The MiniDisc: the failure of a forgotten format (2020)
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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.
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.)
https://mobile.twitter.com/doctorow/status/12586000447118090...
Also
And don’t messed this up themselves by not allowing you to do a digital copy from md devices, since they’d just bought a music studio.
Also, rather than use mp3 like everyone else, they created there own format.
No, it wasn’t. Walkman, discman, ipod. _That’s_ how it went virtually everywhere
Fun trip though!
Well, don't know about "virtually", but in Europe I only know one person who had one, and I don't remember seeing any on the street / bus / metro.
I remember people having tape walkmans, then portable CD players for a short while, than massively switching to MP3 players when they became available, probably because CD players were extremely unpractical. I used to have an MP3-capable CD player, which kind of mitigated the problem, but it was still not great.
I remember looking at minidisc players at the time, and the MP3 CD looked much more practical to load with music and also much cheaper, so I went with that.
I owned a couple of portable minidisc players in the 90s, one of which was stolen. I recall that they were relatively expensive when compared with cassette players, but they were not that rare.
In Canada I never saw one outside a store, never saw a prerecorded MD album even in a store. I knew a lot of people who had portable CD players before MP3 players took off.
In the late 90s I had a Sharp 722 (in champagne gold iirc) and you could plug that thing into a pair of decks (UK Garage at that time) and get rich, beautiful sound out of it – fully captured the texture of the vinyl.
CDs were awkward, needed to lie horizontal, and prone to skipping and getting scratched up.
MiniDisc was never a replacement for CDs, but a replacement for cassettes – and at that, they were great.
Is this past year of COVID to blame? I had been rekindling some nostalgia for my brief foray into MiniDisc over two decades ago (it had been too brief). And then my daughter, born after the iPod but likely channelling part of that retro zeitgeist, wanted to experiment with/explore cassette tapes. No, no, MiniDisc, I said. And then I proceeded to buy way too many of the devices on eBay.
I have a bigger collection now of both players and discs than I did when I first dipped my toe into MiniDisc.
I think both she and I enjoy mix-tape vs. playlist. Trying to pick songs to fit within 80 or 74 minutes.
And then somehow the "I want to hear something mellow" and then the physical insertion of a disc.... Something tangible in an increasingly intangible world?
What I remember from my minidisc days were that at least the ones I owned were all recorders. Even though I bought zero minidisc albums, I had a few minidiscs with albums recorded from CDs.
Even though minidisc wasn't ubiquitous, I'm not sure that the number of releases is a good measuring stick.
MiniDisc replaced tape, not CDs or records. Its raison d'etre was recording your own discs.
It would've been amazing to buy a whole discography on MD, it would've fit there easily.
MD is on my list of the most coolest technologies that just fizzled out in the mainstream.
P.S. British viewpoint by Techmoan (which pointed out the American-centric "MiniDisc is a failure"): 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
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?
Check minidisc.org
It could have gotten a second life though with MD Data but the drives for that were just too expensive.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Sony sold 18 million BetaMax players.
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.
DAT was more practical for recording but also $$.
The completely different ADAT can utilize consumer S-VHS tapes.
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.
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!