Minidiscs were a great tech—-we had a couple recorders in the early 2000s, mostly for recording my wife’s recitals. They were a huge step up from DAT in terms o

Minidiscs were a great tech—-we had a couple recorders in the early 2000s, mostly for recording my wife’s recitals. They were a huge step up from DAT in terms of easy, tiny personal digital recording and playback. Couple things killed them, though. The recording industry did their usual “ZOMGWTFBBQ this will KILL the music industry!” dance that they do every time there’s a new recording tech, so Sony responded by building in 90 layers of DRM all over the place. That meant you could record yourself playing, but trying to get that recording off the disc was anywhere from annoying to impossible depending on the player model thanks to Sony’s proprietary audio formats and connection systems. Until NetMD, the players would only use ATRAC, so you’d have to use Sony’s tools to move content in and out of the devices, with lots of DRM flags to make it harder to use them to bootleg concerts or trade music. All of that was in place right when MP3 and HDD/solid-state recorder/players exploded, at which point there was no selling point for MD anymore. No one wanted to buy a copy of an album on MD (there weren’t many anyway) when they could buy the MP3s or buy the CD and rip the MP3s instead. No one wanted to record audio in a proprietary format on expensive MDs when they could record it uncompressed to a computer or a solid-state handheld and burn it to a CD if they wanted a physical copy. Kind of sad, really—-the later NetMD models were tiny, fun to use, and by then Sony had removed most of the obstructions around recording and transferring audio. Solid-state is more reliable, but those recorders don’t have the cool looks and fun interfaces of the consumer MD models.