I'm kind of sad that MD didn't get more broadly adopted. Had MD data been more of a thing and allow for more flexibility (no dedicated audio and data discs), MD would probably have been everywhere.
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
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: