I remember seeing one of those in a junk pile. As I recall, it was essentially a flat platter of tape enclosed in a cardboard sleeve. Ampex made something similar, but RCA had theirs first.
Considering how bad-sounding MP3 files can get, you're right. It's better than cassette tapes.
Some audio CD's are designed to make bad MP3 copies if you rip them. Get around that by playing the CD while you record it in analog with something like audacity. Then normalize the song to 86% before you save it.
IMO that's just where they belonged, too! Lol
The RCA video disc player we had used discs about the same size as an LP record that came in a large, thick plastic sleeve. You inserted the entire sleeve into the machine, it extracted the disc and spit out the empty sleeve to you. 1/2 way through the movie it gave a message to flip the disc and you had to reinsert the sleeve into the machine, remove it with disc inside, flip it and do the process again to play the 2nd half. One time I manually removed the sleeve - the disc inside looked like a vinyl record and if I remember, just as an experiment I tried to "play" it on a standard turntable. The grooves were extremely small and close together and the stylus on the record player just jumped around but no sound was picked up.
