Who's the absolute pillock then!

[Colin Howard]

Greetings,

As part of my de-cluttering, which is likely to take forever the way I'm
going, I've been attempting to sort out minidiscs and cassettes, of both I
reckon I have thousands! I hope to digitize at least a large percentage of
both, if I don't already have the content digitized on my system.

Currently, I only have one Sony minidisc machine working properly, capable
of playing standard, mono, lp2 and lp4 formats minidiscs, I never purchased
a system able to playthe special discs brought out at the start of the
naughties, capable, so the ads claimed, on one disc, about the size of the
standard discs available at the time which far as I know had not physically
changed since their invention, of holding up to 45 hours of "high quality"?
audio. I never met anybody who had such a beast hence could never ascertain
whether they met the claims made for them. I was led to believe the
machines capable of processing these discs could also cope with the standard
ones as well.

I played at least the start of and in a good few cases, more, to ascertain
their content. Most of them are recorded in lp4 format, meaning a 74 disc
can record 292 minutes in stereo, i.e equals 4 hours 52 minutes, the
80-minute disc recording in lp4 format can record in stereo, 5 hours 20
minutes.

When playing the discs, I pushed it into the disk slot, pressed play, heard
the confirmation bleep and the beginning of the first (or only) track.
Until this evening, when I realize my stupid error which in due course may
well have caused the machine to fail, deciding I did not want to play
further, pressed the eject button. Often, the disc would not eject though
the playing ceased and I heard the confirmation beep. If the disc ejected,
no problem.

Then, I thought, perhaps before pressing the eject button, I should press
stop, doing this then pressing the eject, the discs came out smoothly and
quickly each time.

Trying to get the disc out when I believed them to be stuck, I used a small
screw driver to push under the disc, not often very accurately and having to
do it maybe ten times to cause the disc to slide out, hence, possibly
damaging the mechanism. Now, after several days with these discs, I've
found the answer, I hope the mechanism won't fail.

Cheers.