4 ms·

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 ex

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.

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.