Whatever Happened to the Minidisc Recorder?

I was sorting out some CD and vinyl over the weekend and rediscovered my Minidisc recorder in the front room. I had almost completely forgotten about it even though it can't be more than six years ago I was convinced that these mini cd players were the future of portable music listening.

Looking at it compared to Ipods and MP3 players it looks big and clunky and clumsy. I remember spending hours copying CDs to the discs (up to 4 CDs per minidisc- woo hoo!!!) and then laboriously typing in the Disc and the individual track's names.The sound was near CD quality even on the compressed discs, it was easier to run with than a CD player and it felt quite modern to me.

And then Ipods and Mp3 players took off became more reliable, you didn't have to individually name tracks, you could create playlists and shuffle and look at the album covers in colour on the screen and music on the move was changed forever.

Whilst rooting around I also came across my stock of Mindiscs. I had made copies of all my favourite bands' CDs . I picked up one unlabelled disc and popped it in the player to give it a whirl. It was my Embrace disc.

Regular readers will know that I love Embrace.

On the way to and from work so far this week I have been listening to Embrace on my Minidisc. I still love that band and hope that one day they return. I have to admit I prefer the earlier stuff over the later stuff- with one or two exceptions.

This song is one of those exceptions.

I remember standing in the Uni basement at Newcastle in September 2004 full of excitement waiting for this band because they had been away for three years. I had been following their website for news for almost that long. I had bought the tickets for this gig back in the June. I had heard the album and wanted to see them again so much. They began with this song- Ashes, Mike Heaton the powerhouse drummer stomped the bass pedal to start the set off. My wife arrived late just as Mike started we looked at each other and smiled. They were back.

This is an acoustic version of the song from backstage at the Oxygen festival in 2005.It's still great and shows the song off in the way they had originally intended it to be before Youth their producer suggested they speeded it up. It works well either way as a song about rebirth and a refusal to give up.

Ashes- Embrace