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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 - tota

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.

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.