I have just realised that MiniDisc transfer speeds wouldn't be enough to listen to CD quality (44kHz/16bit) audio without pre-buffering

Even when using FLAC, MD's 1.25Mbps speed would barely be enough. My dream of re-creating the early 2000s music listening aesthetics is ruined by another imperfection.

@newt
Wat is wrong with buffering? Without it you're fucked in a lot of cases: network delays, physical media spun down on detecting vibrations to prevent damage, physical media having to be re-read due to errors, etc…
And 1.25 seems to be just right to be reading FLACs on average — studio recordings are often heavily compressed/filtered and use even lower bandwidth.

@m0xee buffering is gay and lame. Buffering is one of two main reasons why Bluetooth audio is garbage.

@newt
You obviously have no experience using low processing power machines, which use USB (an utter garbage of interface 😏) for audio, networking AND storage.
Dropouts are gay and lame and whatever, buffering is amazing!

@m0xee we talked about this. Gay and lame hardware from 20 years ago isn't really relevant, and neither are ugly hacks to make it work.

@newt
Sure, everyone knows that you need modern desktop-class hardware to play audio 😂

@m0xee still better than half-rotten museum artifacts

@newt
Of course it is better! Might even allow you to implement audio decompression in JS — computing power well spent 😜

@m0xee yeah, good luck adding hotpluggable PCIe with DMA to small ARM SoCs.

@newt
No need to! Buffering can defeat the deficiencies even of such a sorry ass of interface as USB. But of course that wouldn't even be necessary were superior DMA-capable hardware used.