Is Sony's 140MB MiniDisc Drive the Next Betamax? (1996)
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Due to the possibility that you might not have had license to record what you recorded, then you couldn't have a digital version of it on your computer.
This was the end of my relationship with Sony.
Early Kindles are going to lose a lot of functionality soon as 3G networks get shut down and they have no WiFi to fall back on.
Paradoxically, since they are a conglomerate some divisions have sane policies. Their mobile phone one is among the few manufacturers that release kernels and make it easy to self-compile your own AOSP.
The reboot process takes almost a full minute, but at least the SONY logo emblazoned on the screen during that time has hopefully given me a Pavlovian aversion to their brand so that I won't make the same mistake again.
Sad because their walk-man was basically the standard before, and sony makes some good hardware.
Sony is (and already was back then) a record company. They were a huge chunk of the group making the rules, and were in a much better position than any other electronics company to fight them.
Would that have been that much worse than just running a 3mm cable from the MiniDisk headphone out to the computer's mic/line in? Or was Sony somehow preventing that?
I played around a lot with music trackers (production tool) during this time and often did the reverse so I could hear my productions on other stereos or in the car -- that is running computer output to a tape deck and recording to tape. This was obviously before CD burners were affordable.
Probably the NetMD series which supported compressed storage onto “data” MDs.
While I never had a use for transferring off of MDs, the software used to manage MD contents was indeed one of the poorest I’ve ever had the misfortune to interact with. Even the worst eras of iTunes (which had generally been pretty shit especially on windows) does not come close to the utter dreck and absolute disaster that was SonicStage.
That software made iTunes on Windows feel fast.
I'm not certain though; it's 20 years since I last used mine, and I wouldn't have had anything to connect it to except analogue audio.
But it had an "SCMS" copy protection scheme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc#Copy_protection
USB 1.0 was introduced in 1996, which is very much "mid 90s". Then again, it wasn't very popular and at 12Mbps for "full speed", it would not have been very fast.
My girlfriend at the time started college in Fall 1999 and got a new laptop. She later got a CD burner and I remember it hooked up via serial port.
It definitely took a few years to see it become common. Mac may have been the first to really push it, but that would have been late-90's as well, post-Jobs' return.
It doesn't help much if you still buy the Playstation...
Don’t forget about this! The CD rootkit thing was what really soured my opinion of Sony.
> This was the end of my relationship with Sony.
It's a good thing that I bought my MiniDisc player in 2004, just a year before the rootkit fiasco. Because I loved that device.
One day I couldn't transfer my legally, newly bought Sony Music CD to my Sony MD player for mobile use (on my also expensive car and mobile MD players) because of DRM.
That's when I decided I don't care anymore. What's the point if after all that money Napster and the newly released iPod provide a better experience.
I tried the mds a year ago and they work (the cd mechanisms is jammed) now the stereo is mainly used through the aux jack.
I will agree MD would have made an excellent computer disc format had Sony allowed it. (They had something called MD Data but it was terrible). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc
And then rootkit scandal.
Now, they're a cheaper Bose.
SONY got the bad reputation but you can thank the western record companies for this with their reaction to Sony's earlier DAT format. Check out "An Open Letter To Japan" in this 1986 issue of "Billboard" (page 9): https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Billboard/80...
A common refrain during the Napster lawsuit was that "the law needs to catch up to technology". This is hilariously wrong, looking back on it. The music industry was very adamant back in the 70s and 80s that consumers shouldn't have access to audio recording technology, especially not digital copies. As a result, the law was about 20 steps ahead of technology. Any and all consumer audio recording technology had to prevent second-generation digital copies via SCMS.
The fact that MP3 players were even allowed to exist (see RIAA v. Diamond) is a minor miracle; birthed from a legal battle that I doubt Sony was at all interested in fighting. At that point they had literally bought a record label, which pushed a lot of internal corporate changes within SONY. It's far harder to justify selling devices to copy music when you also happen to sell music.
(Of course, Apple wound up completely monopolizing music sales for a decade by more or less ignoring all of the above, getting involved in both sides of the business, and just using the superior user experience to steamroll over both labels and other device manufacturers.)
iTunes was never big enough to count as a monopoly on music sales, not even close.
By the time iTunes went DRM-free (in 2009), CD sales were about a third of what they were at their peak and digital was the industry's only growth market. 90% of 40% is still a huge chunk of the market.
At least I still have my CD collection!
What I didn't know is that it has had a bit of a resurgence in a niche of retro enthusiasts, with limited indie hip-hop/waporwave/future funk releases as blank media continue to be made by Sony.
I'm not from the US, had a different experience. We went from tape to CDs pretty quickly, and had some niche MDs market.
Somebodies probably trying to sell you something. I just got the same video on youtube. It's a very sublte form of marketing that plants ideas or breads knowledge before it's needed.
For example, remember all those articles that came out about the Max Headroom tv hack a few years ago? And then six months later Eminem is dressed as Max Headroom in his rap god video. An obscure cultural reference that you probably wouldn't get unless you were preconditioned.
So in six months time when a song or movie or product comes out and it's got mini disc references, you'll know.
- Sony announced the MiniDisc in September 1992
- Windows 3.1 ... by Microsoft ..., released on April 6, 1992
In windows 3.1 days floppies were the norm, jaz and zip were expensive and not so common.. minidiscs would have been so damn crazy cool as main storage format. So many alternative timelines..
[0] apparently 1998 http://www.minidisc.org/part_Sharp_MD-MS721+MS722.html
There really was no good solution to the interface problem until USB and SATA came along.
Most people didn't even have a computer and those that did were not on the Internet. Even images were rare in the early days of the Web. Music was not a thing yet or at least not the ability to download it.
In 1996 I think the most files I had were either email or Corel Draw files (of nothing really just fun).
I dreamed of having one back then, but not before I dreamed of having a 340MB one and running Stakker on it.
During that time, the main storage media was CDs, often used for software or mp3s. Games and other materials (like Encarta) were shipped on CDs because there was no Internet with lots of media, and anyone who did have it was on dialup. Shipping large data on CDs was the way it was done.
However CDs have the very obvious problem that they are not writable (CD writers were rare and very expensive for many years in the beginning), and once the writable ones came out they were still not suitable for things like random access read/write for typical documents, only really used more for archiving.
That’s why Zip drives were such a game changer (and the various other, now forgotten, attempts at solving this problem). Magneto-optical fall into this same time period.
Yes, they were, which is why there were many attempts to solve the problem, despite no one solution winning.
> Most of the stuff would fit on a floppy and you'd still have 90% of it empty.
High-end, but not uncommon, displays were megapixel range truecolor displays. (Which makes how long we got stuck at FHD, which is 2MP, kind of sad). Uncompressed full screen images were significantly bigger than floppies.
> Any games would be on floppies you wouldn't dream of filling 10% your 420MB hard drive with 10 floppies at 1.44MB each.
Software distribution on floppies was quite compressed; you mightn’t fill your HD with one 10-floppy package (which is good, because the first 10+ floppy software package could be your OS), but it wouldn’t take many.
> Most people didn't even have a computer and those that did were not on the Internet.
The people that didn't have a computer really aren’t a factor in what was in demand by computer users. Those that weren't on the internet directly were often on BBS’s and online services like CompuServe, and were quite often downloading things.
Also, all that changed fairly rapidly over the time in question; in 1993 under a quarter of households had a computer, and internet penetration wasn’t even a thing people surveyed. In 1997 over a third had a computer, and about half of those households were on the internet. In 2001 over half had a computer, and about 80% of them were on the internet. [0]
> Music was not a thing yet or at least not the ability to download it.
Music downloading was definitely a thing by the mid-1990s, even if it didn't hit the public consciousness in a big way until Napster in 1999.
[0] https://www.infoplease.com/math-science/computers-internet/u...
It was like a regular disk, but with >100x capacity and writable.
Sad that their creators failed to commercalize them right.
I guess they could have done a more open standard, but I’m not sure it would have helped them. I recall Superdisk was a slightly more open standard around the same time (maybe a little later) and it went no where.
But, CD burners got cheaper quickly and soon we wouldn't use it anymore.
Put this on a Zip disk, send it to your lawyer
File me under "Funky" - Beastie Boys
Back in the day, 100mb was a breathtakingly large amount of storage - more than 80 floppy disks!
Flash drives and portable NVME SSDs are awesome but they just look boring.
The Zip Drive also never looked as cool both the drives and the disks looked rather boring compared to the minidisc.
It's probably thanks to the matrix and the format being out of my reach as a teenager but oh so cool
... you are on to something here.
(I mean, look at how many movies it shows up in :)
I am convinced, if one looks hard enough a MiniDisc -has- to be found in some TNG episode :)
Sony’s memorystick flash storage did kinda look like the isolinear chips from TNG tho, back in the days where it was Sony or compact Flash/SmartMedia, the memorysticks also won on looks I swear I think that Sony was the only company that actually cared about how things looked in the 90’s and early 2000’s until Apple under Steve Jobs went through the whole look and feel first phase.
Good call. That'd fit better with the "timeline", in that retro-futuristic way :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(hardware)#/media/File:C...
Ironically it also helps that self-recorded MDs were the more common option, so the discs aren't covered in labels/printing. (I have one modern prerecorded MD release, and while the printing is neat in some ways, it doesn't have that futuristic side as much)
I hadn't thought of it, but you are right.
(Then again cassettes were also mostly always used "naked" - as in, copied and devoid of labeling ... ... and they never reached MD-level cool :)
... though they might have seem like a very futuristic thing when first introduced.)
Having a self contained case, and a pretty small size that can easily fit in your palm was pretty practical. We’d go on road trips and it was nice to be able to eject a cartridge and just put it on the dash or whatever.
Same as with a tape, making a recording was sort of time consuming because you couldn’t just drop files and burn to disk). Unlike a playlist that has infinite capacity, when recording to disk you had limited capacity so needed to make more careful editorial choices in your mix.
It was really nice giving or receiving a mix that a friend had taken the time to make :)
(though I'd say that flash drives can be cool if you treat them as James Bond spy gear and get drives disguised as everyday objects or jewelry)
Linux it works ok though.
My dad oddly noticed this and got us into mini discs with an entertainment system that had it, and then a small walkman player that I used to record songs and such onto it. It was so cool for me as an pre-teen. (My dad got into it in 1997ish)
I now want to just find a single MD to just keep as a memory, but they are costly to buy, even as a 5 pack.
It was a fast and durable format. If they had come out the parallel-port or IDE based drives which wrote on the same audio MD blanks in the mid-90s, it could have displaced floppy disks and remained the standard until multi-gigabyte thumb drives came along.
Got a little tascam pocket recorder when it came out. Loved the transfer process (usb). Still did nothing with the recordings. Turns out you have to be a really good musician to make a tolerable recording.
Producers add a lot limits for copy-protect (HDCP and others on UHD-BD). But will the popularity/convenience of streaming repeat how USB stick/MP3 replace MiniDisc?
Blu-rays do have copy protection, but AFAIK MakeMKV rips most Blu-rays without any issues.