Minidiscs for music were very popular before MP3 players had reasonable storage space, at least here in Denmark and AFAIK in most of Europe, and obviously in Ja

Minidiscs for music were very popular before MP3 players had reasonable storage space, at least here in Denmark and AFAIK in most of Europe, and obviously in Japan. If you had to pick between an MP3 player with 32MB or maybe 64MB of fixed internal memory, or a Minidisc player where each disc could hold a full CD album and you could swap them as easily as a CD or a floppy disk, the choice was pretty clear, especially when you looked at it as a logical progression from a discman. The ATRAC codec is a mostly-OK lossy codec. Not full CD quality, but it was comparable to MP3 at the time. (Minidiscs never supported MP3 until right at the end of Hi-MD, otherwise they were ATRAC and eventually CD-quality PCM only.) The final iteration (Hi-MD) could hold 1GB of data or 94 minutes of full CD-quality uncompressed PCM audio, but that was too little and too late when it came out in 2004. As for using Minidisc for data, that was a slightly different kettle of fish. The format was absolutely capable of doing it and the original discs could hold 140MB (increasing with later format revisions), which would have been absolutely groundbreaking in the early 90s. All of the technology was mature and proven and fully capable of displacing both the floppy disc and the CD. This was before the Zip disk, with higher storage capacity and actually reliable. The magneto-optical Minidisc could theoretically be rewritten millions of times, and sure each disc was a bit expensive initially, but they were super durable with a tough plastic shell, and 140MB of storage was more than a lot of people's home computers had at the time. Unfortunately the record label arm of Sony were terrified of organized illegal copying and distribution, and because everyone was generally stuck in a mindset of seeing Minidisc as a cassette tape replacement rather than a general data storage format, it was stuck with real-time dubbing only (some devices with integrated CD and MD players offered high-speed dubbing, but it was still just dubbing, not data transfer). It didn't get data storage capability until the Hi-MD in 2004, which again was too little too late. Combined with Sony's general insistence on keeping their formats proprietary and locked down (see Memory Stick, UMD, Betamax, DAT and so on), everything just conspired to not let the technical capabilities of Minidisc come to fruition. There was an MD Data format, but it never really got off the ground. It used special incompatible MD Data discs, which were rare and expensive, plus the drives themselves were big, clunky and expensive. Minidisc was legitimately a big hit for a while, for portable music. But it never quite displaced the CD and it never became the data storage format it could have been. And now we've got cheap flash memory, so even the idea of a magneto-optical disc seems a bit quaint and antiquated.