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I can't explain why I thought MiniDisc was such a cool format. Maybe it was just its appearance in the Matrix. Maybe it was the Japanese "strangeness" of the

I can't explain why I thought MiniDisc was such a cool format. Maybe it was just its appearance in the Matrix. Maybe it was the Japanese "strangeness" of the format, and the difficulty of getting one in the United States. I was finally able to afford one near the end of the format's life, around the time that MP3 players were becoming endemic. I honestly couldn't make any case for why it was better, and it was significantly less convenient. But I still loved using it. I need to dig through my "big attic box of outdated electronics" and see if I can still dig it up and see if it works. I recently imported a Japanese Kei (mini) Truck. A minidisc stereo would be a great theme-appropriate fit for it, if I can find one at a reasonable price.

flir 4y ago
It's the affordances, in my opinion. Whoever designed the physical hardware was an unsung genius.
KerrAvon 4y ago
I still have a beautiful MD player from Panasonic not much bigger than a Minidisc in any dimension. I think the iPod really killed Minidisc, because the user experience was simply that much better than other MP3 players, which were generally janky designs from unknown brands.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  MiniDisc's killer was none other than Sony itself. Sony's own competing divisions hobbled, crippled, then killed the MiniDisc. The first issue was cost of the media. MiniDiscs we're just never going to be as cheap to manufacture as CDs. So record companies would have far tighter margins on MiniDiscs than they would for the same album pressed on CD. Unsurprisingly not a lot of record companies bothered producing pre-recorded MiniDiscs outside Japan. Without pre-recorded albums readily available the only way to get music onto a disc was to record it yourself. So you had your MD player that cost hundreds of dollars you had to plug into some other audio player to record music to take with you. There was no high speed dubbing unless you had an expensive console recorder so your hour long CD took an hour to copy to the MiniDisc. As the 90s went on Sony also refused to allow MDs to connect to a PC. So you couldn't rip music off a CD (which Sony considered unforgivable piracy) to your PC and then digitally load onto your MiniDisc. That is until they relented and released the NetMD players. But those were crippled in that they would only encode low resolution files but padded them so you only got 80 minutes of play time on a disc (despite the low resolution allowing 160 minutes). Sony also didn't allow their MD data drives to write audio MDs. But no one even had those drives because they were stupid expensive. All of this inconvenience was happening in a time when portable CD players were dropping in price (and getting audio buffers for skip protection) and coming standard in cars. CD-R drives were also coming down significantly in price along with CD-R media itself. So if you did want to make mixtapes or just make CDs from files you got from the budding MP3 scene you could do so cheaply. Sony was even themselves manufacturing these devices, the DiscMan was a really popular portable CD player! The MiniDisc was essentially dead by the time the first portable MP3 players came out. Even the iPod wasn't competing against MiniDisc so much as it was CD players which by then added MP3 playback. The iPod didn't really take off until the third generation one was released in 2003. I say all this loving the aesthetic of MiniDiscs. They look super cool and could have actually been an interesting technology. Unfortunately Sony really likes their proprietary media formats.
  - flir 4y ago
    Internally they had mp3-on-minidisc ready to go, apparently. Engineering wanted to release it, the dark forces you allude to did not.
    - giantrobot 4y ago
      One of the other boneheaded aspects of NetMD was music was "checked out". If you put a track on an MD it was "checked out" and after some limited number of checkouts (2 or 3 IIRC) you couldn't put that track on another MD. Sony seemed obsessed over anti-piracy measures to the detriment of MD's success. You couldn't encode SP quality tracks on a PC you only got that recording real-time on a player. The check out stupidity. And then not supporting MP3s on MD. Sony almost seemed to go out of the way to kill the format.
      - gizajob 4y ago
        I've a lot of respect for Sony, partly because I loved the minidisc. This issue arose because you had one monolithic company on one hand making minidiscs - total piracy-friendly devices, and on the other hand, running a huge record label, justifiably scared of MP3 because it seemed like it was going to kill the music industry, and indeed did kill the form it was in at the time. Hence the label's panic caused the minidisc's extra features to become borked and it killed it. Minidisc really was the best format around though, for a time. They held 80 minutes of music / hundreds of megs of audio, at a time when even a 32mb solid-state card, like smartmedia, was really expensive. Apple didn't have that problem – they just had to build a better MP3 player, and succeeded. It was only after the initial gunfire had died down that Apple saw fit to get the labels on-side, once everyone's iPods were full of pirated music.
        giantrobot 4y ago
        > Minidisc really was the best format around though, for a time. They held 80 minutes of music / hundreds of megs of audio, at a time when even a 32mb solid-state card, like smartmedia, was really expensive. MiniDiscs compared compared favorably to early solid state MP3 players but those weren't their main competition, CD players were. By the time MP3 players were available portable CD players were inexpensive and had enough skip protection to listen to while walking. Even down market cars can standard with them. If you bought a CD from a store there were good odds you could listen into it on the way home. Compared to CDs I don't think MiniDiscs offered much of an advantage in the general case. MD players had some cool features if you were really into making discs but I think most people just wanted to listen to music. I find your point about Sony being afraid a little funny considering they let a great opportunity slip through their fingers. If MD data and MD audio were interchangeable and MD drives for computers were cheap they could have made tons of money off them. Inexpensive 140MB rewritable data discs that could also store 80 minutes of audio ripped from your CDs. MiniDisc could have been the removable media of the 90s and well into the 00s. They would have sucked the oxygen out of the room for Fujitsu's M/O drives, Iomega Zip, and all the other removable disk drives. The audio players would have just been icing on the data storage cake.
- Melatonic 4y ago
  I thought only Sony could make MD players? Looking up the Panasonic now - in general I love Panasonic - never had anything from them that was not awesome.
roughly 4y ago
It was definitely the aesthetics of it. It was _incredibly_ cyberpunk - this great combination of digital storage format, small-size tech-looking disk, the way the players looked and opened - the whole thing was straight out of an anime. It's this artifact from the last moment before tech swerved off that cyberpunk mixture of physical and digital to just straight digital - after that, everything became ephemeral bits, and increasingly the hardware "existed to not exist," as it were - the iPhone, iPad, etc. were all designed as "blank slates" for the software, which was where all the action was. I think that's why the original Motorola Droid is so loved - it's not just that the hardware was useful and interesting, but it "existed to exist" - it had an aesthetic and was trying to be something by itself, not just to disappear.
- MontyCarloHall 4y ago
  >It's this artifact from the last moment before tech swerved off that cyberpunk mixture of physical and digital This perfectly fits with the best definition of cyberpunk I’ve ever heard: “the future, but the 80s never ended.” (Incidentally, I’ve heard Japan described this way as well.)
  - reaperducer 4y ago
    Incidentally, I’ve heard Japan described this way as well While I won't pretend to know as much about Japan as someone who lives there full-time, I've visited 14 times, often for several weeks at a stretch, and in real life, modern Japan is very different from the cyberpunk fantasies spread around the internet by people who have never been, and never will. It's still my favorite country to visit, so I watch NHK World every day. But it's not the cartoon/tech/ninja cliché world promulgated online. It's actually much better.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
fuzzy2 4y ago
Was? It is cool. Magneto-optic storage for the masses. What's not to like? Also, of course, wired remotes with displays.
numpad0 4y ago
I think in the end it was just another example of Sony's proprietary, slightly miniaturized media. Sony had done it over and over and it is not cool at all in that regard. But the aesthetic design of and the experience of handling it was superb. The discs were often transparent and had just the right amount of internal reflections. Loading mechanism was partially motorized and would make a nice intricate sequence of scratching sounds. A lot of MD devices also used a slightly higher tone than were typical of machine beeps. Everything was figuratively "mint flavored". And then the new goodness of white plastic and stainless steel, scented with purified industrial alcohols, came in and wiped them all off.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  > it was just another example of Sony's proprietary This pattern predates MemoryStick and even BetaMax (yes, Sony created BetaMax). I have several dictation tape recorders from the early and mid 70s. Norelco, Philips, GE, and Sony. All of them use the same size mini cassettes except… Sony.
  - brudgers 4y ago
    It is older and not unique to Sony among Japanese manufacturers. Nikon, Canon, Minolta, Olympus, and Pentax camera lenses…and Mamiya and Bronica too now that I think about it. And Kodak color film might be the prototype of vendor lock in for consumer products. Black and white Kodak roll film formats, now that I think of it, are even older still.
    - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
      > And Kodak color film might be the prototype of vendor lock How? Those film cartridges were standard. There were many companies selling 110 film cartridges, 35mm film, etc.
      - brudgers 4y ago
        In the early days of color film, the only way to get Kodak color film processed was by Kodak. Kodak as the only processing option goes all the way back to the Kodak No. 1 camera in the 19th century. Kodak produced a lot of roll film cameras that took unusual formats that practically speaking only Kodak sold. https://www.brownie-camera.com/film.shtml https://www.brownie-camera.com/film.shtml This continued into the 1970’s with with the Kodamatic instant film formats. While there were technically speaking other manufacturers of disc film and disc cameras, practically speaking they were synonymous with Kodak brand. That near exclusive film format only ceased manufacture in 1999.
glial 4y ago
The primary alternative at the time was CDs. MiniDiscs were like cool CDs that wouldn't scratch if you threw them on the desk or in the glove compartment. Also the aesthetics of the players were great... Too bad the accompanying software was so terrible.
gernb 4y ago
Mini-disc players had up to 240hrs of play time on a single charge. No MP3 player has ever had more than about 30hrs of play. Not that I want to go back to mini-disc but it's always been surprising to me that a device with moving parts would perform better than one without.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- layer8 4y ago
  The moving parts of a MiniDisc are extremely lightweight, and I’m pretty sure the whole electronics of portable MD players were optimized end-to-end to consume as little power as possible. The ATRAC codec was also designed to be implemented directly in silicon and to use minimal energy. MP3 hardware was likely significantly less power-efficient.
  - dafelst 4y ago
    Interestingly Sony hardware and software to this day (even the PS5) still support ATRAC decoding.
jonjon10002 4y ago
I jumped to MD in 1997 because I was still using cassette for mobile music consumption. Because of the media size, there wasn't a pocketable portable CD player, and skipping was a problem (that got fixed later) so I never switched to CD for mobile use. Compared to tapes, MiniDisc was a godsend: no eaten tapes, random access playback, smaller size, better sound, song titles, and it was just so cool looking. I also used a MiniDisc a lot to record and transcribe meetings at work. The live audio recording was excellent. The main disadvantage I ran into was that even with an optical digital connection, recording a 60-minute album from CD to MD took 60 minutes. I seldom ran into recordable media or prerecorded titles in the wild, even in New York (although Tower carried them), but there were lots of good online stores back then to buy blanks and new players. I stuck with it until 2002, when the second-generation iPods showed up. It was easier to carry one thing, and not a player and a bunch of loose discs. I still have a giant anvil road case with a few hundred of them in storage, although who knows if they delaminate or turn into oil over the decades.
- throwanem 4y ago
  A few years back I bought a couple of assorted batch lots off eBay from people selling out of an old collection, or just selling an old collection wholesale. Some new discs still in the cellophane, too - mostly Neige, but I have a couple of Color Club ones in there somewhere. I still have my own small collection bought with high school summer-job money, too. And I have exactly one Hi-MD disc, that came with the MZ-RH1 I bought for ripping - an accident, I think that must have been, since the price I paid matched other player-only sales and didn't include the $60 or so that Hi-MD discs were going for around the same time. Most failures I've seen have been mechanical, whether due to mistreatment by a prior owner or, with a couple of the TDK ones I bought as a kid, the glue that holds the case window in growing brittle with age. The media itself, like flash memory, is perishable with enough write cycles, and I think I've run into two discs so far that were mechanically sound but unreadable. Certainly I never had that kind of failure back in the day, and I must've rewritten some of those discs a few dozen times - they weren't cheap then, and summer-job money only stretches so far. Certainly if there are any common failure modes comparable to sticky-shed syndrome, I haven't run into them. Granted, it's been a couple of years; I wrapped most of the really intensive research once I got my ripping setup in place a little while before the pandemic kicked off. (For unencumbered full-quality digital ripping, you need an MZ-RH1 specifically, plus SonicStage iirc 3.4.3 and some drivers I had to dig a bit to find. I keep meaning to rehost that stuff somewhere along with a howto, but there's lots of other ways I have to spend my time of late - I'd be happy to hand the whole package off as a zipfile with my notes, if someone were interested.) So I might be overlooking something at this point, especially without referring to notes, but my overall impression is entirely that, given a working recorder or player, all or nearly all of your discs should still be perfectly usable.
foobarian 4y ago
I wonder if the analog side of it was also designed superbly. More modern players happened to succeed not because the creators worked harder, or designed better, but purely by stupid luck of riding the Moore's law curve. But the analog side of things was not subject to Moore's law, and since modern players are cheap, there is no budget for a careful analog design. Hence I would expect older products like MiniDisc to have excellent performance there. All this without having used one, just some fun armchair speculation.
lttlrck 4y ago
You could make "mix tapes"!
acchow 4y ago
I remember loving the infinite storage capability on a cheap medium.
tqi 4y ago
Man i loved my MD player, i remember thinking in-line remote with the shirt clip was so cool. Looking back, it was pretty hilarious that transferring songs to the disc was real time (ie 70 minutes to transfer 70 minutes of audio). I really had nothing better to do...
- joecool1029 4y ago
  They fixed it in later hardware revisions with NetMD allowing faster than realtime digital downloading, but the software was terrible. There's amazingly been an opensource project slowly iterating and adding functionality to do so in the current age: https://wiki.physik.fu-berlin.de/linux-minidisc/ https://wiki.physik.fu-berlin.de/linux-minidisc/
  - tqi 4y ago
    amazing. if only i remembered where my mini disc was...
woodrowbarlow 4y ago
> I recently imported a Japanese Kei (mini) Truck. the subaru sambar? i adore that thing. someone in my neighborhood has one and i get a big ol' grin every time i see it on the road.
- jonpurdy 4y ago
  I would love to import a Honda Acty. A neighbour had one when living in Toronto but seems like they're really difficult/impossible to import to California.
TheCondor 4y ago
The smaller disc size than a CD. The built in protection for the disc (I had a shitty car at the time and I think discs got scratched up by the player itself, eventually they were all unplayable). Recording built in. It scratched all the itches of the early 1990s. The devices themselves were pretty sexy too, portable, full featured.
rsync 4y ago
I feel exactly the same way about PCMCIA. It is my all-time favorite form factor.
- Melatonic 4y ago
  The card format connector? It was cool in a few laptops to be able to add stuff on but I'm not sure it was anything all that special?
- jjkaczor 4y ago
  Yeah - it just "felt right" in the hand. I had a modem, with a serial connector dongle that would let my Motorola flip be used with my Newton 120... Dial-up internet in the "palms of your hands" while hanging around in coffee shops circa 1995/6.
eastbound 4y ago
The killer for me was that it had a direct USB CD-to-MiniDisc cable to transfer CDs, with original quality, proper tracks and all. I would have loved to use it! Unfortunately once opened, the user manual said something along the lines of “Press he record button, plug the USB-to-jack wire, and in 45 minutes, done! It will recognize the tracks by noticing the silence between them, hopefully you don’t have silences in the music, right? Also don’t fuss too much about the white noise due to impedance, it’s a high-quality transfer we pinky-swear.” I swore never to buy anything from Sony since 1999. I relapsed in 2016 for ONE purchase. And swore again: Never - buy - SONY. EVER.
spinny 4y ago
I owned a mzr700 at the time cd/mp3 players started to come to the market. It looked like something from the future when compared with the cd/mp3 players at the time. audio quality was amazing and minidisks always worked, no skipping or disk damages, and longer battery life than the cd/mp3 readers
cogman10 4y ago
> the difficulty of getting one in the United States. I had never even HEARD of the minidisc before I worked abroad in england from 2004-2006. Then seeing it being both ubiquitous, common, and cheap (and nearing it's EOL) was stunning. It's just a fun little format. The discs were just the right size and could store a boatload of info for the time. It was back when a 64mb mp3 player was pretty expensive.
Wistar 4y ago
I have perhaps the only 110V Sony LISSA stereo system that exists. Sony modified it to 110V for me for a special project. I have all of the components, including the CDP-LSA1 CD player, MDS-LSA1 MiniDisc recorder/player, STR-LSA1 receiver, and Sony speakers but not the new-age modern-looking 2.1 speakers that some later sets shipped with. All of the components interconnect with 1394 (Sony's i.Link), except for the speakers which are conventional analog connections. In about 2002, I used it for a single demo for a few days and, since then, it has sat, unused in my storage shelves. I need to send it to a museum or something. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Lissa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Lissa (edit: fix date. 2002, not 1982.)
- gonesilent 4y ago
  you should take a picture for the wiki link.
  - Wistar 4y ago
    Good idea.
- krallja 4y ago
  Isn’t Japan already 110V?
  - frosted-flakes 4y ago
    Japan is 100v. North America is 120v, not 110v.
  - Wistar 4y ago
    I probably should have written something such as "converted to the North American standard," although my memory is that they converted it from 220V Euro.
fomine3 4y ago
I feel similar for DVD-RAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-RAM#/media/File:DVD-RAM_FUJIFILM_disc_removable_without_cartridge_locking_pin.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-RAM#/media/File:DVD-RAM_FU...

flir 4y ago

It's the affordances, in my opinion. Whoever designed the physical hardware was an unsung genius.

KerrAvon 4y ago

I still have a beautiful MD player from Panasonic not much bigger than a Minidisc in any dimension. I think the iPod really killed Minidisc, because the user experience was simply that much better than other MP3 players, which were generally janky designs from unknown brands.

giantrobot 4y ago
MiniDisc's killer was none other than Sony itself. Sony's own competing divisions hobbled, crippled, then killed the MiniDisc. The first issue was cost of the media. MiniDiscs we're just never going to be as cheap to manufacture as CDs. So record companies would have far tighter margins on MiniDiscs than they would for the same album pressed on CD. Unsurprisingly not a lot of record companies bothered producing pre-recorded MiniDiscs outside Japan. Without pre-recorded albums readily available the only way to get music onto a disc was to record it yourself. So you had your MD player that cost hundreds of dollars you had to plug into some other audio player to record music to take with you. There was no high speed dubbing unless you had an expensive console recorder so your hour long CD took an hour to copy to the MiniDisc. As the 90s went on Sony also refused to allow MDs to connect to a PC. So you couldn't rip music off a CD (which Sony considered unforgivable piracy) to your PC and then digitally load onto your MiniDisc. That is until they relented and released the NetMD players. But those were crippled in that they would only encode low resolution files but padded them so you only got 80 minutes of play time on a disc (despite the low resolution allowing 160 minutes). Sony also didn't allow their MD data drives to write audio MDs. But no one even had those drives because they were stupid expensive. All of this inconvenience was happening in a time when portable CD players were dropping in price (and getting audio buffers for skip protection) and coming standard in cars. CD-R drives were also coming down significantly in price along with CD-R media itself. So if you did want to make mixtapes or just make CDs from files you got from the budding MP3 scene you could do so cheaply. Sony was even themselves manufacturing these devices, the DiscMan was a really popular portable CD player! The MiniDisc was essentially dead by the time the first portable MP3 players came out. Even the iPod wasn't competing against MiniDisc so much as it was CD players which by then added MP3 playback. The iPod didn't really take off until the third generation one was released in 2003. I say all this loving the aesthetic of MiniDiscs. They look super cool and could have actually been an interesting technology. Unfortunately Sony really likes their proprietary media formats.
- flir 4y ago
  Internally they had mp3-on-minidisc ready to go, apparently. Engineering wanted to release it, the dark forces you allude to did not.
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    One of the other boneheaded aspects of NetMD was music was "checked out". If you put a track on an MD it was "checked out" and after some limited number of checkouts (2 or 3 IIRC) you couldn't put that track on another MD. Sony seemed obsessed over anti-piracy measures to the detriment of MD's success. You couldn't encode SP quality tracks on a PC you only got that recording real-time on a player. The check out stupidity. And then not supporting MP3s on MD. Sony almost seemed to go out of the way to kill the format.
    - gizajob 4y ago
      I've a lot of respect for Sony, partly because I loved the minidisc. This issue arose because you had one monolithic company on one hand making minidiscs - total piracy-friendly devices, and on the other hand, running a huge record label, justifiably scared of MP3 because it seemed like it was going to kill the music industry, and indeed did kill the form it was in at the time. Hence the label's panic caused the minidisc's extra features to become borked and it killed it. Minidisc really was the best format around though, for a time. They held 80 minutes of music / hundreds of megs of audio, at a time when even a 32mb solid-state card, like smartmedia, was really expensive. Apple didn't have that problem – they just had to build a better MP3 player, and succeeded. It was only after the initial gunfire had died down that Apple saw fit to get the labels on-side, once everyone's iPods were full of pirated music.
      - giantrobot 4y ago
        > Minidisc really was the best format around though, for a time. They held 80 minutes of music / hundreds of megs of audio, at a time when even a 32mb solid-state card, like smartmedia, was really expensive. MiniDiscs compared compared favorably to early solid state MP3 players but those weren't their main competition, CD players were. By the time MP3 players were available portable CD players were inexpensive and had enough skip protection to listen to while walking. Even down market cars can standard with them. If you bought a CD from a store there were good odds you could listen into it on the way home. Compared to CDs I don't think MiniDiscs offered much of an advantage in the general case. MD players had some cool features if you were really into making discs but I think most people just wanted to listen to music. I find your point about Sony being afraid a little funny considering they let a great opportunity slip through their fingers. If MD data and MD audio were interchangeable and MD drives for computers were cheap they could have made tons of money off them. Inexpensive 140MB rewritable data discs that could also store 80 minutes of audio ripped from your CDs. MiniDisc could have been the removable media of the 90s and well into the 00s. They would have sucked the oxygen out of the room for Fujitsu's M/O drives, Iomega Zip, and all the other removable disk drives. The audio players would have just been icing on the data storage cake.
Melatonic 4y ago
I thought only Sony could make MD players? Looking up the Panasonic now - in general I love Panasonic - never had anything from them that was not awesome.

roughly 4y ago

It was definitely the aesthetics of it. It was _incredibly_ cyberpunk - this great combination of digital storage format, small-size tech-looking disk, the way the players looked and opened - the whole thing was straight out of an anime. It's this artifact from the last moment before tech swerved off that cyberpunk mixture of physical and digital to just straight digital - after that, everything became ephemeral bits, and increasingly the hardware "existed to not exist," as it were - the iPhone, iPad, etc. were all designed as "blank slates" for the software, which was where all the action was. I think that's why the original Motorola Droid is so loved - it's not just that the hardware was useful and interesting, but it "existed to exist" - it had an aesthetic and was trying to be something by itself, not just to disappear.

MontyCarloHall 4y ago
>It's this artifact from the last moment before tech swerved off that cyberpunk mixture of physical and digital This perfectly fits with the best definition of cyberpunk I’ve ever heard: “the future, but the 80s never ended.” (Incidentally, I’ve heard Japan described this way as well.)
- reaperducer 4y ago
  Incidentally, I’ve heard Japan described this way as well While I won't pretend to know as much about Japan as someone who lives there full-time, I've visited 14 times, often for several weeks at a stretch, and in real life, modern Japan is very different from the cyberpunk fantasies spread around the internet by people who have never been, and never will. It's still my favorite country to visit, so I watch NHK World every day. But it's not the cartoon/tech/ninja cliché world promulgated online. It's actually much better.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

fuzzy2 4y ago

Was? It is cool. Magneto-optic storage for the masses. What's not to like? Also, of course, wired remotes with displays.

numpad0 4y ago

I think in the end it was just another example of Sony's proprietary, slightly miniaturized media. Sony had done it over and over and it is not cool at all in that regard. But the aesthetic design of and the experience of handling it was superb. The discs were often transparent and had just the right amount of internal reflections. Loading mechanism was partially motorized and would make a nice intricate sequence of scratching sounds. A lot of MD devices also used a slightly higher tone than were typical of machine beeps. Everything was figuratively "mint flavored". And then the new goodness of white plastic and stainless steel, scented with purified industrial alcohols, came in and wiped them all off.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
> it was just another example of Sony's proprietary This pattern predates MemoryStick and even BetaMax (yes, Sony created BetaMax). I have several dictation tape recorders from the early and mid 70s. Norelco, Philips, GE, and Sony. All of them use the same size mini cassettes except… Sony.
- brudgers 4y ago
  It is older and not unique to Sony among Japanese manufacturers. Nikon, Canon, Minolta, Olympus, and Pentax camera lenses…and Mamiya and Bronica too now that I think about it. And Kodak color film might be the prototype of vendor lock in for consumer products. Black and white Kodak roll film formats, now that I think of it, are even older still.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    > And Kodak color film might be the prototype of vendor lock How? Those film cartridges were standard. There were many companies selling 110 film cartridges, 35mm film, etc.
    - brudgers 4y ago
      In the early days of color film, the only way to get Kodak color film processed was by Kodak. Kodak as the only processing option goes all the way back to the Kodak No. 1 camera in the 19th century. Kodak produced a lot of roll film cameras that took unusual formats that practically speaking only Kodak sold. https://www.brownie-camera.com/film.shtml https://www.brownie-camera.com/film.shtml This continued into the 1970’s with with the Kodamatic instant film formats. While there were technically speaking other manufacturers of disc film and disc cameras, practically speaking they were synonymous with Kodak brand. That near exclusive film format only ceased manufacture in 1999.

glial 4y ago

The primary alternative at the time was CDs. MiniDiscs were like cool CDs that wouldn't scratch if you threw them on the desk or in the glove compartment. Also the aesthetics of the players were great... Too bad the accompanying software was so terrible.

gernb 4y ago

Mini-disc players had up to 240hrs of play time on a single charge. No MP3 player has ever had more than about 30hrs of play. Not that I want to go back to mini-disc but it's always been surprising to me that a device with moving parts would perform better than one without.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
layer8 4y ago
The moving parts of a MiniDisc are extremely lightweight, and I’m pretty sure the whole electronics of portable MD players were optimized end-to-end to consume as little power as possible. The ATRAC codec was also designed to be implemented directly in silicon and to use minimal energy. MP3 hardware was likely significantly less power-efficient.
- dafelst 4y ago
  Interestingly Sony hardware and software to this day (even the PS5) still support ATRAC decoding.

jonjon10002 4y ago

I jumped to MD in 1997 because I was still using cassette for mobile music consumption. Because of the media size, there wasn't a pocketable portable CD player, and skipping was a problem (that got fixed later) so I never switched to CD for mobile use. Compared to tapes, MiniDisc was a godsend: no eaten tapes, random access playback, smaller size, better sound, song titles, and it was just so cool looking. I also used a MiniDisc a lot to record and transcribe meetings at work. The live audio recording was excellent. The main disadvantage I ran into was that even with an optical digital connection, recording a 60-minute album from CD to MD took 60 minutes. I seldom ran into recordable media or prerecorded titles in the wild, even in New York (although Tower carried them), but there were lots of good online stores back then to buy blanks and new players. I stuck with it until 2002, when the second-generation iPods showed up. It was easier to carry one thing, and not a player and a bunch of loose discs. I still have a giant anvil road case with a few hundred of them in storage, although who knows if they delaminate or turn into oil over the decades.

throwanem 4y ago
A few years back I bought a couple of assorted batch lots off eBay from people selling out of an old collection, or just selling an old collection wholesale. Some new discs still in the cellophane, too - mostly Neige, but I have a couple of Color Club ones in there somewhere. I still have my own small collection bought with high school summer-job money, too. And I have exactly one Hi-MD disc, that came with the MZ-RH1 I bought for ripping - an accident, I think that must have been, since the price I paid matched other player-only sales and didn't include the $60 or so that Hi-MD discs were going for around the same time. Most failures I've seen have been mechanical, whether due to mistreatment by a prior owner or, with a couple of the TDK ones I bought as a kid, the glue that holds the case window in growing brittle with age. The media itself, like flash memory, is perishable with enough write cycles, and I think I've run into two discs so far that were mechanically sound but unreadable. Certainly I never had that kind of failure back in the day, and I must've rewritten some of those discs a few dozen times - they weren't cheap then, and summer-job money only stretches so far. Certainly if there are any common failure modes comparable to sticky-shed syndrome, I haven't run into them. Granted, it's been a couple of years; I wrapped most of the really intensive research once I got my ripping setup in place a little while before the pandemic kicked off. (For unencumbered full-quality digital ripping, you need an MZ-RH1 specifically, plus SonicStage iirc 3.4.3 and some drivers I had to dig a bit to find. I keep meaning to rehost that stuff somewhere along with a howto, but there's lots of other ways I have to spend my time of late - I'd be happy to hand the whole package off as a zipfile with my notes, if someone were interested.) So I might be overlooking something at this point, especially without referring to notes, but my overall impression is entirely that, given a working recorder or player, all or nearly all of your discs should still be perfectly usable.

foobarian 4y ago

I wonder if the analog side of it was also designed superbly. More modern players happened to succeed not because the creators worked harder, or designed better, but purely by stupid luck of riding the Moore's law curve. But the analog side of things was not subject to Moore's law, and since modern players are cheap, there is no budget for a careful analog design. Hence I would expect older products like MiniDisc to have excellent performance there. All this without having used one, just some fun armchair speculation.

lttlrck 4y ago

You could make "mix tapes"!

acchow 4y ago

I remember loving the infinite storage capability on a cheap medium.

tqi 4y ago

Man i loved my MD player, i remember thinking in-line remote with the shirt clip was so cool. Looking back, it was pretty hilarious that transferring songs to the disc was real time (ie 70 minutes to transfer 70 minutes of audio). I really had nothing better to do...

joecool1029 4y ago
They fixed it in later hardware revisions with NetMD allowing faster than realtime digital downloading, but the software was terrible. There's amazingly been an opensource project slowly iterating and adding functionality to do so in the current age: https://wiki.physik.fu-berlin.de/linux-minidisc/ https://wiki.physik.fu-berlin.de/linux-minidisc/
- tqi 4y ago
  amazing. if only i remembered where my mini disc was...

woodrowbarlow 4y ago

> I recently imported a Japanese Kei (mini) Truck. the subaru sambar? i adore that thing. someone in my neighborhood has one and i get a big ol' grin every time i see it on the road.

jonpurdy 4y ago
I would love to import a Honda Acty. A neighbour had one when living in Toronto but seems like they're really difficult/impossible to import to California.

TheCondor 4y ago

The smaller disc size than a CD. The built in protection for the disc (I had a shitty car at the time and I think discs got scratched up by the player itself, eventually they were all unplayable). Recording built in. It scratched all the itches of the early 1990s. The devices themselves were pretty sexy too, portable, full featured.

rsync 4y ago

I feel exactly the same way about PCMCIA. It is my all-time favorite form factor.

Melatonic 4y ago
The card format connector? It was cool in a few laptops to be able to add stuff on but I'm not sure it was anything all that special?
jjkaczor 4y ago
Yeah - it just "felt right" in the hand. I had a modem, with a serial connector dongle that would let my Motorola flip be used with my Newton 120... Dial-up internet in the "palms of your hands" while hanging around in coffee shops circa 1995/6.

eastbound 4y ago

The killer for me was that it had a direct USB CD-to-MiniDisc cable to transfer CDs, with original quality, proper tracks and all. I would have loved to use it! Unfortunately once opened, the user manual said something along the lines of “Press he record button, plug the USB-to-jack wire, and in 45 minutes, done! It will recognize the tracks by noticing the silence between them, hopefully you don’t have silences in the music, right? Also don’t fuss too much about the white noise due to impedance, it’s a high-quality transfer we pinky-swear.” I swore never to buy anything from Sony since 1999. I relapsed in 2016 for ONE purchase. And swore again: Never - buy - SONY. EVER.

spinny 4y ago

I owned a mzr700 at the time cd/mp3 players started to come to the market. It looked like something from the future when compared with the cd/mp3 players at the time. audio quality was amazing and minidisks always worked, no skipping or disk damages, and longer battery life than the cd/mp3 readers

cogman10 4y ago

> the difficulty of getting one in the United States. I had never even HEARD of the minidisc before I worked abroad in england from 2004-2006. Then seeing it being both ubiquitous, common, and cheap (and nearing it's EOL) was stunning. It's just a fun little format. The discs were just the right size and could store a boatload of info for the time. It was back when a 64mb mp3 player was pretty expensive.

Wistar 4y ago

I have perhaps the only 110V Sony LISSA stereo system that exists. Sony modified it to 110V for me for a special project. I have all of the components, including the CDP-LSA1 CD player, MDS-LSA1 MiniDisc recorder/player, STR-LSA1 receiver, and Sony speakers but not the new-age modern-looking 2.1 speakers that some later sets shipped with. All of the components interconnect with 1394 (Sony's i.Link), except for the speakers which are conventional analog connections. In about 2002, I used it for a single demo for a few days and, since then, it has sat, unused in my storage shelves. I need to send it to a museum or something. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Lissa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Lissa (edit: fix date. 2002, not 1982.)

gonesilent 4y ago
you should take a picture for the wiki link.
- Wistar 4y ago
  Good idea.
krallja 4y ago
Isn’t Japan already 110V?
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  Japan is 100v. North America is 120v, not 110v.
- Wistar 4y ago
  I probably should have written something such as "converted to the North American standard," although my memory is that they converted it from 220V Euro.

fomine3 4y ago

I feel similar for DVD-RAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-RAM#/media/File:DVD-RAM_FUJIFILM_disc_removable_without_cartridge_locking_pin.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-RAM#/media/File:DVD-RAM_FU...