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The MiniDisc: the failure of a forgotten format (2020)
- failwhaleshark 5y agoI remember this. It looked neat but was $$. The various extensions didn't help much. DAT was more practical for recording but also $$. The completely different ADAT can utilize consumer S-VHS tapes.
- Synaesthesia 5y agoInteresting that DAT was blocked from commercial sales because it was too good. Basically CD quality audio copies with tiny cheap tapes.
- arpa 5y agoWhat really killed this format is the draconian copy protection that crippled the software for getting the tracks on device (for NET MD players). Other method(s) of getting sound on MD was essentially dubbing, like you would with MC. Other players removed the artificial barriers of getting your music on device, and it turned out that antipiracy measures are not a feature... which is a shame, because the feel and sound of MD players is pretty damn great, and the wired remote with minimal backlit display is god tier UX compared to anything that was/is on the market. I bought my first secondhand MD player in 2015, and it was the best thing. It even had AA battery adapter(!!!)
- julik 5y agoThis. MD was kind of a weird cross-over between a disk with a filesystem (which the iPod was in its first iterations) and a CD. And it sucked as both - it could not be used as a file system because you had to use Sony's proprietary tools to get anything onto it and off of it, _and_ it sucked as as a CD because the only equipment that could get data off of it would do it either real-time (too slow) or - at best - at 4x realtime. That while CD-R reader drives already could read at 32x realtime. The DRM also had a nice property that you needed a proprietary Sony app to get music onto and off of a MD, this app was horrible _and_ it was only available for Windows. MDs did indeed stay in widespread use for professional sound recording where convenience was less important than reliability, they were quite reliable. This only turned around once flash storage started becoming fast and affordable.
- bigtex 5y agoI worked at Best Buy from 97-02 and don’t recall having a any prerecorded content for MD’s or if we did it was almost non existent. Your explanation is the correct answer as the onerous drm and Sony way of doing things limited the market appeal. I think they eased up the restrictions when MP3’s starting getting big but then it was too late.
- summm 5y agoSony did this to themselves multiple times. Because they always had done other division they wanted to not cannibalize, or some Not-Invemted-Here. E.g them too long using memory stick instead of sd cards.
- chungy 5y agoQuite honestly I don't think SD was even a big thing yet. I remember clearly complaints about Sony not just using CompactFlash, in contrast.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jagger27 5y agoCF versus MemoryStick seems like a weird comparison. Sony was big on miniaturization back then and CF would have been a complete non-starter.
- blablabla123 5y agoBut you could play the music over SPDIF and record it while playing. I cannot remember having had problems with that. (Until my self-built SPDIF adapter broke...) Also other than stated in the article, MD used its own compression format so you could put 700 MB uncompressed audio onto a 130 MB disc. But in times of > 10 GB storage it makes no sense anymore to use replaceable cartridges. Just put it all on the player. That's what ultimately killed it. It could have gotten a second life though with MD Data but the drives for that were just too expensive.
- arpa 5y agoThat is true, but the SPDIF playback/record is essentially dubbing :(
- dr_dshiv 5y agoCouldn't agree more. I loved minidisc but this is what killed it for me
- INTPenis 5y agoYou may be right for the vast majority of users but I was a nerdy power user already back then and this was never an issue. I loved my MD player but what really killed it for me were affordable mp3 players. And I never owned an iPod. But I did own several other mp3 players, and eventually smartphones with mp3 playing capability (before iphone). And once I got my first Android the game was over for MD in my view.
- lookalike74 5y agoI bought an Aiwa mini-stereo with CD & MD that came with a portable MD player. The portable had a AA battery attachment, and I could go most of the day on the rechargeable and pop that on when needed. I bought 10 blank MD's to record and re-record with whatever I wanted, and that was all I needed for 3 years. It was great.
- tcldr 5y agoThat was the amazing thing about the format. It didn't need much of a network effect to work as you could just record your own stuff. And obviously, as soon as one person in the group got one, many others followed. It was great.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoThey say history is written by the winners, but when it comes to technology, history is written by Americans. MiniDisc was a huge success for Sony, and was the winner of the tape-replacement format war in virtually every country - except the USA. It was so successful that Sony is still making blank MiniDiscs today. (Though they are not sold there, Americans can type MDW80T into eBay if they'd like some brand-new MiniDiscs.) I grew up in the UK and for nearly a decade portable MD players were virtually ubiquitous on the Tube. Only the iPod began to end that era, and it certainly wasn't instant.
- gertrunde 5y agoIt was heavily used in radio as well, almost ubiquitous for recording outside interviews etc for later broadcast.
- jackvalentine 5y agoAnd commercial exhibition, every large theatre/cinema/auditorium/performance space I worked in up until 2008 when I changed track had a rack mounted MD player hooked up to the automation to do announcements.
- imperistan 5y agoTrue. I’m Dutch and have encountered mini discs only in my radio work in the early 2000’s
- tinus_hn 5y agoAlthough it has found a niche it definitely wasn’t a ‘huge success’ in the Netherlands.
- zinekeller 5y ago> it definitely wasn’t a ‘huge success’ in the Netherlands. Fair enough, the land of Philips :P (But in all seriousness, plain CDs were more popular in certain regions in Europe because "why have a different device for music?". It isn't as drastic as in America though, where it is a product that looks like and feels like never released to consumers.)
- zinekeller 5y agoAh yes, another American-centric viewpoint (which is correct, no qualms about that part) but in other countries (probably with the exclusion of inner reaches of Africa and, uhm, Canada) MiniDisc (at the late 1990's and early 2000's)... is just there: a reliable way to have portable copies of your music. P.S. British viewpoint by Techmoan (which pointed out the American-centric "MiniDisc is a failure"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU3BceoMuaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU3BceoMuaA P.P.S. A direct rebuttal (to the point it was titled "The (Not) Forgotten Audio Format That (Never) Failed"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCK89V4NpJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCK89V4NpJY
- JohnTHaller 5y agoAmericans remember it being a failure. UK folks remember it being a massive success. In a way, they're both right. It sold 5m players in Japan. UK was its second most popular market. It achieved success in some countries in Asia and Europe as well, but almost nothing in North or South America. I've never seen one in person here in the US outside of an electronics store. On a related note, I've always wanted to try one out. Any suggestions on a site/video breaking down good options for a recorder/player today with digital inputs and the ability to enter text?
- fzzzy 5y agoLook on ebay for decks with ps/2 keyboard inputs. Check minidisc.org
- kitsunesoba 5y agoThe second linked video is excellent, highly recommend. Watched it a few days ago on a whim and was surprised by how deep MD’s history is.
- jokoon 5y agoFrom wikipedia: Recordable MiniDiscs use a magneto-optical system to write data; a laser heats one side of the disc to its Curie point, making the material in the disc susceptible to a magnetic field; a magnetic head on the other side of the disc alters the polarity of the heated area, recording the digital data onto the disk. Playback is accomplished with the laser alone: taking advantage of the magneto-optic Kerr effect; the player senses the polarization of the reflected light and thus interprets a 1 or a 0. Recordable MDs can be rerecorded repeatedly; Sony claims up to one million times.
- aktuel 5y agoI guess the iPod is also a failure then since no one uses them anymore.
- zeusk 5y agoiPhone, very widely used today was described by Apple itself as "An iPod, a Phone, and an Internet Communicator" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK55ElsVzxM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK55ElsVzxM
- codetrotter 5y agoSteve Jobs was so good at what he did. I am still a bit sad that he is gone when I think about it, because I would have really liked to meet him.
- bombcar 5y agoNo wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame. The original iPod wasn’t a thunderous success but Apple continued to iterate on it and when they release a non-FireWire version that worked with Windows it really took off. Had they dogmatically insisted on FireWire and Mac only it may have remained a niche thing. And of course it greatly contributed to the success of the iPhone because why not get an iPod that could make calls and save pocket space?
- ghaff 5y agoNeither the original iPod nor the original iPhone were really devices that most people really viewed as world-changing on their release. I got on at the 4th gen click-wheel iPod and the iPhone 3GS and those were the on-ramps for a lot of other people do. (And I wasn't a Mac user until 2010.)
- kube-system 5y agoWhen iPod sales peaked, Apple was selling as many in a single fiscal quarter as the number of MiniDisc players Sony sold over 20 years… about 22 million. Sony sold 18 million BetaMax players.
- ragingrobot 5y agoI still have several portable MD players I bought new in the early 2000s. At the time, even on high spec PCs, the software was slow as hell to convert music to their proprietary format. MP3 wasn't speedy, but it wasn't nearly as slow as converting to ATRAC. I remember it taking on the order of hours to copy a CD to MD. The quality was better than MP3 so it was worth it in the end, but an annoyance nonetheless, and probably didn't help adoption in the US (we want it now dammit!). > The MP3 format spelled the beginning of the end for the MiniDisc. That should be "the iPod spelled the end". MP3 and MD coexisted for quite a few years before the iPod's arrival.
- kiksy 5y agoOne of my friends had a later NETMD and I remember that only taking seconds to convert and copy MP3s to disk. The software was horrible though.
- ragingrobot 5y agoHow much later? The experience I described was about 2000-2001, and it was far from seconds. To be fair, encoding to MP3 wasn't exactly speedy on the machines at the time (compared to the present day), but converting to ATRAC was significantly slower.
- JKCalhoun 5y agoIf you have a Net MD player today, head over to this much nicer Web front-end for ripping your mp3's to MiniDisc: https://stefano.brilli.me/webminidisc/ https://stefano.brilli.me/webminidisc/
- bennyp101 5y agoI still have mine in the attic (lives in my cable/bits box that has moved with me for 20 years ..) I'll try and dig it out later, see what I was listening to then! It served me well during my GCSE's! But when the iPod Nano came out, and I could fit a load of songs on it, and physically fit it in the 'watch' pocket of my jeans - the minidisc went in the box and never came out.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- thom 5y agoDuring the brief period of my youth that I was in a band, we recorded on MiniDisc. Being able to do 4-track digital recordings was pretty cool, in a way I didn't really appreciate back then beyond rewinding being less of a hassle.
- KingOfCoders 5y agoI did love my MD players/recorders, it was a game changer after several Discmans. Still have a Sharp MD-MS701 here.
- MariusE 5y agoA great video on minidisc, with a good deal of history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCK89V4NpJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCK89V4NpJY
- Lucasoato 5y agoIs it the same format of Nintendo GameCube?
- codetrotter 5y agoGameCube optical disc format was based on miniDVD, which is something different. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_optical_discs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_optical_discs
- bencollier49 5y agoCouldn't read it.
- aftergibson 5y agoLately I’ve been enjoying physical artefacts more and picked up a minidisc player and some blank discs. I’ve had fun printing labels out and putting albums onto it. There’s also a pretty fun synthwave scene producing new work on minidiscs, the music is a guilty pleasure of mine particularly while coding so I’m having a lot of fun with the format.
- WalterBright 5y agoMy Sony tape deck needed some repair (the rubber parts dried up from age) and I took it to a Sony repair shop. They said it would be expensive to repair, and I could get a minidisc player cheaper and it would sound better. They were right. That was the end of my reel-to-reel. Recordable CDs terminated my interest in MD. MP3 terminated my interest in CDs. And so it goes.
- whywhywhywhy 5y agoLoved my minidisc players and recorders. Feel so cheated my cyberpunk future was denied because it never became a (successful) data format.
- trollied 5y agoSony really messed up by not also targetting MD as a floppy drive replacement.
- TacticalCoder 5y agoThis... I was an early MD adopter for music and I remember trying to find info as to how to use these for data but it wasn't possible. Funnily enough I totally forgot how I would record them: I know I'd transfer my songs from CDs to minidiscs, but I forgot how. At approximately the same time, on my Mac, I was using the Iomega ZIP drives, ranging from 100 to 250 MB if my memory serves me correctly. These always felt heavy and bulky compared to the minidiscs. The form factor of the MD was really cool and kinda still is.
- salamandersauce 5y agoThey did later with MD Data but it was too late and too expensive. Zip drives came in and offered basically the same thing for less.
- cptskippy 5y agoEveryone always talks about why the MD failed in the US, but why did it succeed in the UK?
- LeoPanthera 5y agoI wonder if the UK had more of a culture of "home taping". The UK also has commercial-free BBC radio so recording stuff from the radio was more rewarding.
- danfritz 5y agoMy dad had a full collection of minidics and our car had a mini discs player. I remember my dad telling me it was a superior technology but sadly wouldn't get any traction. I never had a minidics player, I had cd's and after that a USB player with 32mb of storage. A year later I could get the same model with 64mb storage for the same price!
- d_runs_far 5y agoAm I the only one on here that actually bought the Sony minidisc with a scsi interface? I had it plugged into my Mac G3 and was used for backing up video projects that I was shooting on miniDV tape at the time. I also used it for playing music, but never bought pre recorded albums.