One sort of fix for the slot loaders, and I only have one audio player with
this, was the cd size converter. it was a kind of outer bit you clipped the
cd into and then fed the whole thing into the slot. It worked but sometimes
got jammed on the way out due to the slight bend it induced in the cd as it
extracted it making the little middle bit pop out on one side!
Brian

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This newsgroup posting comes to you directly from...
The Sofa of Brian Gaff...

Blind user, so no pictures please!
"Johnny B Good" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 04 May 2017 21:51:52 +0100, Vir Campestris wrote:

On 04/05/2017 20:29, Johnny B Good wrote:
The innermost area is less prone to contamination by handling

That's the one. Fewer scratches and fingerprints.

Small discs came later IIRC.

They were a neat solution to incorporating some 70 or so MB's worth of
data on a business card shaped disk or allow driver software to be
provided on a miniature CD that would fit into the smaller box sizes
typically used to package PCI and PCIe adapters.

The only issue was they could only be used in drives equipped with an
automatic slide out coffee cup holder. Drives that relied upon a slot
loading mechanism represented an almost[1] insurmountable problem to the
use of such miniature disks.

Thankfully, slot loading optical drive usage in desktop computers seems
to have been a passing fad. Not even laptops use slot loaders where some
sort of case could be made for the slot loading mechanism being less
prone to damage. I guess the slot loading optical drive looked like "A
Rather Neat Idea" until these miniature CDs appeared on the scene to
spoil the whole concept of trayless drives.

[1] Not completely insurmountable if you had access to a tray loading CDRW
drive equipped PC to copy the data onto a full size CD-R blank that you
could then present to your slot loading CD drive. Alternatively, you
could use another machine to copy the files onto a usb pen drive or else
use another machine on your house/office lan to copy the files onto a
shared folder that the slot loader afflicted machine could access.

Failing this last option, there's always the option these days to
download the latest driver software package from the manufacturer's web
site. You'd only be stuck with the problem of extracting the files off
the miniature CD itself if it were older or more obscure kit no longer
enjoying support by the OEM who may have gone out of business or else had
simply lost interest in a piece of kit they now regard as obsolete.

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Johnny B Good