The Waveform #023: The Minidisc Bump

Clearing the office cupboard turned up a carrier bag of minidiscs labelled in three different handwritings, one of them marked DO NOT ERASE in capitals and underlined twice. Every single one of them still plays. The laptop we were using in the same year has been landfill for a decade, and the backup drive that replaced it died in a house move. Nothing in that bag was ever backed up anywhere, which is presumably why it survived.

Why Musicians Are Falling Back in Love With Minidisc

Petra Lindqvist's case for the format that refuses to die went up last November, and we have added an update this week, because the prices in it are no longer remotely true. Cheap, indestructible and impossible to stream from turns out to be an irresistible combination for a certain kind of musician, and the second-hand market has worked that out. Read the update before you bid on anything this weekend.

Also this week

• Velvet Static's 'Half Light' Is Shoegaze for the Server Room. Guitars pushed through cooling-fan drone in a decommissioned data centre, making the year's best headphone record and its worst car record.
• Liner Notes: In Defense of the Skip Button. Dario Fontaine on why the album was always a container rather than a contract.

One more thing

The repair angle nobody covers: a two-person outfit in Rotterdam is cutting replacement drive belts for six of the common portable decks, about nine euros a kit with the tweezers thrown in. A perished belt is why most dead players are dead. Fifteen minutes, one plastic spudger and a steady hand, and the thing spins up again, which is more than I can say for anything else I own from 1998. They also publish the belt measurements for free, so you can source your own elsewhere and they will still answer your email about it, which tells you what sort of operation it is.

Enjoy the weekend. Ada