Music Tech MiniDisks from a Deceased Japanese Music Archivist

[Khastle]

As many of you know by now I'm a music collector. It's a hobby that brings you little ROI and many people wonder why do it when you can just listen to your tunes on a streaming service or, if you want to get more retro, burn your music to a disk from very much accessible MP3 files. These are very valid arguments, but why I collect is out of love for music and wanting to archive my favourite albums through their physical releases. There's a great feeling on getting your hands on a rare release, especially if the album or artist is relatively underrated and unknown. Music appreciation and archivial, after all, was one of my main motivations in creating this site.

Through my purchases I've collected my fair few oddities and these MiniDisks that have fell into my possession I particularly want to share. To get straight to the point two months or so back a website called Vapor95 (https://vapor95.com) had a massive sale where they were getting rid of loads of stock due to them moving stores. One of the item(s) included in this sale were these strange MiniDisks with a story behind them: according to the description they were owned by a now deceased Japanese karaoke enthusiast who, most likely around the late 90s to early 2000s, had archived multiple songs from that period to supposedly over 2000 minidisks or so, some crazy respectable archivist shit. I bought eight of them and received nine, I guess they felt bad about sending me The Beatles one (lower right corner of image) which is understandable as The Beatles suck (cheeky bastards must have thought they were real slick sending it as they saw I was from the UK when packing).

What makes these MiniDisks interesting however and the main driver for me buying them is, going by the product's description, they have a high chance of containing music lost media on them from the time period they were burnt. Its very likely there's one or two songs on these that are archived no where online and the last surviving copies could exist on one of these disks. The main issue I'm having at the moment? I don't have a MiniDisk player but when I do I'll upload the rips of these songs to the Mariana Network channel (link below) and hopefully someone or another can come along and identify the songs present, with anything unidentifiable being safe to say being found lost media.

Look forward to updating you lads on my findings. The rips, like I said above, will be uploaded on the channel below:

https://youtube.com/@mariana.network

 

[Khastle]

Hey so an update to this thread: more bad news than good. I now own a minidisk and have tried all of the minidisks, and three of the disks simply do not read properly. There is definitely audio on them but when they are put through the minidisk it's all broken up and almost impossible to properly listen to which is a shame as the black one was one of them which definitely has some decent tunes on there but sadly they just can't be listened to properly (I also did clean them to no result). Rest are a bit iffy and some work perfectly, sadly the Beatles minidisk being one of them. More bad news is my PC simply does not recognize my minidisk when plugged in, could be the usb ports or the lead idk, but seems like these days you gotta get lucky finding a lead or port for these devices as some machines seem to be ok and others straight up ignore them. Because of this it will be a pain identifying the bands on them which is a pain too as yeah I can't read Japanese so yeah the more manual solution isn't really an option lol.

Some good news however, one of the minidisks did have an English name when the disk initially loads in which was The Blue Hearts, a late 80s Japanese rock band. Here's one of their songs which was present on the disk, not bad.


Don't know when I'll update this thread again as I can't even properly get this minidisk to work with a computer at the moment as it is and I doubt there is any lost media on these disks, but we will see.