3 ms·

I had a few mini-disc players in the late 90s. I had about an hour commute in to work in those days and it was awesome not to lug around tapes or the shock sen

I had a few mini-disc players in the late 90s. I had about an hour commute in to work in those days and it was awesome not to lug around tapes or the shock sensitive, constantly skipping, CD Walkman. I managed to find a fairly cheap "all-in-one" hifi that had a minidisc drive in it too, so transferring was easy, but lacked the track naming, and it would only transfer at 1.5x speed. Those minidisc players took a bit of a beating. In the end I replaced it with a Creative Nomad Jukebox (http://www.iretron.com/blog/posts/technology-flashback-creative-nomad-jukebox-2000/nomadjukebox/ http://www.iretron.com/blog/posts/technology-flashback-creat...). That was a revelation. 6GB of MP3 storage meant I could rip all of my CDs and take them with me. Sony seems to have a habit of producing some really great technology and then woefully mismanaging it by having short term thinking and failing to learn from rivals. It had so many advantages at the time, but the equipment involved in recording to it was so expensive it was hard to get the labels on-board. If Sony had been willing to drastically subsidise the recording equipment and got the labels on board they'd have had so much more chance to make it in the market. When you're leaving it for your target consumer to wrestle with "How do I get my music on to it", and requiring specialty hardware purchase or complicated hacks, you've sort of lost the market already.

cat199 7y ago
> the equipment involved in recording to it was so expensive it was hard to get the labels on-board. Source or speculation? If b, then, to add: I don't think for a major (or even medium/minor) label this was the issue - at the time the labels had a real concern about mass high quality digital copying by consumers destroying their business
- AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
  I was a young guy getting started in the music industry around this time... At the first studio I worked at, we used MiniDiscs all the time to do professional audio work. It was often the way we stored productions and the way we distributed them to other partners. That said, any sort of mass production of MiniDiscs for the consumer would have been laughed away due to the costs. > mass high quality digital copying by consumers This has likely been a facet of the music industry's concerns ever since the cassette tape[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio#Data_access_from_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio#Dat...
- paulmd 7y ago
  this is specifically the reason minidisc is built around a lossy compression codec so there would be at least some generational loss from copying. Sony themselves were/are a label and this led to deliberate worsening of their electronics at times.
  - philsnow 7y ago
    Were disc->disc transfers not digital? I would expect to not have to decode/encode (and thus suffer loss, if the encoder weren't deterministic) if you're transferring disc to disc.
    - devilbunny 7y ago
      There were workarounds like TOC cloning to keep the transfers digital (by making the device think it was playing something from an analog source, not a digital one, so it would allow a digital copy over SCMS), but those were not possible on all devices. And even the digital transfers were over SPDIF, not direct data transfer (so it depended on the quality of your encoder chip). There was one way around this: the MDS-W1 (http://minidisc.org/part_Sony_MDS-W1.html http://minidisc.org/part_Sony_MDS-W1.html) could move tracks in raw data format between discs. Of course, it erased the source track, but if you did this twice (it defragmented as it went) and then TOC-cloned, you could have two identical MD's. They're available on eBay, but they're $400-500 and ship from Japan, so good luck powering one if you're in Europe. It really was a lovely format that was crippled by the music side of the company. 170 MB on a rugged, infinitely-rewritable, non-accidentally-erasable format that was smaller than a 3.5" floppy?

cat199 7y ago

> the equipment involved in recording to it was so expensive it was hard to get the labels on-board. Source or speculation? If b, then, to add: I don't think for a major (or even medium/minor) label this was the issue - at the time the labels had a real concern about mass high quality digital copying by consumers destroying their business

AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
I was a young guy getting started in the music industry around this time... At the first studio I worked at, we used MiniDiscs all the time to do professional audio work. It was often the way we stored productions and the way we distributed them to other partners. That said, any sort of mass production of MiniDiscs for the consumer would have been laughed away due to the costs. > mass high quality digital copying by consumers This has likely been a facet of the music industry's concerns ever since the cassette tape[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio#Data_access_from_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio#Dat...
paulmd 7y ago
this is specifically the reason minidisc is built around a lossy compression codec so there would be at least some generational loss from copying. Sony themselves were/are a label and this led to deliberate worsening of their electronics at times.
- philsnow 7y ago
  Were disc->disc transfers not digital? I would expect to not have to decode/encode (and thus suffer loss, if the encoder weren't deterministic) if you're transferring disc to disc.
  - devilbunny 7y ago
    There were workarounds like TOC cloning to keep the transfers digital (by making the device think it was playing something from an analog source, not a digital one, so it would allow a digital copy over SCMS), but those were not possible on all devices. And even the digital transfers were over SPDIF, not direct data transfer (so it depended on the quality of your encoder chip). There was one way around this: the MDS-W1 (http://minidisc.org/part_Sony_MDS-W1.html http://minidisc.org/part_Sony_MDS-W1.html) could move tracks in raw data format between discs. Of course, it erased the source track, but if you did this twice (it defragmented as it went) and then TOC-cloned, you could have two identical MD's. They're available on eBay, but they're $400-500 and ship from Japan, so good luck powering one if you're in Europe. It really was a lovely format that was crippled by the music side of the company. 170 MB on a rugged, infinitely-rewritable, non-accidentally-erasable format that was smaller than a 3.5" floppy?