Gescom, MiniDisc and Mind-boggling Mathematics.

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Au Revoir!

Things have been reasonably quiet at Casa EI3LH recently. Mainly because the other day I went back to school after 30 years to pursue a Masters.

Part time, but it is eating up what limited spare time I have already. Maybe thats a good thing some folks would say! :rofl:

I have spent a LOT of time recently conducting some research in to a MiniDisc album I purchased many years ago and recently revisited. Little did I know that the novel concept behind the album would open up mathematical doors that literally blew my brains to smithereens!

It is 1 jillion percent an off topic post, but I know there are folks that may get something out of the utterly absurd mathematics I uncovered, as well as some of the nice generative AI work and quotes from my bookshelf that I discovered upon deeper research. That is why I risked posting it here (and hopefully won’t be eaten alive for it! :sweat_smile:).

I hope you enjoy this post anyway, I put a serious amount of effort in to it (like actual full days of research and checking my maths in Wolfram) and hope it finds a suitable audience…as well as perhaps some secret Autechre fans! It is also a bit of a practice piece for me for when I get to writing the bigger stuff during my Masters process.

Here is the post (and some related artwork I generated - read the post if you want to know the meaning behind it). I hope you enjoy it.

72 44.

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I assume your masters is not in mathematics?

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Not a hope! I’ve the IQ of a bubble in a Malteaser! :rofl:

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Ah see you said it was the bubble in an Aero in the blog post, inconsistencies again!

Other thoughts: The AA batteries idea might not be much use unless we discover a couple of mega planets made of nothing but zinc and manganese dioxide. If you were able to rig up a solar power setup for your Minidisc player (and you’d manufactured new drive gears from synthetic diamond), how many iterations do you reckon you’d make it through in the expected lifetime of our current sun? That’s assuming we don’t all get plunged into nuclear winter by the very AI doing the calculations going all Skynet on us…

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No, I had my response on shuffle! :rofl:

Now that is an interesting thought. I guess at that stage you’d have left our universe and taken a couple of Earth’s worth of AA batteries with you for the journey so you could continue listening while migrating to a suitable Universe.

I just love the absurdity of the task generated from a music album. It is utterly bonkers. :blush:

EDIT: Thinking about using solar power is novel too. However that then changes the entire premise and all of the calculations would go in the bin because you’ve altered the control factor.

Plus, wouldn’t you need to calculate a sufficient supply of solar panels (and related equipment) to replace the panels as they wore out? An example might be home solar panels, in that they last how many years, is it 10? 20? More? You could potentially use that as a basis, but then that would be your control and would not be able to change.

Thus, when the day comes that you have to leave our Universe for a new Universe (and what if the next Universe you arrive at isn’t a suitable Universe that can continue the task?) that doesn’t mean plastering solar panels all over your starship!

Jaysus I need a Panadol. I’ve been researching this for days and it is brain melting! :rofl:

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Might I suggest the significantly fewer playlist permutations of Sleep’s one-track wonder, Dopesmoker? Although it’s usually something other than a panadol folk tend to take with that, something it sounds like the lads from Autechre had been trying out a bit of when they came up with this idea!

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If we’re going down that road, I suggest switching media and popping on a copy of John Henry Timmins IV’s magnificent octopus (and definitely not on the Academy ‘Best Picture’ list) The Cure For Insomnia.

Made in 1987 and weighing in at a fairly nippy 85 hours long, it’s the longest film ever made. Alas it was only ever screened once (possibly twice but I can’t recall where I found mention of it, it isn’t in my copy of Spinegrinder - where I usually find my viewing fare :sweat_smile: ).

Good luck finding a copy, although there is a couple of short excerpts from it on a dodgy 80’s Cannibal splatter VHS. I’ve never seen it, though you’d probably have more luck finding the original negatives of Jim Morrison’s 1969 fillum HWY: An American Pastoral than you would finding all 85 hours of The Cure For Insomnia.

Then again, 1 million feet of 35mm and 16mm was found under the floorboards of a sound stage a couple of years ago that contained all of the footage ever shot (and a lot of it unseen) from the legendary 1971 Steve McQueen fillum Le Mans (best motor racing film ever made in my opinion).

So there is hope yet!

EDIT:

Just an aside, back on topic (even though this is off topic) - I have set up a codespace for my Gescom Runner software. I wanted to make sure it works in any environment and doesn’t fall over.

You can replicate it in your own Codespace if you wish to. Apologies, I haven’t finished writing up the readme yet. After 8 hours (yes really) of checking the article historically and mathematically, I’d had enough and just published the code and the article around the same time.

I will set up the Github properly when I get a sec. The code is all commented anyway. Just to demo, here’s a screenshot showing a dry run. It calculates a confirmed permutation, then generates the playlist. It won’t lose your place either if the host crashes, reboots or suffers an outage. The only real difficult part is on you, the listener, to listen to the album in it’s entirety, which is impossible!

I suppose you could spend a day listening to permutations, then apply cryogenics, sleep for 24 hours, defrost yourself and go again. Rinse and repeat. :sweat_smile:

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Jeez, between talk of this and the minidisc, I’m now getting daft ideas about the minidisc’s big weird video cousin, the XDCam disc :laughing:

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Don’t forget Hi-MD too. A larger capacity recordable MiniDisc but it sold in smaller numbers and thus in 2026 commands Gr€€dBay prices.

I’ve seen the XD-CAM discs in the past. They were originally marketed as ‘Blu Ray Cartridge’ before Sony moved them to the Professional line and rebranded as XD-CAM.

I think they were only recently discontinued, along with pretty much every other line of Sony branded recordable media, including MiniDisc and Hi-MD.

It is all Perrier water under the bridge now as UHD media far exceeds the capacity of any of these. Yet UHD’s days are numbered too as most manufacturers ceased production of them in recent years, including Pioneer who’s recordable drives are legendary (glad I have two of them).

Aside, in 2026, Laserdisc is still relevant for several reasons, notably though because of the excellent sound - which is why I still own two players and an AC-3 decoder.

Did you know recordable Laserdiscs were available in the professional market? Long before that, videodisc (or Laserdisc) was used by productions like BBC Match of the Day for action replays.

That was before the likes of CED and VHD. Meanwhile in West Germany you could watch your fillums on the super obscure TED format!

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I have happy memories of MiniDisc and had the MZ-700R, a Sony separates player in my home cinema set up and even an Xplod MDLP player in the car!!

My only remaining discs still prop up my monitor on my desk!! :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:

I don’t even listed to MP3 now as most of my files now are FLAC/DTS.

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I used to use them a lot in my old job - I thought I still had one kicking about the house, as I almost always carried a spare one in my bag just in case. I think they finally got the hang of card-based workflow just as I was leaving, but they were a fairly comfortable hybrid option for production teams who were used to handing over tapes, but in a form that could still be ingested as files for post production.

We had a lot of the HD1500 XDCam decks for recording on to, but my personal favourite were the PDW-700 camcorders that recorded straight onto the discs. There was a fun looking wee field recorder that I thought looked cool in the catalogues, but sadly I never got to actually try one:

https://pro.sony/en_GB/products/xdcam-disc-memory/pdw-r1

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My MZ-500R arrived today. It works perfect and runs off of 1 AA battery just fine. Tested it with my Gescom MD and all is right with the world again. I might get another player as backup though if this one fails. No point paying big money on them, stock up and store cheap ones.

MiniDisc shuffle and auto seek really is top tier. What a shame the format failed commercially.

Managed to find a CD pressing of MiniDisc for sale at a reasonable price to rip to WAV so I can run more tests on the Gescom Runner software soon.

I always wanted to try out one of those 1970’s OB cameras. The ones that were giant backpacks and looked like jetpacks!

Sort of like this. I can’t find a better photo:

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I have found “Minidisc” flac.

I’ll maybe listen to it on shuffle in bed tonight and may get a long lie… :joy:

And you got me thinking where my MDS-JE480 is. I recall selling my minidiscman (which you could screw a 1xAA battery onto). The Xplod unit was sold with the car.

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You will need to use VLC (or player of your choice) and run my Gescom Runner software so! If you do use it, let me know how you get on, any bugs etc. The permutation calculations appear to be working when I tested it over the weekend. Also, the Play > Crash > Restart from last permutation works too.

It should be spot on so see how you fare! Happy listening. See you in 2.37×10^130 AD!

I had a Sony Xplod head unit many years ago in an old Fiesta. It was one of the first mp3 head units. I had that fitted with an Infinity amp and Infinity Reference Series 6x9’s and Subwoofer. The setup cost more than the car did!

I remember playing Drop It Like It’s Hot in the car one day to stretch the subs legs. Stopped at the local Shell for petrol and noticed the subwoofer had shook the car so much it separated the fuel cap from the car panel! :rofl:

A quick reflection from the testing today. I ran the disc with a pair of Koss Portapro’s connected and it sounded glorious. I forgot how nice MD could sound. Even better, the MZ-R500 has optical IN/OUT and I have both a DAP and a pocket headphone amp with SPDIF in/out to test sound quality vs the R500 built in DAC to 3.5mm stereo out. I had to order some of those 3.5mm mini toslink adapters though to add to the cable, should have them tomorrow and can test then.

As for DTS, I have a portable soundcard that is one of the few with SPDIF IN/OUT and optical coax in/out. I’ve used this method before to capture bitperfect DTS tracks from my DTS Laserdiscs to archive them and decode/playback. Same with AC-3 via a Yamaha APD-2 decoder between the Laserdisc and the sound card for perfect AC-3.

This proved useful when I was able to preserve the 70mm Sensurround track that appeared on the Laserdisc of the Directors Cut of Alien. To this day, that Sensurround track (which was a test track in cinemas by Fox) has not appeared anywhere else. I took that audio and muxed it in to a 4K UHD disc of Alien that I have, so I made my own personal ‘ultimate edition’ so to speak and preserved the audio for when the LD eventually succumbs to disc rot.

I find it ironic how obsolete media formats can still have an important role to play so many years after everyone has moved on. A bit like amateur radio in a way and how people say “what’s the point when you have a smartphone?”…

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I just bought Koss SB40s for my 891!! :grin:

I had a quick listen to “Minidisc” and although the math may be interesting , it’s not for me.

My PC that’s hooked up to my system runs Music Bee which plays lossless. I use VLC for DTS music files. I still have my old Sony DVD player that plays some SACDs I “made” myself with NERO years ago!! :face_savoring_food:

Nvidia Shield for movies/tv series via Kodi (passthrough) and a Yamaha amp (that’s needing upgraded soon for better HDMi compatibility) running 5.2 Wharefdales and Bowers and Wilkins subs.

Cars had an Alpine V12 with Alpine 6x9s and Infinitys in the doors/tweeters.

Off to my bed to listen to Classic FM on my Bose Soundwave!!

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I don’t think Gescom is truly for anyone! :sweat_smile: It’s more of a demonstration/exhibit piece than anything truly listenable as a long player.

On the flip side (excuse pun), Autechre are fantastic. They are on a world tour currently (and coming to Dublin and London in October) so I am hoping to see them live.

For anyone interested, I have my Gescom Runner software uploaded fully to my Github repository, so if you would like to try the software out yourself, you can do so here:

I hope folks enjoy the novelty of it. It was a lot of work to get right, particularly the permutation lookups.

I never had one of those. They were always advertised in The Sunday Times magazine, squeezed between a Luxury Trouser Press and orthopedic slippers. Never appealed.

The trouser press on the other hand…

Nothing wrong with Classic FM either. Though I prefer the linux software ‘Shortwave’ and listen to Naim and Linn classical and jazz streams there quite often.

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