The MiniDisc deck you hoped to never see [video]
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I was finally able to afford one near the end of the format's life, around the time that MP3 players were becoming endemic. I honestly couldn't make any case for why it was better, and it was significantly less convenient. But I still loved using it.
I need to dig through my "big attic box of outdated electronics" and see if I can still dig it up and see if it works.
I recently imported a Japanese Kei (mini) Truck. A minidisc stereo would be a great theme-appropriate fit for it, if I can find one at a reasonable price.
The first issue was cost of the media. MiniDiscs we're just never going to be as cheap to manufacture as CDs. So record companies would have far tighter margins on MiniDiscs than they would for the same album pressed on CD. Unsurprisingly not a lot of record companies bothered producing pre-recorded MiniDiscs outside Japan.
Without pre-recorded albums readily available the only way to get music onto a disc was to record it yourself. So you had your MD player that cost hundreds of dollars you had to plug into some other audio player to record music to take with you. There was no high speed dubbing unless you had an expensive console recorder so your hour long CD took an hour to copy to the MiniDisc.
As the 90s went on Sony also refused to allow MDs to connect to a PC. So you couldn't rip music off a CD (which Sony considered unforgivable piracy) to your PC and then digitally load onto your MiniDisc. That is until they relented and released the NetMD players. But those were crippled in that they would only encode low resolution files but padded them so you only got 80 minutes of play time on a disc (despite the low resolution allowing 160 minutes). Sony also didn't allow their MD data drives to write audio MDs. But no one even had those drives because they were stupid expensive.
All of this inconvenience was happening in a time when portable CD players were dropping in price (and getting audio buffers for skip protection) and coming standard in cars. CD-R drives were also coming down significantly in price along with CD-R media itself. So if you did want to make mixtapes or just make CDs from files you got from the budding MP3 scene you could do so cheaply. Sony was even themselves manufacturing these devices, the DiscMan was a really popular portable CD player!
The MiniDisc was essentially dead by the time the first portable MP3 players came out. Even the iPod wasn't competing against MiniDisc so much as it was CD players which by then added MP3 playback. The iPod didn't really take off until the third generation one was released in 2003.
I say all this loving the aesthetic of MiniDiscs. They look super cool and could have actually been an interesting technology. Unfortunately Sony really likes their proprietary media formats.
Sony seemed obsessed over anti-piracy measures to the detriment of MD's success. You couldn't encode SP quality tracks on a PC you only got that recording real-time on a player. The check out stupidity. And then not supporting MP3s on MD. Sony almost seemed to go out of the way to kill the format.
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.
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.
*I think it was this one. https://winampheritage.com/plugin/minidisc-track-pauser-vers...
I think that's why the original Motorola Droid is so loved - it's not just that the hardware was useful and interesting, but it "existed to exist" - it had an aesthetic and was trying to be something by itself, not just to disappear.
This perfectly fits with the best definition of cyberpunk I’ve ever heard: “the future, but the 80s never ended.”
(Incidentally, I’ve heard Japan described this way as well.)
While I won't pretend to know as much about Japan as someone who lives there full-time, I've visited 14 times, often for several weeks at a stretch, and in real life, modern Japan is very different from the cyberpunk fantasies spread around the internet by people who have never been, and never will.
It's still my favorite country to visit, so I watch NHK World every day. But it's not the cartoon/tech/ninja cliché world promulgated online. It's actually much better.
Also, of course, wired remotes with displays.
But the aesthetic design of and the experience of handling it was superb. The discs were often transparent and had just the right amount of internal reflections. Loading mechanism was partially motorized and would make a nice intricate sequence of scratching sounds. A lot of MD devices also used a slightly higher tone than were typical of machine beeps. Everything was figuratively "mint flavored".
And then the new goodness of white plastic and stainless steel, scented with purified industrial alcohols, came in and wiped them all off.
This pattern predates MemoryStick and even BetaMax (yes, Sony created BetaMax). I have several dictation tape recorders from the early and mid 70s. Norelco, Philips, GE, and Sony. All of them use the same size mini cassettes except… Sony.
Nikon, Canon, Minolta, Olympus, and Pentax camera lenses…and Mamiya and Bronica too now that I think about it.
And Kodak color film might be the prototype of vendor lock in for consumer products.
Black and white Kodak roll film formats, now that I think of it, are even older still.
How? Those film cartridges were standard. There were many companies selling 110 film cartridges, 35mm film, etc.
Kodak produced a lot of roll film cameras that took unusual formats that practically speaking only Kodak sold.
https://www.brownie-camera.com/film.shtml
This continued into the 1970’s with with the Kodamatic instant film formats.
While there were technically speaking other manufacturers of disc film and disc cameras, practically speaking they were synonymous with Kodak brand. That near exclusive film format only ceased manufacture in 1999.
In any case even if Kodak did something like this 100 years ago, that does not preclude Sony from taking it to a new level in more modern times.
"You Press the Button, We Do the Rest" was Kodak's marketing slogan.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Press_the_Button,_We_Do_...
Formats such as 101, 102, etc. we’re discontinued long before I was born.
On the other hand, my grandparents had a Kodak instant camera instead of a Polaroid, I am in some of those pictures, and it was a proprietary format.
Technicolor is another Kodak only film format, and Kodak was in the business of leasing the cameras to movie studios.
Not that I have hate for Kodak or love for Sony or vice versa. I don’t have many strong emotions around brands.
Ring, Nest, Alexa, Siri, Windows, NEF, CR3 etc etc the world is full of proprietary systems.
Even John Deere combines.
BTW, the Kodak business model for APS was selling new equipment to photo labs. Existing machines could not process it in a way that did what consumers were told APS would do.
> On the other hand, my grandparents had a Kodak instant camera instead of a Polaroid, I am in some of those pictures, and it was a proprietary format.
I think I must be a lot older than you. I used 110 and 124 for years. I can tell you firsthand these were not proprietary. Regarding Kodak instant, I never even heard of it until you wrote about it. Anyone who wanted instant photos bought Polaroid. I do not know if their cartridges were proprietary since I never owned one (the photo quality was not very good compared to traditional film). Anyway, I’m glad to learn Kodak had one proprietary format. I just do not think that makes a pattern. Sony dominated this field — make the media proprietary (by patent i assume), but let anyone create devices that use the format. Make the money on selling the media. They did this countless times; I’ve often thought about compiling a list - there are several failed media formats that never became popular. I thought Sony was behind HD-DVD (the blu-ray alternative), but it looks like that was Toshiba primarily (with Sony also backing it).
Kodak made 101 format from 1895 to 1956.
124 until 1962.
Speaking of Polaroid, very much proprietary.
Too bad the accompanying software was so terrible.
Compared to tapes, MiniDisc was a godsend: no eaten tapes, random access playback, smaller size, better sound, song titles, and it was just so cool looking. I also used a MiniDisc a lot to record and transcribe meetings at work. The live audio recording was excellent.
The main disadvantage I ran into was that even with an optical digital connection, recording a 60-minute album from CD to MD took 60 minutes. I seldom ran into recordable media or prerecorded titles in the wild, even in New York (although Tower carried them), but there were lots of good online stores back then to buy blanks and new players.
I stuck with it until 2002, when the second-generation iPods showed up. It was easier to carry one thing, and not a player and a bunch of loose discs. I still have a giant anvil road case with a few hundred of them in storage, although who knows if they delaminate or turn into oil over the decades.
Most failures I've seen have been mechanical, whether due to mistreatment by a prior owner or, with a couple of the TDK ones I bought as a kid, the glue that holds the case window in growing brittle with age.
The media itself, like flash memory, is perishable with enough write cycles, and I think I've run into two discs so far that were mechanically sound but unreadable. Certainly I never had that kind of failure back in the day, and I must've rewritten some of those discs a few dozen times - they weren't cheap then, and summer-job money only stretches so far. Certainly if there are any common failure modes comparable to sticky-shed syndrome, I haven't run into them.
Granted, it's been a couple of years; I wrapped most of the really intensive research once I got my ripping setup in place a little while before the pandemic kicked off. (For unencumbered full-quality digital ripping, you need an MZ-RH1 specifically, plus SonicStage iirc 3.4.3 and some drivers I had to dig a bit to find. I keep meaning to rehost that stuff somewhere along with a howto, but there's lots of other ways I have to spend my time of late - I'd be happy to hand the whole package off as a zipfile with my notes, if someone were interested.)
So I might be overlooking something at this point, especially without referring to notes, but my overall impression is entirely that, given a working recorder or player, all or nearly all of your discs should still be perfectly usable.
All this without having used one, just some fun armchair speculation.
Looking back, it was pretty hilarious that transferring songs to the disc was real time (ie 70 minutes to transfer 70 minutes of audio). I really had nothing better to do...
the subaru sambar? i adore that thing. someone in my neighborhood has one and i get a big ol' grin every time i see it on the road.
The devices themselves were pretty sexy too, portable, full featured.
It is my all-time favorite form factor.
It was cool in a few laptops to be able to add stuff on but I'm not sure it was anything all that special?
Unfortunately once opened, the user manual said something along the lines of “Press he record button, plug the USB-to-jack wire, and in 45 minutes, done! It will recognize the tracks by noticing the silence between them, hopefully you don’t have silences in the music, right? Also don’t fuss too much about the white noise due to impedance, it’s a high-quality transfer we pinky-swear.”
I swore never to buy anything from Sony since 1999. I relapsed in 2016 for ONE purchase. And swore again:
Never - buy - SONY.
EVER.
I had never even HEARD of the minidisc before I worked abroad in england from 2004-2006. Then seeing it being both ubiquitous, common, and cheap (and nearing it's EOL) was stunning.
It's just a fun little format. The discs were just the right size and could store a boatload of info for the time. It was back when a 64mb mp3 player was pretty expensive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Lissa
(edit: fix date. 2002, not 1982.)
You can delete and reorder tracks and this new state is written back to the disc. There's nothing else that does this.
You can't delete a song from a cassette. You can overwrite it with noise but that's not the same thing as skipping it. It's not random access.
You can't delete a track from a CD either, as they were not writable back then. Even today with a re-writable you can't easily delete a track, you'd need to rewrite the entire disc.
You can't reorder a song on a cassette, obviously. You can't really do this with a CD either, other than rewriting it fully with the new order. You can program a CD player to play songs in a particular order but this is not persisted across players.
MiniDisc can do all of the above and will do it instantly. This allows a music buff to constantly tweak and optimize their playlist. You can quite compare it to your current Spotify playlist, but now physical. No other physical media allows you to manage a playlist like a MiniDisc can.
The reason I know this is my dad's 30 year (and ongoing) denial in this not being a more widespread standard. He has this cute little box with 8 MiniDiscs in it. Each crafted to perfection in personal meaning, genre, order of songs. He plays it every day.
I look at it with admiration. Because it works. It worked when I was a teenager and now that I'm middle-aged, it still does. It didn't get outdated, get 17 trillion UI updates, require a password or have ever-changing terms and conditions. It just plays. For 25+ years in a row.
Long may it keep playing.
This may be a naive question, but did they suffer from fragmentation? Reordering tracks via the TOC is a simple operation, but after adding and removing and re-adding songs, I would imagine the writer would need to eventually re-write the entire disc to fragmentation issues, or else have a very complex set of metadata.
I think people would do a disk to disk dub in these situations as a form of "defrag" operation.
You could also get an 80 minute disk, put it in a recorder and get it to read it, then sneakily swap it with a 74 minute disk without letting the recorder's eject switch trip, then force a TOC write, and you would be able to upgrade a 74 minute disk to an 80 minute version.
Statistically though, I imagine reordering to be the most frequent operation. Deletion should be rare since it's a purposeful decision to put the song on the disc in the first place. You might rarely delete one when you get tired of it.
> You can't reorder a song on a cassette, obviously.
I've reordered songs on reel-to-reel magnetic tape with a knife and special tape; I don't see why you couldn't do something similar with a cassette...
The other reason is that cassettes sound like shit, even if you have metal tape and a Nakamichi Dragon.
Perhaps some clever person will write something to transcribe and screenshot videos automatically.
My mental model for Minidiscs is much more similar to tape, it was so easy to use them to record. As a teenager this was the most exciting thing about them -- you could record ~CD quality audio from CDs (I had so many MD mixtapes!) or the radio. On top of that, you could make your copy feel polished by adding track markers and names, giving you information about the track playing when listening and letting you skip back and forth between songs.
This was a huge upgrade from cassettes and an upgrade from CDs because you didn't need to go through the rigamarole of burning.
Of course, this doesn't even touch upon industrial design of the units which has already been well covered in this thread. If you'd like to browse through some old units and get a sense of that, I recommend minidisc.org.
MD audio was compressed with proprietary ATRAC, so sending it out would only make sense if the other end supported it. On the other hand the analog audio would clearly be more compatible.
However, those MD decks supported TOS link for input, but had some bits flipped to disallow CD digital recopy.
LGR has a nice video about it:
There was also a Vaio laptop that had an MD drive, it didnt support data though:
MiniDisc is my favorite example of "History is written by the USA" - younger people in many countries believe it was a failure, even though it was successful in their own country, just because it failed in the USA, and it's mostly the USA who write blogs, make YouTube videos, post to social media.
Also, the main advantage not well discussed following the rise of the iPod and smartphones, was that virtually all minidisc players were RECORDERS. We really lost something, culturally and creatively, when audio devices lost their record-ins. I used to love plugging my headphones into the stereo-in on my minidisc, and walking around capturing the sounds around me. Later playing back through those same headphones would transport you directly to wherever you were at the time. Amazing for field recording and dumping mixes and tracks onto them. Technology progresses, but it seems like the past few decades it hasn't necessary improved a great deal as it does, and much gets lost.
I agree that technological change as resulted in a regrettable loss of common-man recording capability (e.g. streaming and disc-players vs VCRs), but did that actually happen for your use case? Smartphones all have mics, and you can certainly download a recording app even if your phone doesn't ship with one.
I know you can kind of abuse headphones into a microphone (I used to do it all the time as a kid), but would they actually work well with good quality? Did you have some special headphones for this use case? I knew a guy who said he had some special earbuds designed for recording concerts: they had a microphone pointing outward from each ear, and he'd plug them into his MiniDisc recorder.
"Abusing" headphones isn't really the right word to use – headphones and dynamic microphones are almost identical technology. One way, signals go in an drive the diaphragm into producing sound, the other way, audio hits the diaphragm and can then be amplified by a preamplifier, making a microphone. Hence it's really easy to put the earbuds into your ear and walk around recording, and when you play back it's like a perfect binaural recording of what your ears were hearing at the time. I've heard of those earbuds with microphones on the outside, that's a bit more pro.
Yes you're correct, smartphones can record really easily, there was just something really aesthetically pleasing about how the minidisc was a device just built to record and playback really well. It was a beautiful way of having a recording device, without the need for dongles or doodads like you need to do it well on a smartphone. I should have also made the point that a piece of technology being limited also encourages one to find ways of transcending the limitation and doing new things with it (see the Gescom album 'Minidisc' that was designed to be played on shuffle). Having a portable field recorder that was affordable to be a birthday or Christmas present endowed one with something more valuable than a mere smartphone with a recording app, for some reason.
P.s. try and record something at high volume, like a band playing, on your smartphone with the built-in microphone. You'll basically get a square-wave with interludes. The variable level of the mic preamp on the minidisc made it so you could make decent quality recordings of anything...
These days most phones are awesome recorders so I am not sure we really lost that much - I totally get what you are saying for that brief period where ipods were the norm (before phones).
I guess it depends on how you measure it. iPod felt like a true success - it was a rebirth for Apple, proliferated iTunes across millions of computers, built up sensational excitement for an iPod phone, which ultimately became the iPhone which is still a success today.
They were rare in the US in part because they were very expensive. A portable MD player was hundreds of dollars where a portable cassette player with an AM/FM radio built in was $20-30. They stayed expensive even as CDs and CD players (including portables) got less and less expensive. Very few albums were released on MD in the US so even if you invested all the money in the format you were paying $30-50 for "import" discs.
CDs were high quality but large and worked well at home. MiniDiscs were small, portable, and recordable, and mostly replaced tapes, not CDs.
Pre-recorded MDs didn't sell well because that wasn't the point. You'd buy the CD album and then copy it onto MD yourself.
And my point is that model doomed MDs in the US. Everyone* in the US had a cassette player. Every car radio shipped with one, every stereo unit had one, and portable units were cheap and plentiful by the beginning of the 90s. There were also a huge number of pre-recorded albums available on cassette including stuff like books on tape. In the 80s and the first half of the 90s portable music meant a cassette deck.
When MDs came out in the US they were incredibly expensive, more expensive than CD players of the time. If you had a CD player at home you could make a tape off it with a ubiquitous tape deck then play it in the same.
A MiniDisc player was in the best case just a sound quality improvement over cassettes with a huge price premium. By the mid-90s portable CD players could be had for $100 while MD players were still several hundred dollars. In 1995 you could spend a hundred dollars and take your CD collection with you without spending hours transferring them to MiniDisc.
At least in Europe and Japan a MD owner could go to the store and buy pre-recorded albums for their players. I don't know if cassettes skipped those regions in the 80s but the US was lousy with them.
* for some values of everyone