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Comment by arpa | Hacker News Reader

What really killed this format is the draconian copy protection that crippled the software for getting the tracks on device (for NET MD players). Other method(s) of getting sound on MD was essentially dubbing, like you would with MC. Other players removed the artificial barriers of getting your music on device, and it turned out that antipiracy measures are not a feature... which is a shame, because the feel and sound of MD players is pretty damn great, and the wired remote with minimal backlit display is god tier UX compared to anything that was/is on the market. I bought my first secondhand MD player in 2015, and it was the best thing. It even had AA battery adapter(!!!)

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This. MD was kind of a weird cross-over between a disk with a filesystem (which the iPod was in its first iterations) and a CD. And it sucked as both - it could not be used as a file system because you had to use Sony's proprietary tools to get anything onto it and off of it, _and_ it sucked as as a CD because the only equipment that could get data off of it would do it either real-time (too slow) or - at best - at 4x realtime. That while CD-R reader drives already could read at 32x realtime. The DRM also had a nice property that you needed a proprietary Sony app to get music onto and off of a MD, this app was horrible _and_ it was only available for Windows.

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.

I worked at Best Buy from 97-02 and don’t recall having a any prerecorded content for MD’s or if we did it was almost non existent. Your explanation is the correct answer as the onerous drm and Sony way of doing things limited the market appeal. I think they eased up the restrictions when MP3’s starting getting big but then it was too late.

Sony did this to themselves multiple times. Because they always had done other division they wanted to not cannibalize, or some Not-Invemted-Here. E.g them too long using memory stick instead of sd cards.

Quite honestly I don't think SD was even a big thing yet. I remember clearly complaints about Sony not just using CompactFlash, in contrast.

CF versus MemoryStick seems like a weird comparison. Sony was big on miniaturization back then and CF would have been a complete non-starter.

But you could play the music over SPDIF and record it while playing. I cannot remember having had problems with that. (Until my self-built SPDIF adapter broke...) Also other than stated in the article, MD used its own compression format so you could put 700 MB uncompressed audio onto a 130 MB disc. But in times of > 10 GB storage it makes no sense anymore to use replaceable cartridges. Just put it all on the player. That's what ultimately killed it.

It could have gotten a second life though with MD Data but the drives for that were just too expensive.

That is true, but the SPDIF playback/record is essentially dubbing :(

The model I had allowed for only 1 digital copy, after that generation it had to be analogue before another digital copy could be made.

I think they meant it's realtime (dubbing) rather than faster than realtime copying.

I bought an Aiwa mini-stereo with CD & MD that came with a portable MD player. The portable had a AA battery attachment, and I could go most of the day on the rechargeable and pop that on when needed. I bought 10 blank MD's to record and re-record with whatever I wanted, and that was all I needed for 3 years. It was great.

That was the amazing thing about the format. It didn't need much of a network effect to work as you could just record your own stuff. And obviously, as soon as one person in the group got one, many others followed. It was great.

You may be right for the vast majority of users but I was a nerdy power user already back then and this was never an issue.

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.

Couldn't agree more. I loved minidisc but this is what killed it for me

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