4 ms·

> 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

by 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?

by cat199 7y ago

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?