truck, but I recently
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repaired something on there without recording.
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And it was mainly because at the time I was doing the repair, my next door neighbor was
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either mowing his grass or weed whacking or something like that and it was just this really
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loud sound.
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It would have not been very good, but what I did was fixed a coolant leak that I had traced
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to what I thought was the thermostat and the gasket around that thermostat.
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So I ordered a thermostat and this crazy RTV, is that what it's called?
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This silicon stuff in a tube that you apply kind of like you're putting icing on a cake
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or something and it creates a gasket.
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So I got some of that stuff and I got a new thermostat, pulled out the old one, scraped
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off all the old gasket residue.
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So it was nice and clean, put the silicon gel gasket kind of thing on there, let it set
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up for a while, then put the new thermostat in and then put the thing back together.
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And it took a little time because I had a bunch of coolant that was kind of like spilled
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all over my engine and took a little time for all that stuff to drip off.
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After about four days, I could tell that it had worked.
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There was no more leaking of coolant and now it's completely dry under my truck.
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So I'm glad about that.
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And the whole thing, it only costs maybe $17 or $18 I think for the thermostat and the
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gasket stuff.
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So glad about that.
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What I wanted to talk about today was it's kind of a response episode, man I'm sorry,
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it's windy like that.
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I didn't think it was this windy.
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I'm going to try to shield the microphone from the wind.
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It has a windscreen on it.
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This is my $2 microphone and it's got a windscreen, but it's blowing enough right now
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that I'm worried it won't, it won't quite shield out the wind.
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I just hear the sound of a, I thought I just heard a, I just walked across the bridge
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over the coolant and I thought I'd just heard a waterfall crying out, maybe not.
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Anyway, I'm doing a response episode to somebody, I'm sorry, I don't remember the name
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right now.
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It was a guy who did an episode about mini discs and I wanted to respond with my own
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story of mini discs and it begins when I was in graduate school.
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I want to say probably 1998 or so was when I first heard about the mini disc as a technology
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and it was because I was working in the field of musicology which has a sort of sister field
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called ethnomusicology.
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Now ethnomusicologists as part of their research very frequently have to go out and do fieldwork
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and the fieldwork involves making recordings of either interviews or musical performances
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or both and I remember the ethnomusicology students and one of my faculty members talking
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about this crazy new thing that was really really small and made incredibly high quality
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recordings called a mini disc that you could take out into the field, it had a long battery
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life and you could store lots and lots of recorded audio on these little discs.
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And so when it came time to do my own sort of field research where I was studying the
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music of a composer from Argentina and I got a dissertation research grant to travel
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to Buenos Aires for three weeks and I used part of that money to buy myself a mini disc
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recorder and a high quality digital microphone.
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So the recorder that I got was a sharp MD702 and it was a portable kind.
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They also made rack mounted kind of like component type mini disc recorders and players as
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well.
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The mine was one of the little bitty ones.
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It could fit in your pocket although it was kind of thick.
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The microphone was a Sony stereo digital mic, I forget the model number, I could probably
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look it up when I get home.
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But it made amazing recordings and I really liked a number of things about it.
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I wanted that the recording was very clean sounding.
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It's like there's no tape hiss or anything like that.
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I liked the fact that the device itself was very small so I could tuck it into one of
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the pockets of my shoulder bag, microphone likewise.
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It came with a little mic stand that I could use if I were conducting an interview.
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I could just put it on the table there between us and it would not be anything intrusive.
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And I also liked the fact that you could do pretty easy digital editing of your audio
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files on the thing using the device itself.
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You could split tracks, you could join tracks, you could cut out bits of audio by splitting
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in two different places and then deleting the part in the middle.
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And you could also put labels on the tracks so that the digital readout would show the
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names of the tracks on there.
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So it was a great medium, I really, really liked it and I've got probably 30 little mini
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discs still that I left over from my research and various other things.
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The other context in which I used mini disc was the year that I was working as an overnight
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radio announcer at a radio station in Austin, Texas.
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That's where I did my doctorate was at the University of Texas at Austin.
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I got a job, I got a part time job at a local publicly funded radio station called 89.5 KMFA
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that played classical music 24 hours a day.
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And I was hired right at the time when they decided to go to 24 hour programming.
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Because apparently up until that time they kept the programming going up until I don't
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know midnight or 1 a.m. and then they would start up again at 6 a.m.
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There's a guy coming up behind me and some vehicle, I can hear him approaching.
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But when they decided to go to 24 hour programming they needed to hire people to work the overnight
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shift and I was one of those people.
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And so there goes the guy in the vehicle.
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So I went in to interview for the job and I had to record a little audition tape and
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they had me record it on a mini disc.
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And one of the things they were looking for was, you know, I had the kind of knowledge
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that was harder for them to train, you know, I intuitively understood all of the different
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things you needed to say about a classical music recording when you were playing it or
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when it was finished, you know, who the conductor was, who the solos might have been, the name
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of the orchestra, which movement we heard or any of that kind of thing.
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And I could also off the cuff talk about interesting musical or historical background
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things about them because my training was in musicology.
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So that part of it was no problem.
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But the part that the program director wanted here was how I sounded on microphone.
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And so apparently he thought I was okay on the day of my interview they actually let
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me go live right on the air after listening to my tape.
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He said, yeah, put them on the air for the next break.
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And so right during the mid-day time, I don't know, noon, one o'clock when a lot of people
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are listening, they put me for my very first time live on the air.
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And I'll tell you right now, my heart was pounding.
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But I pulled it off okay, the program director liked what he heard, so he hired me, eight
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bucks an hour.
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That's not a lot of money, but if you're going to have to work for eight bucks an hour,
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I don't know that any, there are very many jobs cooler than getting to be on the radio.
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So I really enjoyed that.
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I worked overnight shifts.
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And then when the daytime folks either were out sick or when on vacation, they would hire
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me to cover their slots as well.
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But where the mini disc comes in is at that time, this radio station anyway, did not use
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the old cart system for the promotional segments and stuff, you know, little advertisements
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and stuff like that.
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What they used with mini discs, in the control room, they had two commercial grade CD players
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to play the music.
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And then right on top of each one of those was a rack mounted mini disc recorder and
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player.
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And on the mini disc, they would have promotional items either public service announcements
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or announcements about underwriters for the programming or upcoming events, promotional
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things for various special programs they had all during the week.
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And so in between the musical numbers, I would have to read out some of the spoken announcements,
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public service things, community news, the weather.
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And then I would usually play something off of a mini disc as well.
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And then also some of the weekly programs, like there was a guy who did a program called
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want to say pipe dreams or something, there was all organ music.
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And he always produced that show and then mixed it down to mini disc.
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And so when that time came, usually it was like two o'clock in the morning when the replay
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of his show would come on.
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I would pop in the mini disc and hit play and it would play for an hour and then it
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was over.
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And I remember one time.
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I was actually able to kind of save his show.
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Something had gone wrong in the transfer of the program over to mini disc or something
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where once it got to a certain beginning of a certain track, it skipped all the way to
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the end of the disc instead of playing the next track and it wouldn't stop doing that.
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And they had left me a little note with the mini disc saying something's wrong with
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this, if it doesn't work right, get ready to play something else.
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And so while some other music was playing, leading up to the time slot for this, I listened
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to what was happening on the mini disc and found the spot where it kept skipping.
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And I got out, either I used my own mini disc recorder or I used the one there, but I
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found the spot that was one second before the end of the track and split the track right
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there and then deleted the one second segment that led into the problematic bit.
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And then from there on, it played perfectly.
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So I kind of was able to save the show by doing a little bit of on the fly editing on
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the mini disc.
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Nowadays I suspect they probably just use wave files or MP3 files or something like that
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instead of any kind of physical medium.
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But at the time we used CDs, we used mini discs and backups for the database, we're actually
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done on tape and part of my jobs as the overnight guy was to go in there and swap out the backup
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tape from the database computer.
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And then even that was, that's it.
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No, I should tell another story about the mini discs and that is when I went to Argentina
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to do my research.
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I have my suitcase stolen.
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Now my mini disc recorder and my microphone and my cable and I think a couple of discs were
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all in my shoulder bag that I had with me, but my suitcase had the AC adapter and it got
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stolen.
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And so I was there with my recorder and no way to charge it up.
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I walked all over Buenos Aires trying to find an electronic shop that could sell me
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a little AC adapter and I finally found one and it worked okay while I was there.
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But then when I got back to the States, it had the wrong kind of plugs.
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Now you couldn't plug it into our walls and so I found a battery case on eBay that would
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let you attach this little gizmo to the device and then just run it from AA batteries.
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So that's how I used it from there on.
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At some point, I don't remember what prompted me to try it, but at some point I thought I
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wanted to try to make a USB AC adapter for the thing.
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And so I took a USB cable and cut off one end and soldered on the little adapter plug that
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fit into the mini-disc recorder.
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I soldered that onto the, you know, the plugless end of the USB cable that I had cut.
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I've actually got a video on YouTube showing pictures of this and me talking about
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and stuff.
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And then I would plug in the USB cable to a computer that gives what five volts of power
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and that actually worked.
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And so I kind of improvised a USB power source for this sharp mini-disc recorder.
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It worked for a while, but, you know, I had intended to record this episode on the sharp
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mini-disc recorder, but it wouldn't boot up anymore.
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I think it's dead.
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So it goes, you know, not going to be too upset about it.
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We've got other things to record with now, including the phone in my pocket, which does
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a great job.
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Anyway, I think that's probably about all I wanted to say about the mini-disc recorders.
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They were very important to me at one time in my life, and for a while now I've done
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without them completely, but it was a pretty cool kind of technology.
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All right.
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I will talk to you guys later.
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Bye.
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You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at HackerPublicRadio.org.
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