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Quarter-sized CD's?
Anonymous Coward writes: "The Denver Post is running an interesting story about Dataplay, Inc. This Boulder, Colorado based company aims to supplant the 20-year-old CD with a quarter-sized (1.5" x 1.25") optical disc that can hold 500 Mb of data. Players and media (already supported by 4 major record labels) are scheduled to launched 'the latter part of first quarter 2002'." They're cute, but considering that Sony's minidiscs never took off and this format is heavily restricted, my guess is that this will fail.
Wow so this is pretty revolutionary, except it really isn't because DVD's already hold more data per cm^2 than this anyway, and the new 50GB/side DVDs are coming out in a year.
Just fucking make a DVD player that can only hold quarter-sized discs. This is gay.
Steve Volk founded DataPlay in November 1998 out of his frustration with the multiple storage formats used in consumer electronics.
So his solution? Invent another storage format!
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Make them smaller so they are easier to lose.
And somehow I just can't justify paying 20$ for something that is the size of a quarter.
For some reason, MD didn't take off in a big way in the US, but in Japan and Europe, they are a huge success. In the UK you can buy pre-recorded minidiscs in the music stores, like CD's or vinyl.
Almost every 2nd person on the public transport in London is listening to a MD player. They have totally replaced tapes and the walkman over here.
Just because the US seems to have ignored them for the last 5 years does not make them a failure...
The reason minidisks never tookoff is because Sony refused to sell licenses. Same reason Beta lost to VHS. Sounds like this technology is too restricted to become a standard, but when will companies learn?
Go ahead and waste your life with your inhibitions, just don't ruin other people's lives with your intolerances.
Damn. If they remove the restrictions, there's a *TON* of applications they can use. You can even make a drive out of a PCMCIA Type III card. If you can shove one drive natively in a system, all you need to do is slap part of the Linux distro on it and free up half a gig of HD space! That's a whole HD for me on my laptop!
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
They're cute, but considering that Sony's minidiscs never took off
If you're into music, like making it yourself, a Minidisc is one of the Good Things you can have...
I guess this means I'm gonna have to buy the White Album again...
This sig is umop apisdn.
We'll need coin purses for our music. Wonder if you could buy a Coke with 'em? ...
Sony MiniDiscs didn't take off because they had shit fidelity. You might recall that it was the high end of the audio market which paved the way for the current CD market, i.e. I paid $650 for my first CD player, equal of which today costs ~$100. MP3, though popular is still far from mainstream, probably because the cost is too high for personal MP3 players (when you consider what it costs to buy a cheap portable cassette or CD player), besides, MP3 has low res. audio, too. CDs aren't necessarily here to stay, but they still work very well. (Of course, quality is also heavily determined by who issues the recording and how good a production job they did.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I disagree. Minidiscs took off. It took a long time, but nowadays, many people own a minidisc. Pre-recorded MD never took off. Ok. Probably because they were as expensive as CDs, and because record dealers didn't want to have every record on a new support. But blank MDs are nice. Excellent quality, all features of a CD (direct access to tracks), plus song and disk titles. Plus they are small. The only bad thing about MD is that recorders are still a bit expensive. But I only use MDs to record music I want to hear while traveling. I don't want of CDs and MP3/OGG gadgets that need a computer to be recorded.
{{.sig}}
DataPlay - Flash Killer or Copy-Control Nightmare? [slashdot.org] (From Feb 21/01)
NZ
The only big wins I see with this technology are
- Portable players. Imagine a matchbox sized unit that holds a full album worth of music. Portable CD players long ago reached the point where the size of the CD is the limiting factor in how small they can be made.
- Massive storage units. If you could put these CDs in "rolls" or some other method, you can store a whole lot of them in a standard sized consumer audio unit, as opposed to the 5 or 10 CD changers that are common now.
And that's about it. For just about everything else a regular CD is just better. The consumer-hostile content control is just the icing on the cake IMHO.I read the internet for the articles.
And we all know the cost of the media is what keeps CD prices at $17.99
Quarter sized? Whose quarters are they using? Mine are about 0.94". I might believe silver dollar-sized. :)
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Sony's minidiscs never took off
Wrong. Sony's minidiscs never took off for the intended audience.
Minidiscs are the defacto standard medium for amateur bootleggers (for concerts, etc), since they're cheap, small, and have good quality. The best are DAT recorders, but they're expensive and big.
Just some FYI.
U da bitch. And u momma too.
I still have 100+ LPs and a few 45s, and a rather nice turntable, because some stuff didn't move well to CD, some stuff didn't come out on CD and some stuff lost tracks when it was re-thought and moved to CD (i.e. ELO Out of the Blue)
I'm probably getting a DVD player in the next month, but deciding factor isn't so much that it's better or more convenient, it's actually that my NEC VCR is dying (after 16 years. Hey, it was and still is a great model, I hope I can get it fixed.), but I'll still need a VCR to play the prerecorded tapes I have (many, too many...)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Any new format, to succeed needs to add value to the user to overcome the cost of changing over. With CDs, there was a marked increase of quality over vinyl. Some might argue it was a decrease, but Joe Sixpack is still glad his CDs dont pop and scratch. Further, the CD allowed instant track access at the push of a button. It was these two features which pushed the changeover to CDs, along with the gradually decreasing price of players and concurrent larger selection of CDs in stores.
That said, where are the additional values of this medium over CDs? It's small. neat. But if I have to give up my CD burner, small dont mean much.
The next medium is most likely to be some flavor of mp3 or ogg device, be it solid state or magnetic disc based. Give me the ability to carry all the music I've bought over the last 15 years in my pocket, and the ability to navigate easily among all the songs, and I'll be all over it.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
"...can hold...five complete pre-recorded albums of CD-quality music..."
(emphasis mine)
That is just wrong...if this disc is 250MB per side, 500MB total, then it's smaller than a actual CD. It might hold 5 albums of MP3s, but a CD will hold more!
And also:
"Recording and data transfer 10 times faster than a CD."
I seriously doubt it. CDs are recordable now at 12x and higher, and readable at over 50x; I think they mean theirs is recordable at 10x, not 120x. I'd be real suprised if it was readable at 500x (I think 500x is about 10MB/sec?). But since they're already talking about compressed data/music, maybe they include the compression into their data transfer rate? Whatever.
Build a better mousetrap, and someone will build a better mouse
Even thought there are heavy restrictions, and built in encryption, etc. on this disc, people will still find a way to circumvent it somehow.
The difference between this and mini-disc is that mini-disc was never meant to take on cd's, but instead was supposed to replace the cassette tape market. Personally, I kinda thought that mini-disc was a pretty good technology. Small form factor, high compression, etc. You could fit four cd's worth of music on one mini-disc with some recorders. It's just a technology that didn't make it.
I have to wonder how many songs they will put on these little '500 mb' discs though. I don't know how many minutes of audio 500 transfers too (although it could be anything I know with new technology and everything)...
One thing about a smaller form factor though... Even though it's easier to carry, it's easier to misplace and lose too...
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
Is DataPlay the next big thing, or something to avoid?
Something to avoid, due to the SDMI restrictions at file system level and 500 MB being 150 to 300 MB less data than a 1980's technology CD-ROM can hold. This is 2001. A breakthrough is having a regular size CD hold 10x the data of a DVD, or a 3-inch CD hold 4x a DVD. Quarter size means losing them regularly. Mini CD size is about as small as you want to go.
Whoops, that's right, I forgot: there is no market outside the US.
Are you spontaneously enthusiastic about everyone having everything you can have? - Buckminster Fuller
They're cute, but considering that Sony's minidiscs never took off and this format is heavily restricted, my guess is that this will fail.
Sony's minidisc failed because Sony wanted royalties from everyone for the technology. This technology will probably be subsidized by the RIAA in order to get people to migrate. For the average Joe Consumer, this would be an ideal technology so I would expect this to take off if executed properly. However, I would not expect the protection mechanisms to last very long.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
I was just reading the "Big Breakthrough" infographic, and this thing sure looks impressive. At long last, thanks to modern technology, I can finally have inexpensive, universal, portable optical media that stores 500 MB of any kind of data I want and can be written 10 times faster than a 1X CD burner!
A quarter sized disc with data on both sides? Can you print pictures or text on these? Can you read such text? CD's are nice because they are reasonably portable (moreso than vinyl), they are round (a beautiful shape), you can print quite a bit on the label side in a readable size, they can be held in one hand, and they stack much nicer than cassettes. Cassettes are too thick for the other two dimensions, not to mention that cassettes suck. A stack of quarters isn't much better. I imagine these quarter discs are about the same thickness as a CD?
The biggest problem I have with CD's is the care that must be taken to avoid scratches. I much rather see media that addresses this problem (mini disc? flash memory?) than smaller CD's.
I've had minidisc players for over a year and I see people carrying them everywhere. Over here they seem to be going from strength to strength.
There's still not much selection available prerecorded, but I don't think most people want to use them to replace CDs, just for replacing tapes and replacing CDs for on-the-move purposes.
Mini disks are doing just fine, thank you.
That is in all of the world EXCEPT in North America.
Over here the record companies have been choking them because they are recorders, and eveil people might record their own music, even from media that they did not buy.
As usual the problem is not the media or the technology, but American companies (and Sony).
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
Um, this is *so* OT but I'm kicking myself trying to remember what that reference is from... Care to enlighten me, "rsteele19"?
Freedom: "I won't!"
Just to bitch and whine, I submitted this well over a YEAR ago :(
Anyway, to be on topic, I don't see why we're just moving to smaller media with higher density. Why not keep existing sizes, but with the added desnity? I know I will never personally use these, as once things get to a certain size, they tend to disappear rather easily on a cluttered desk, or get left in pockets. *sigh* I just want cheap DVD-Rs. Good size, good capacity.
An article about Dataplay seems to show up on slashdot very 3 months, whipping everyone up into a massive frenzy. Of course, Dataplay has over the past 1.5 years or so never released ANYTHING other than press releases, but I guess that does not stop people discussing how great or terrible their non-existant technology is.
They're called Clik! disks. Tiny CDs that have a square edge, which holds the disk.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
It's From Men in Black.
WikiAfterDark.com It's a sex wiki, go now!
Instead of trying to ban CD-R/CD-RW RIAA should support new technologies like this. I bet CD-RW drives are full incompatible with this kind of quater-CD, it would solve their problem (I agree that CD-RW drives are a problem for RIAA) without being intrusive like they are trying to do.
They could also increase music quality, increasing frequency range (in a way vinyl lovers would accept use these quater-CDs) so mp3 would never be as good as a original quarter-CD.
There are so many productive ways to avoid piracy, they might consider to adapt to the new reality (just like everybody else does), instead of fight agains it.
I hope this is the light that shows RIAA the right way.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
"I like the technology, but it's just not a slam dunk," Levitas said. "The copyright protection that they've been able to embed is wonderful."
It's not just a slam dunk, it's a smack down. It's not "wonderful", and any embedded hardware to enforce copy protection is reason enough to never accept this format. Thankfully, record companies are having at least some trouble as it is to copy protect audio compact discs. To give them a 1-up with technology like this would be disasterous. Of course, there's always the possibility of ripping the data, wiping the disc, then re-writing it as whatever format you choose... but that's just plain absurd.
Why do these damn corporations incist on selling products to the consumers under lock to which we do not have the key? We have to stop supporting this. Even though this format looks like it has incredible promise, we should never buy into it. It should never be accepted so long as copy protection is built in. I will make the choice whether or not I want to obey copyright law.
Why bother.
I liked the concept in "First Contact" (Trek). The "CD" was a flat stick. That would be easier to handle than a disk. Disks are optimized for machines, not humans. It would be easier to label also.
You could just stick it in a slot instead of having a lid. (The trailing edge may stick out a little bit so you have something to grab on to.)
Trek got it right again.
Table-ized A.I.
We all know there are lots of things that add to the cost of the disk, but that got me thinking...
The breakdown of a $15 CD is:
$5 to the store
$5 record company
$3 artist
$2 manufacturers and distributors
Who does this type of key purchase leave out? The store (since the samples do their own promotion), the manufacuturers and distributors (since these people have already gotten the physical product to you).
So, basically, record companies just have to pay artist $3 and get to keep the rest. If they pay themselves the same amount as a CD, the key should cost $8. Any bets on if they get greedy?
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Early adopters for a new audio format would be primarily
1) Audiophiles
2) Techtoy-loving geeks (thats us)
3) Music freaks
Group 1 is *never* going to embrace a technology that uses lossy compression - and there's no way a 500MB disk is going to hold even a single album without it. Group #1 is looking for 96/24 and increased fidelity and longevity, size be damned.
Group 2 is going to run away at high speed from anything that incorporates rights management to such a crazy degree.
Group 3 is just fine with CDs and CDRs - why pay $10 for a 500MB blank when that same $10 gets you 20 or 30 blank 650MB CDRs that work in every CD player you have, with your choice of lossy (MP3) or lossless (traditional redbook CD audio) formats, and no rights management?
How can this possibly succeed? I don't get it.
-- "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." (Charles Darwin)
Dataplay discs may be cheap, small, and offer significant areal density, but the drive is completely proprietary. This presumably adds a significant cost to the host device itself.
The world is going to move away from mechanical drives for portable multimedia devices like handhelds and MP3 players. They simply take up too much power to spin the disc and drive the head.
I don't see a lot of benefit for consumers here. And, much as the music industry in particular would like to ignore this fact, it's consumers that will define the success and failure of a new content packaging such as this one.
Every successful format in recent memory has offered some compelling benefit. CDs were smaller, more durable, and sounded better (to most people) than the LPs and tapes they replaced. DVDs offered compelling benefits over and above those offered by videotapes and laserdiscs.
But a new format that's aimed at providing a vehicle for content owners to increase profits without providing a single tangible benefit for the consumer isn't at all likely to succeed. Digital rights management doesn't provide the consumer any benefit right now.
That's not to say that DRM is fundmentally a bad idea: I suspect that many among us would actually use a system that allows us to unlock specific songs rather than paying for an entire CD, for example. But the music industry has yet to learn that the relationship with the consumer is truly a give-and-take relationship; if we're to accept a new format or some sort of DRM scheme, there has to be a set of benefits that make it worthwhile.
I think the industry is beginning to realize this, actually. The attempt to buy legislation like the SSSCA represents an admission that a free marketplace isn't going to adopt new technologies if the benefits are completely one-sided. So long as these hamhanded attempts at market manipulation fail, there will be little choice but to deliver better value in exchange for the better control that they'd like to have.
I find the current state of affairs hilarious.
When a Slashdot editor ends a sentence in a preposition, a hundred nasty comments are immediately posted, each one questioning the education and intelligence of the editor in question.
Yet it seems that comments can't be moderated beyond +2 unless they contain at least one of the following errors:
* "Loose" instead of "lose". We're going to *lose* the game, because of a *loose* defensive strategy.
* "Their" instead of "they're" instead of "there". *They're* going to put *their* things over *there*.
* "I've got" instead of "I have". "I've got" is not correct. You *get* things, maybe you *got* something yesterday, but you haven't "got" something right now.
I'm not trying to be a grammar nazi (yes, I know, there is a user with the name Grammar Nazi), but it seems that the typical Slashdot poster needs a refresher course on 4th-grade English.
Looks like I'll have to buy the White Album again.
Look at the reverse. One of the (many) reasons that LaserDisc never took off was that the discs were too large and cumbersome. Once they reduced the size of the video media to CD size (AKA DVD), the format was adopted by casual home users.
5 1/4" seems to be the right size for removable media. Even the 3" mini-cd's were never popular, and I have yet to see a 3" DVD or DVD-ROM (even though they are part of the standard). I believe that this is also due to size.
They never took off in the USA maybe, but I'm sitting here kicking with my MD player, a lot of people I know have MD's, on their systems, DiscMan's and in the car (my 65 year old uncle has one at home and in the car).
They were a big hit in Europe ever since they changed their strategy about four years ago and targeted them as more as a replacement for the cassette. You can get some really smooth MD kit quite cheap now, the prices keep falling.
As a pre-recorded format they never took of apart from in Japan, but it's certainly live and kicking as a cassette/CD hybrid.
What happens if you accidentally drop your media full of MP3's in a juke box at the local bar?
To say minidisc's took off in the UK is rather nieve , a recent professional audio magazine here ran an article on minidisc and called a huge amount of mastering houses and studios to see if they mastered with minidisc, the result was a resounding 0 (nil) absolutly no studios mastered with them, why ?
well Atrac (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding for MiniDisc) is a very clever compression method that actually throws away a staggering 85% of the available input signal, this means that what you actually listen to on your player is only 15% of the original source, ATRAC is an audio coding system based on psychoacoustic principles , so as the average ear and brain is rather clever also, it can ignore the fact that 85% is missing and rebuild in your brain the missing 85% from the 15% available resulting in you hearing your latest and greates tune and saving space on a 2" disc.
Of course the more discerning listener can hear the fact that most of the nuances are missing and that the music sounds lifeless and dull, ARTRAC is basically Sony's answer to mp3 except technically worse, hence its failed as a professional format in any respects.
if you really cared about your listening experience minidisc is probably the worst thing you could listen to, even cassette with its antique encodings records more of the signal.
for those who would like a more technical description of the ATRAC format that can be found here
"This is going to replace CD's in about 10 years. Look like I'm going to have to buy the white albumn again."---K from MIB---
Don't tell me I'm the only one who saw this quote coming.
Mark
Alas, poor clippy, I loath him so.
I have seen Dataplay prototypes and played with an actual disk. It's cute. The actual disk is encapsulated in a sleeve that looks like a 3-inch floppy, only a bit smaller. Critical in its favor is the metal shutter door. You do not scratch these on the tabletop or in the car. They're proteted. That's good. That's what's wrong with CDs -- even after error correction, they can easily fail, because they're so exposed. Stinkin' jewel cases are far more cumbersome than the cardboard sleeves that old LPs came in, but DataPlay solves this with a hard shuttered enclosure. (Anybody remember CD caddies?) And it still fits into a shirt pocket or Walk-creature-sized machine.
Now the DRM is an option that, of course, all of the prerecorded music companies will invoke. And I can't comment on its crackability. But if you take a drive by itself, and some blanks, then you can ignore the DRM, because it's your own drive. And it fits into a laptop, or a desktop, and can replace a floppy, while being a whole lot nicer than Zip or LS-120.
It's a tiny bit smaller in capacity than CD-RW, and I wonder if that's its weakness. Just a tiny bit more diameter on the disk would give it a lot more area, and it could have been 1-2 GB and still smaller than a floppy.
It'll be interesting to see how they spin this, and how the public responds.
Why would consumers want to replace the cd technology to begin with. It offers very high quality sound on consumer systems, is easy to maintain, has no restrictions on its use in its current specification and is practically universal now.
The only think I see replacing CDs would be some sort of DVD. Ultimately I don't think consumers will latch on to any replacement technology unless it offers the same flexibility that they've come to expect from cds.
As hinted at before, if the capacity is 500M total, then imagine a dual function device that reads cd and these disks.
For instance ad DVD-RAM uses 2 lasers (I know, I took one apart to clean them) on for the DVD-RAM the other for the CD's. Remember those adapters for the 3 and 1/2 inch cd's?
It's be neat to put in a cd sized adapter for a "5 disk changer" kind of setup. Granted unless a really good engineer devises the "holder" it will be another PITA to use/implement.
But storage will be a breeze, just use a left over toilet/hand wipe paper tube, especially if they are light/heat sensitive like most cd/dvd's are.
Maybe I am being overly optimistic/pessimistic but I think the success or failure of this will be based on how well it can be put into a multifunction device that can read/burn/shift whatever data is put on it in addition to all the other specs of DVD/CD -r -rw +r +rw etc.
Like "mini-disc" a single function device is ok, but I'd want more capability, personally.
YOMV (your opinion may vary)
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Damn, I lost my entire CD collection in the couch cushions.
I didn't know that.
I master with bait, smelt to be exact.
DVDs are painfully sensitive to scratches, which is causing a real problem in the movie rental business. If these little discs are as finnicky as DVDs, I don't want them.
This is a great idea, but in practice it doesn't work well. Take all those CDs that came out in the mid 90's using the TestDrive technology, such as the Quake shareware CD. It had the shareware version of Quake on it, and if you liked it, you could call a toll free number, give them a code number it generated, they'd give you a complimentary code number, and the CD would unlock Quake for you, and copy it to your HD. You could also choose to purchase many older id games like Wolf3D, several Doom packages, Hexen, etc. But, it was a very short time later that a tiny little program was widely available that would allow you to generate complimentary keys to the Test Drive program's code. This will happen with records on this disc, and the RIAA will keep prices artificially higher than they should be to "counteract" the "losses" via people cracking the disc.
Further, the paragraph goes on to say this:
But we have proof that record companies do not pass on saving in material costs to the comsumer. A cassette tape is much more costly to produce than a compact disc, yet you can buy new cassettes for about $10 while the same album on CD costs about $15. The CD is the much more popular format, so they charge more for it, and make a killing. If they can afford to sell cassettes at $10, then they should be able to sell the CD for $9 and make the same profit, but they do not. And they won't, unless we PRESSURE them to. They backed off the crap they tried to pull piggybacking their ideas on anti-terror bills because of public pressure.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
wow, I am impressed
Guess I'll have to buy the White album again.
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If we're going to move towards a format that's supposedly going to dethrone the CD, size and 50 more megs will not cut it. I'd rather have all my music on one CD-sized 10 gig disc than a bunch of little quarters. Preferably a disc that's sheathed like a floppy disk. No more scratches.
The guy says "We're in discussions with everybody" and their target market is 'everything'. That's a really, really bad sign. The reason you haven't seen ANY of these yet, is because they're still waiting to hear the technical specifications from refrigerator manufacturers before finalizing the design ;)
Secondly- so he thinks he has the support of most of the record labels? I'd looooove to see those contracts ;) plenty of musicians think the same thing and stay confused for a long time why they're not getting paid. I'm picturing a situation in which the record companies 'found him a lawyer' to help understand the agreements they themselves drew up. He may have no idea what kind of sharks he was dealing with, or who his lawyer was REALLY working for. I have a hard time picturing this guy as sharp and paranoid enough to conduct negotiations with record companies without being utterly screwed.
So, don't even worry about this supplanting CDs with copy-prevented media.
The record companies have a huge amount of infrastructure in replicating houses etc. and even the ability to pressure replicators not to work with indies such as Negativland. They're going to move ahead with CD, non-Red-Book-compliant CD, DVD-A and SACD.
This is about taking this technology off the market so that it never becomes a 'piracy-friendly' techology, like a CD-R that's more easily transported. That's what this is about and why we won't ever see it come out.
While it's true that blank cassettes cost the same as blank MDs, and the MDs provide better quality in a smallest package, answer me this: where can I get an MD recorder for $30 brand-new?
The day cassettes die for recording is the day when MD recording equipment is cheap enough. CD players cost $30-40 brand-new for inexpensive models, so they have long since passed cassettes for playback. $200 for an MD recorder is simply too much for the vast majority of (non-gadget-freak) Americans.
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The only way that I see this happening is if the reading/writing device is using a lazer with a really high frequency... such as a blue lazer... anybody know of this?
Agreed. As you pointed out, there is no driving reason for consumers to move to this new format (we've already got random access, etc.). What if the RIAA members "pushed" this format change because it helped them instead?
Consumers already have CDs and are happy with them (and the fact that they are easy to rip helps too). But, the RIAA is probably kicking themselves now for ever supporting such a "loose" format. Don't you think the RIAA would love to be able to take back all CDs ever sold and promote this format (or another with limited copying for Joe Sixpaxk)?
What if the RIAA offered a deal where they will exchange your "old" CDs and vinyl for "new" DataPlay discs? In this way they have dropped the cost of switching to the new format for consumers and they (the RIAA) gets what they want, no more CDs. This might sound expensive (and thus counter RIAA), but consider that the production cost is the lowest chunk of $ in the cost of a CD. A dollar hit on all CDs ever sold might be worth ridding themselves of CDs forever, and thus staving off their (the RIAA) obsolecence in light of digital file swapping.
There has to be a reason why the RIAA members would pour money into YAMF (yet another music format)...
GRH
When recording to minidisk is it only possible to transfer data at 1X? For instance, it takes me about 7 minutes to make an 80 minute CD on my 12x burner, but my discman is huge. With a minidisc system it would be smaller, but wouldn't it take 74 minutes to get 74 minutes of audio on? For me this is a huge drawback.
DataSquid.net, a little about me.
The first (and as I see it the biggest) reason why the MD never got too big was that it couldn't be used for data (for the most part). A drive was releast but was extreemly expensive and you had to use data MDs, which you couldn't swap for music MDs. Basically, there were two formats which caused problems. The DataPlay discs are all identicle. You can take a data disc and the erase it and use it to record audio, or vice versa.
The second major problem with MDs was their audio quality. Yes, they did sound great, but even an untrained ear could tell the diference between a CD and a MD. The reason is that MDs don't hold much data (under 300MB I think), so to hold a full CD, the data is compressed. The compression is not nearly as good as the raw audio. As I understand it the dataplay discs can hold a full CD uncompressed (~500mb), or you could use WMA, OggVorbis, or MP3 so you could hold more.
The last major problem as I see it is that MDs didn't have much use; in that they didn't have a good niche. They're best attempt was as "recordable CDs", but that wasn't perfect. Now with DataPlay discs, they would make IDEAL media for cell phones, gameboy type things (hello hand-held FF-VII), and of course MP3 players. They'd work great in laptops too.
There were other small problems too. First of all they were quite expensive. You have never been able to get much music on them (mostly things produced under Sony only), and they players were (and still are) expensive as hell. I think that the DataPlay discs would make excelent CDs. Not only because they could hold as much as a CD and sound just as good, but because they are MUCH smaller and more convient.
So, all I'm saying is good luck DataPlay. They seem to have a good product that could be the next CD/Floppy/Coaster for Shot Glasses/etc.
Note: I like MDs, but I can't wait to try DataPlay discs.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I've been receiving opt-in spam from Dataplay for over two years now. Almost every month they send out a lengthy e-mail full of the same buzz-speak : "DataPlay will rock, DataPlay will roll, DataPlay swallows." They still don't have a product, not even a prototype. This looks like some idiot's attempt to attract easy capital back in the days of the great V.C. boom. Now he's probably just trying to suck up whatever's left after the crash.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Too small in size and too small in capacity. Dammit, will the world PLEASE standardize and stick to it? DVD-R and DVD+RW are my favorite but it if they would quit hanging on to old economies and old copy protection schemes and concentrate on a good standard, the economy of scale would make it cheap. The stores could have kioskes where you sample and listen and then burn the discs, print the book (an 8.5x11 inch book or so - so that this mad tendency for 4 point fonts will die!), and then the revolution will be OVER. Those who cannot adapt will lose and those who can will thrive. My freedom is more precious than your profit. Until then, down with the RIAA, MPAA, and all other enemies of freedom!
Chances are this wont replace CD's in America, the same way minidisc's and digital compact casettes failed to do so in the early 90's.
Some may argue that those were replacements for the casette...but really, that's what the CD did, especially with cd-r and cd-rw.
One of the largest reasons for this is probably due to the fact that it's too small. CD labels and cover art are important marketing tools. Selling a little tiny disc with a cd cover the same size of a regular cd cover, defeats the purpose.
I do however believe that these DataPlay discs will become a huge success in the data storage and transportation market. When these go to market, it will finally be time to replace my Diamond Rio300.
Digital rights management, size, etc, notwithstanding, I think the format is too small.
It's the size of quarter. I lose quarters all the time. I probably lost one today. I understand why flash media, Memory Sticks, etc. are so small, but that's OK with me. I only own two flash cards, one's always in my camera, and so they are not hard to keep up with.
But if I'm going to go out and buy something with specific data on it (like an album, or a movie), I would like it to be a little more substantial. Floppy disks are a good size and I think credit card size is ideal. MiniDiscs are pushing it.
I think this quarter-size disk has lots of potential for PDA's, cell phones, or any devices that want more memory capacity. Storage problems will be alleviated and the cost of memory will reduce. But, of course businesses that wants to rip people off with flash cards will not support this technology for a while. Nevertheless, we can see some great products in the future.
This has implications well beyond music. A tiny disc like this with a decent capacity can fit into the little devices we've all come to know and love: PDAs, digital stillcams, those little voice recorders for saving interviews and lectures for later transcription or transfer to parent Big Iron (and whoever thought that a PC would one day represent "Big Iron" in our portable lives?) and on and on and on.
So let's set aside "dethroning the CD" for a bit and talk about dethroning the other storage technologies: Compact Flash, Memory Stick, Smart Media, MicroDrive, and whatever else is floating around out there. For now, I own a couple of iPaqs with CF jackets, a stillcam with CF, and a camcorder which can save stills onto MemStick were I so inclined (I'm not). To integrate DataPlay's technology into _that_ aspect of my digital life would require the purchase of replacement technology or of adapters that add bulk and subtract convenience. Why change from my effective standardization on CF?
These disks have moving parts. That's Bad for mobile devices -- just the kind of thing where a small, high-data-density gizmo is most valuable. At the moment, DataPlay's storage capacity is reported to be 500MB for $10. I took a quick look at B&H's website and found a 512 MB CF for $800. Definitely a price win for DataPlay even given that a little time with a search engine would undoubtedly turn up a lower price. Same place, 128 MB of Smart Media can be had for $100. 128MB MemStick is $120. So the current market leaders in solid-state are not price competitive with DataPlay right now. The key differences are that they are here, now, in the market and that as with all computer-y doodads, their price is plunging.
We'll see if DataPlay ever releases an actual product or just manages to use press releases to get newspaper stories written. If they _do_ get something out there, we'll see if it costs what they claim it will, whether it's easy to come by, and whether the medium comes so crippled with hardware-level DRM that pictures I take in a digital camera can only be dumped to a single computer using a special program (a la the Media Manager that MS uses to get music from CD-in-PC onto an iPaq). If it's easy-to-use and recognizes that I the buyer am to be the determiner of what is done with the stored content, if it can be written on a bajillion times before giving out, if it has a price-per-convenience that undercuts the other folks then it could be a winning tech despite the moving parts. If, on the other hand, they focus so hard on uncopyable recorded music that it loses its usefulness in other technologies then it'll likely die and good riddance. (Of course, with built-in DRM it could be the first medium approved by Sen. Hollings (D-Disney).)
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
As someone else says - you don't master with
a lossy compression format, so it's utterly
ludicrous that a "professional audio magazine"
would ask this of recording studios - shame on
them !
Also note that ATRAC3 now used in all recent
MiniDisc recorders is considered *extremely
good* now as a compression format - you're
referring to the essentially obsolete original
ATRAC format which wasn't very good (but MP3's
didn't even exist then if you remember...).
I think that the advent of the ability for a
CD to blown of MP3's and that to be played on
a CD player (that can also play normal audio
CDs) has drawn attention away from Mini Disc,
though - as other people have pointed out -
most countries except the US are using Mini Disc
quite extensively as an (excellent) replacement
for portable CD players or portable cassette
players.
It's also helped that Mini Disc prices for
hardware (about 120 pounds in the UK for a Sony
recording hi-fi Mini Disc desk and 90 pounds for
a play-only Sony Mini Disc portable) and
blank discs (now only 1 pound each) have come
down dramatically in the past year or two.
The only thing that's seriously failed (and it's
not difficult to see why) is pre-recorded MDs -
they cost *more* than CDs and have totally died
a death in the UK because of that.
I think Mini Disc is currently the best portable
music format right now - it's cheap, it's small,
it's robust (read-ahead buffers) and has
removable media (so no being stuck with the
RAM limit on your MP3 player and having to find
a PC to change your music - which is a MASSIVE
downside of portable solid state MP3 players
at the moment).
In the 10 years since MD's first appeared,
no-one's come up with a better portable format
(MP3's fail on the expense of the players,
the lack of removable media and the sound quality). I *dare* you to challenge this
statement !
As a music medium, these will fail. Music CDs are becoming a read-once-or-twice before storing as a compressed, more convenient data format. Size does not matter when you just stick the CDs in your closet or put on display in your living room. When you can put your music collection into an unscratchable format that be copied from car to house to portable, there is no reason for a permanent physical medium except for backup.
As a computer format these will fail. For archival and distribution you need lots of data space. DVD tech will supplant CDs for this, possibly at a smaller size, but still capable of gigabytes of storage. For temporary storage and transportation, flash technology works fine, is more reliable, and is getting cheaper and larger capacities over time, and is poised to replace floppies permanently.
So I think the trends are against this medium, but time will tell.
It is! one day they will be able to fit Yottabytes On a single atom :) Maybe even further than that!
Five years ago most people didn't know what a minidisc was. I'd say most of my fellow students now know what they are- they finally seem to be becoming popular, largely in part to the MDLP compression standard (up to 320 min. of music per disc), and the availability of "docks" to attach to one's computer. Students around here (design school) are carrying them more and more, preferring them to expensive MP3 players. The recorders have dropped in price- you can now get a recorder for around $140- and they're scarcely larger than the discs they play. It only took Sony ten years to get the format right.
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
Soon after we got CD-R, we got mini CD-R, small disks that can be read and written in most normal CD-R drives. I would expect the same to happen with DVD-R and DVD-RW. That would probably give you similar storage capacities to DataPlay in a similar format.
'nuff said.
"Never bullshit a bullshitter" All That Jazz
Last time I checked, a circle was equal in length and and width, if it's described in such a manner. 1.5" x 1.25"??? Elliptical super-quarter media is the new thing for the future, I'm sure of it!
oh yeah... like I want to go out and replace THOSE in the near future...
records I can understand, large, bulky, easy to ruin
tapes I can understand, tape hiss, eventually wear out, tape deack eat them
cds? perfect audio, rugged, wont wear out... ummm, no thanks
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Last time I checked, a circle/disc was equal in length and width, if it's described in such a manner. 1.5" x 1.25"??? Elliptical media is the new thing for the future, I'm sure of it!
Look at the image in the article. The discs are about 1.125" across, circular, and encased in a slightly larger plastic case, which is 1.5" by 1.25"
What I found more interesting was later in the same report, where it listed the major record companies and their market share and labels. To save effort, I've excerpted (fair use) this information below:
Concentration of Ownership
Today, many recording artists and studios earn a great deal of money, pushing industry sales to about $40 billion. Nevertheless, sales of all recordings have leveled off, except for a few superstars.
As in other media, a few corporations dominate the recording industry. It is interesting to note that only one, AOL Time Warner, has its corporate headquarters in the United States. In the 1990s, here's how the major labels stacked up.
WEA, which is owned by AOL Time Warner, controlled more than 25 percent of the market through Atlantic, Elektra, Giant, Reprise, Rhino, Sire, and Warner Brothers. Sony held about 14 percent of the market share through Columbia and Epic.
Polygram, which is owned by Philips Electronics, captured just over 13 percent of the market with A&M, Def Jam, Deutsche Gramophone, Island, Motown, and Polydor. BMG, which is owned by Bertelsman, held just over 12 percent through Arista, BMG Classics, Private Music, RCA, Windham Hill, and Zoo.
Other major companies, which control about 10 percent of the market, include CEMA through its labels Capitol, Chrysalis, EMI, IRS, Liberty, and SBK; and French-owned Vivendi through Geffen, GRP, MCA Records, and Uptown.
We call it art because we have names for the things we understand.
A smaller disc should be lighter, would be easier to spin, require less current, and so lead to a player with a longer battery life. (CD player battery life is pretty good, tho)
A smaller disc should also skip less (less mass, less distance per degree of jolt) so require less antiskip memory.
The discs are in a plastic case, this means that it's much harder to damage the media. (and it's likely it'll only be slot loaded, not top loaded)
Regular CDs are too large for my taste, although these are too small. I'd rather have something 2 to 3 inches across. (I want an 8cm CD MP3 player!)
Ya know, I thought this looked familiar. Like damn near a year old familiar. It wasn't a good idea- and barely newsworthy- then, and isn't any better now.
With stuff that isn't news (crap), and stuff that isn't news (old), I'd say today's a slow news day on slashdot. If there ever were a day that it wasn't, anyway.
And that cheap shot at minidiscs is just inexcusable.
MD is not very popular in (at least) Switzerland, Germany and Holland.
They got some market share, but compete with (more widespread) portable CD-players and now the MP3 players (solid state, HDD-based and CD-based) are taking over fast.
In one or two years, MD shall be gone (rightly so).
I have the answer to media piracy issues, and the answer to how to establish new technology and swarm the market place!
.. I would. I mean, I'd rather pay the $2 and get a nice cover and have inlays to read etc. Why the hell not, it'd be within reach of everyone. The companies would make a ton of money from the literally millions upon millions of sales.
First the media:
Make the media CHEAPER. If I knew I could go out and buy the latest albums or DVD movies for say $2
New technology:
It's the same answer. MAKE IT CHEAP. Bring out dataplay devices for TWENTY DOLLARS. Make the media $2. EVERYONE WILL BUY THEM. Why? Because it's cheap. Nobody rushes out to buy a new format costing hundreds of dollars which make be extinct within the year. Yet everyone would try something that was so cheap.
I'm always amazed at how when some new tech comes out, priced at $1000, and the companies are miffed when the market doesnt jump on it.
ADVICE: PICK A PRICE. DIVIDE BY TEN. SELL MILLIONS. BECOME A HOUSEHOLD NAME.
Moderators... that's +1 funny, not insightful.
It might work for a Toonie here in canada, btw.
The article claims that the disks hold 500MB, or enough for 11 CD-quality albums.
Uh, right.
A CD-quality album is 600MB. Compressing it down to fit in 45MB results in casette-tape quality music: good enough for portable devices or computer speakers, but lousy for a good stereo system. For that, you need significantly more storage space.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
Why is it important to create data storage alternatives that are this small? It seems more like a pain than......anything good. Cd's hold more anyways, and are easier to move with your physical hands. Quarter size is too small....
When DVD's first came out and they were the same form factor as CDs, then DVD audio was announced, and now these new 100GB+ transparent disks, I thought the media industry had finally found some common sense. Sure, if we want the latest in whizz-bang media players, we'll still need to go out and buy new hardware to play it, that goes without saying, but that same new player should be able to play all the old stuff as well.
Let's face it, there wasn't much incentive to replace your old vinyl with tapes or mini-discs, but I know lots of people who have replaced large quantities of perfectly good tapes with 5" disks, myself included. The size is fine; not too big, not too small - you want some blurb with your purchase, right? You don't need a huge stack of electronics to play it all; at a pinch a DVD player will do it all. Seriously, what's there not too like with the form factor?
I recall an episode of "Buck Rogers" where Buck uses what must have been an audio CD to "record" some data in his Starfighter. The only reason it stands out so much, is that I used the argument way back when to illustrate a point; that we probably will still have 5" disks in the 25th Century.
Of course, by then, the big question will probably be "which moron decided on a 127mm form factor?"...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Such short memories people have ...
DataPlay - Flash Killer or Copy-Control Nightmare?
Posted 21 Feb 2001.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Fuck off to all of you who do that
his storage format is not radically different than any other. Merely more compressed, just like floppy disks became (vs. the 5.25 inch variety), and just like laptop HDs vs. the standard ones.
So big deal, eh?
;)
Insert mind here.
Like hell! Me and millions of others all over will tell you that it DID NOT FAIL! www.minidisco.org! My MD-MS722 works better than ANY MP3 player EVER will.
Actually, I don't mind the size of today's CD. It's perfect for me, it's small and light-weight enough, and the size is now standardized. All my cases are of that same size.
I have come to fall in love with the CD. It is a universally open standard, and offers anything I want: Data storage, audio storage, accessible from anywhere, (re)recordable...
The only thing that can make me leave the CD format is if they come up with something that has all the advantages of the CD and offers even more storage capacity. Until then, everything else is an also-ran.
This must be alien technology.
I don't agree with changing the form factor -- yeah, being able to fit "about" the same amount of data as a CD onto something one-twenty-fifth the
size is cool and all, but can you imagine having to sort through a pile of these while you're driving?
I think the CD's size has become a pretty de facto form factor -- I'm convinced that part of DVD's success has been because people feel comfortable picking up a 5" disc (certainly laserdiscs were too bulky to become popular) *AND*, you can build players that accept both media without having to hack any additional logic into it.
I say keep trying to pack more and more information into the same size. It'll sell better because people have already accepted that size, whether they even realize it or not.
"The record company is the pimp, the artist is the ho, the stage is the corner, and the audience is the trick."
Synergy is your friend
I'd say this is doomed to failure, primarily because they've wrapped it up in a silly plastic 'caddy'.
There are certain instances where caddies are a necessity (i.e. tape applications - reel to reel doesn't count!!) but for optical media, what is the point of the caddy? It does nothing except increase the media cost significantly.
I daresay part of the wonderful things about CD is the fact that it doesn't have caddies. Remember in the early 90s when many CD-ROM drives required you to put your CDs in expensive caddies? Where are those caddies now? In the trash. We learned how to handle discs directly.
A far better idea would be for them to make some double sided mini CDs that aren't in caddies.. that way they'd still play in regular CD players and CDROM drives.. and they could make a mint from patenting the idea for double-sided mini CDs.
mogorific carpentry experiments
2.1 GIG per NORMAL CDR ussing new special BURNERS on sale March2002.
They will also hold 500meg on an 8cm miniCDR size.
Shipping costs. How much would it cost to get 100 CDs shipped from an online vendor? How much would it cost to get 100 of these little quarter sized thingies? There's substantial savings there already...
But then again, they want to sell these retail in stores, right? Because of this, I suspect the packaging will be padded up to something bigger than CDs so that it's hard for someone to stick the things in their pockets and walk away. This would result in bigger packaging and more waste.
Which scenario do you think is most realistic?
Now all we need is quarter-sized screens to view the movies on - talk about the benefits of miniaturization!
"1.5 x 1.25"?!?!
new cds are going to be elliptical?
OOOOOH they are going to have a plastic shell... who'da thunk it?...
sig
MD is now replacing DAT in broadcasting. DAT fails frequently, has terrible problems with sensitive equipment, and is losing popularity all around. MD players are tiny, they can be concealed easily in interviews, and are easier to use.
It is also widely used in public radio for grabs, promos, advertising, in lieu of more expensive computer equipment.
While MD may have only had moderate success in the home market (although at home we have a MD deck and two MD portables), it is taking off big time in broadcasting.
When MD came out, something like a portable audio player w/ flash memory would've been a simple impossibility.
Two years ago, you could hold maybe 30 mins of OK quality music on a portable flash MP3 player.
Two years from now, you'll probably be able to hold about 30 hours of CD quality music on a portable flash MP3 player.
MD is very quickly becoming irrelevant.
Granted it didn't take off like a house on fire, but it is now starting to gain popularity here in the US.
More and more places offer MD players and recorders for sale. I've purchsed two of them myself in fact. Given that the RIAA is doing it's damnedist to kill off the MP3 format (I can't believe that Sony is making a CD that can't be MP3'd...isn't that killing off thier own MP3 player market?) MD might be the next best thing (save for not being able to file share). The sound quality is better than 128 bit-rate MP3's and as far, the only drawback to them is the fact that you have to record in real-time. Not that much of an issue considering that I buy a CD and then listen to it anyway...so I just pop in the MD and record.
Some places (Crutchfield for one) even has deals where you buy a Sony or a JVC reciever with MD recorder build in and they give you the MD player. They're shock resistant, they're small, the media is cheap compared to MP3 Players ($2 bucks a disk out my way compared to $45 and up for media cards) the disks are nice and small, battery file is vastly improved from last year (2 alkaline batteries lasted me 15 hours, now I get 15 hours on one rechargable) and now you can sacrifice quality and cram up to 4 CD's on one MD (no stretch since people are doing that just to get more than one CD on a MP3 Player's memory).
It might not be the greatest yet, but it's going places as far as I can see
Phoenix
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
Feb.
March
Because I care, feel free to email this around Taco.
MEMO:
TO: Slashdot editors
SUBJECT: Dataplay
We know already. Please make it stop.
CmdrTaco
No sig for you!!
While stated with little class, the parent article is quite accurate. Minidisc uses ATRAC compression which induces artifacts into the audio. Yes, it's better than MP3 as another poster has written, but that is comparing apples to oranges. Red book audio CDs use raw uncompressed PCM data, which means they are superior in quality to Minidisk - a contributing factor to why CDs are more popular.
Just because you can't hear the difference doesn't mean other people can't either...
I've got records, cassette tapes, CD's, DVD's (just bought Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein and EP1, today), video cassettes, at what point will all this merge? Or will RIAA/MPAA fight the battle (against their own best interests) discouraging moving my old recordings onto one unified format? It'd be nice to have DVD/CD and move all my junk to it so I only have one recorder/player and one cabinet to store things. Right now it's getting a bit out of hand.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
umm, i'll just add my two cents and say that minidisc is one of the coolest formats out there. if the cd jockeys would stop crapping on about lossy compression and listen to it, and the mp3 goons would stop screaming about transfer time and just buy a few discs, then i think you'd find quite a lot of people really getting on the minidisc bandwagon.
i have an mzr900, and couldn't be happier with it. not because i'm some sort of md zealout, but because it does what it is supposed to extremely well. it replaces tapes. it's very portable. you can carry several very cheap discs around with you. you can record live. and the list goes on.
how it compares with cd is irrelevant. cds skip, they are too large, and you can't record to them with a little portable device. they are not competitors. i have hundreds of cds, and it doesn't matter. every once in a while i refresh which albums i have copied to md, onto about 15 or 20 mds, and i've got a new collection to cart around portably.
brilliant.
Well, now that Fujitsu are concentrating on 2.5" format MO disks, this may not be too far fetched.
They already manufacture a 3.5" MO disk and drive which can store 2.3GB and is quite fast as well.
Minidisc is smaller (2.5") but can currently only hold about 150MB if I remember correctly. If Fujitsu can sell their upcoming technology to the audio markets as well as the computing market, then currently achieved densities would lead to a next generation minidisc storing ten times as much as they do currently. With ATRAC LP2, that'd be about 20 hours of music.
Not bad, eh?
Given that Sony and Fujitsu are apparently being very friendly on the MO front, this is not too far fetched. And given the ever onward march of progress in MO densities (it's quadrupuled in the last 2 years), it seems very likely that a new 2.5" MO disk from Fujitsu could well hold somewhat more than 1.5GB.
The music industry is still struggling to gain control in the consumer market regarding recordings. They have a great new Law they'd like to use for prosecution purposes (DMCA), but no technology upon which to build a case. They already know that fair-use prevents a lot of lawsuits with respect to CD's and records (making those cassette copies for your Walkman or Car stereo ;-). IMHO, MiniDiscs are great.. Really compact, excellent sound (the "lossy" angle is BS) and fairly cheap (not the recorders but the media). Keep in mind, Sony intended MD's to replace cassettes, not CD's.. CD's were only ever mentioned as to compare sound quality and such. But even then, MD's did not have anything over CD's when it came right down to it. So people kept buying "tried and true." CD's have always been good to you.
Now the RIAA wants to bend you over a table and sell you these quarter-size discs, which won't provide any opportunity for fair-use. None of _us_ will buy them because we know better. Most other consumers won't buy them because they simply do not have anything over CD's.. So their a tad smaller than MD's... Remember most people didn't go for MD's and minidiscs didn't prevent fair-use. Now when Joe Blow finds he can't make cassette copies for the car he's going to be pissed. He'll prolly find the quater-disc player/recorder too expensive and that will just shut the case all together... Wave good-bye to demand.. Sorry RIAA!! Anyway, there's my 0.02
-Bob
Actually, I've got a pack of Verbatim mini-CDR's here, of the 3-inch size.
They hold 185MB (21 mins of music), not 380MB.
Also, they do fit in a regular CD storage case because those cases generally hold CDs by the central hole, and are not dependant on their size. Slipcovers, however, do present a problem.
In any case, I find them useful for transporting a good amount of data in a form-factor that's much more suited to my pocketses!
I can take all the files I need from homeschoolwork and never notice that they're in my pocket.
Plus, they're realy cute.
Unfortunately, they cost about 2x as much as a regular CD, but it's not like I run through a lot of mini-CDs. I only burn about a meg or two at a time onto the mini-CD, and then leave for the day, so each one lasts a looooong time.
It would be nice if I could buy a mini-CDRW, but they don't seem to be available (around here, at least).
BTW: you're absolutely correct about the business card CD things. the only problem is that they cost QUITE a bit more than you'd expect...
--R
From looking at the photos, I get the feeling these are enclosed in a cassette mechanism that's part of the media. When it's in the ejected state, it's scratch-protected (like a minidisc)?
nonsig. unsig. desig.
"Do something man. Right now."
These mini CDs must take off.
I've seen the future. They were using them on Seaquest DSV. And it's always been accurate so far.
Except about everything else.
Think about it, disks the size of a quarter.
How many times have you lost quarters and not even relized it. It is a conspiracy, we buy these, we loose these, and we have to buy more of these.
Gimme the good old Laser disks, no way I am gonna misplace one of those.
-- Any comments seen here are not mine, but a mixture of alchohol and lack of sleep.
The last couple years I was in high school I was interested in having high quality recordings of my choir concerts. We already had sound equipment at the schools - microphones used to pick up the choir and the piano, when it was used, went through a mixer, whose output went to some amplifiers (standard stuff, here). But we didn't have anything but a cassette recorder hooked up to it. I hate tapes. So I got to talking with a friend I had from Germany, and he mentioned that he had a MiniDisc recorder. I was hooked from there - one cable from the sound board to the line-in jack on the MD recorder and it worked as easily as a tape player with the quality of a CD player.
Anyway, from then on I've recorded choir concerts and made CD's for everyone (obviously the CD's aren't as high-quality as one recorded in a studio, but for live stuff it doesn't matter that much). And when I'm too lazy to hook my sampler and other stuff to the computer to make a recording (since I'm too poor to buy professional recording equipment... :-/ ), or I'm not near my computer, it's nice and simple to plug in to my MiniDisc Walkman and make a decent recording.
I know of lots of people who could benefit from MiniDisc technology the way I do; Sony and Sharp and others who make MD Walkmen might do better to market their recording devices less to consumers, since everyone is impatient and doesn't ever want to wait for music to record, even if you can keep the recording on a cheap disc... But for live (and portable) recording of just about anything, MD is wonderful, and that's really where it excels most.
Anyway, there's my very prolix $0.02...
Ah, yes... like the comparable CDRs that I use with my TDK Mojo to play MP3s... they cost neary $0.54 each, and only store 150MB more than a DataPlay disc...
This article was full of idiotic statements.
The world won't end in darkness, it'll end in family fun, with Coca-cola clouds behind a Big Mac sun.
Well Gee, how many decades did it take for CDs to get popular? MiniDisc is a great format (and a PC MiniDisc-Drive would be nice) but it hasn't been around long enough to see if it will eventually take a serious hold. After all, right now very few companies are producing MiniDisc systems, which is keeping the price fairly high.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Also, have you looked at the technology that allows MD medium to be so small? Clipping the audio spectrum to 'only what's detectable to the human ear' is all well and fine in the economics of space, but the nigh-unto-fanatical "golden eared" audiophiles would have fits with their overtones clipped. Sure, I may not be able to hear it all myself with my ears of lead, but if I'm going to drop money on music, I want -all- of it, overtones and all, for my money.
MD never had/has too much of a chance for the 'first sale' market of music. The strength of MD has been and will continue to be the realm of RErecordable medium.
I can't say I remember much of the push for MD in the States, but of what I recall, the push was for MD to 'replace' CD. Wasn't gonna happen then, isn't gonna happen now.
MD is the replacement for tape, pure and simple.
The fact that MD is rerecordable wasn't really expressed to Joe Sixpack at the most crucial time, and the market foothold for the general public wasn't established. Sure, MD may be big in Europian and Asian markets; maybe it's been marketed for its true value. Sure, small radio stations, DJs, professional journalists in warzones (gotta love NPR, when a reporter can have enough time to talk about the bullet-proof MD recorder he uses) and other various people may know of the value of MD. But if good ol' Joe Sixpack doesn't buy into it... it ain't gonna go anywhere here in the States.
These quarter-sized disks are all well and good, but even if the recording companies find it cost-effective to switch over the big question still remains; 'Will Joe Sixpack see buying a completely new medium and system worth it, with a functional CD player at hand?'
I know I wouldn't... Besides, I don't think you could grind down the edge to a blade and send these things slashing through thick vis-queen quite like you can a CD. ;) (gotta love AOL, for nice DVD-style boxes and plenty of CDs to fool around with)
rm -rf /bin/laden
There's no wrong way, to eat a Rhesus...
err, we already have minidisc, that's enough for music i think. quality is good, size is small - perfect (yes you need a MD recorder for most titles are sold on CD). and for data? i think a normal Compact Disc is perfect. ist is slim, and the size is almost perfect for writing the title on it and, still more important for the normal geek they are big enough not to get lost too easy. so, why do we need another mini-sized data carrier? is it really useful to spend tons of money for a new drive that you can't write on and that will (as i think) not stand the test of time
".Sig Stealer" was here
The copy protection you talk about, MD to MD, is mostly not really an issue. I never ever saw a a dual MD deck (like dual casette). The other way would be, to connect one MD player to another. If this is done optically, it is true, it won't copy. On the other hand: you connect the two MD's analogically it will copy like a charm. Quality, you say? No big deal... I didn't notice much difference between the two copies (but I'm no audiophile). Besides, I heard that the professional gear didn't have that restriction (but I'm not sure).
Actually it just "brings you back" to the times when CD and audio-casette dominated the world: you made your pirate copies direct from CD to audio-casette and casette2casette copies were just out of the question.
But then, I do not pirate music...so I don't bother. :-)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
You summarized it perfectly: they replace audio-tapes, *not* CD's or MP3. It's exactly in that segment where MDs profilerate in Europe. My sister just recently shelved her Walkman (tape) to replace it with MD. I did that some years ago. As far as I could see about 75% of my sisters friends already replaced tapes with MD. (We're talking teenagers) On the other hand, I never saw an MP3 player "in the wild" here in Europe. Note: I don't say that they don't exists. I just never saw any. :-(
Too bad that car-MD players are not yet very common (they exist and are expensive). I have a CD charger but that is really a hassle
In my eyes you're a +1 Insightfull.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I can walk to both major UK record chain stores here in Cheltenham, UK and prove you wrong, if you like.
MD was popular for about three hours on Wednesday tea-time a few years back. Almost all stores have stopped selling pre-recorded MDs now. You can still get MD blanks everywhere, mind.
Some of the bigger stores like Tower Records in major cities such as London and Birmingham sell pre-recorded MDs, but if your concept is that you can just pop into any high street record store in an average UK town, you're wrong.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
I think the Music Industry should start giving
out walkman like players very cheap for the
disks. This will result in lots of people
buying them, and the disk will certainly succeed.
All players based on this disk should only
give analogue output, so that its not copied
with the same fidelity.
Also they should ban the device surfacing on
the PCs. The PCs if ever they get these disks
should have a very different surface format.
So that they can never be read on any general
purpose computing device. This way they will be
able to disallow copying.
Now if they can supply their songs without
the possibility of people copying it in the
same quality, they will have less and less
reason's to go after people using P2P software.
They can also supply their songs on the internet
at reduced quality.
Since people cannot get the songs any longer, in
their desired quality on PCs, they will have to
buy these songs in the disk format only. But the
smaller guys will have a field day. They will be
able to get famous without any backing from the
RIAA. People who want good quality music, not
necessarily the one being doled out on all other
media, can get their music from the net free of
cost. The musicians who get famous this way can
earn money by doing shows. I believe people will
want to see these musicians sing in person, and
they will pay for the priviledge.
I say more power to the boulder and RIAA. The
RIAA can make themselves obsolete in whatever
way they want.
-anand
TDK are going to release a CD-RW drive in the 1st quarter of next year that uses 8 depth scoring (3 bits into the space of 1). Capacity of a STANDARD disk will be approx 2G. This drive also writes at 36x.
Get your ass to Europe and Japan. Minidiscs are taking off in the UK now after about 10 years of obscurity. I just bought a portable recorder the other day.
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
Woo, I'm excited..
:)
"It's such an advanced technology at a shockingly low price"
So, if I get this right, these things are just the right size to be able to lose down the back of the sofa/through a hole in your pocket/get swallowed by the cat.. they store less than normal CD's (500 Mb? I'd be excited if it was 500 Gb, or even just 5 Gb), they cost much more than normal CD's ($10 to make?!), and they store data on both sides, hence either expensive readers to read both sides, or having to flip the damn thing over every five minutes to read the other side..
Isn't improvement wonderful
Also.. "just bigger than a quarter and can store up to five music albums."
This thing stores 500 Mb which equates to 5 music albums?.. okay, in that case, yer bog-standard common or garden 650 Mb cd must be able to store 6.5 music albums, then, eh?
And I'm sorry, but I can't resist this:
"But the company has shrunk the unit, which is about the size a Palm Pilot, to roughly the size of a small diamond."
A small diamond? of course. why not the same size as a small dog poo, or a small piece of mouldy cheese?
-- RichardX
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
This seems to be the same idea as Sony's Minidisc! Which we all know didnt go to far. Sony must be laughing at this.
The only reason I can think of why they didn't take off in the states is how high the prices were when they were released, and how long it took the prices to come down. Same for blank media. I started out with a portable player/recorder, and I think it's probably the coolest most useful player/recorder of audio I've ever seen. It's also the neatest toy! :-)
I have a 'component' MD Player/Recorder, a Car MD-P/R, a portable 'MiniDiscMan' P/R, and two portable MD players, one of which is scarcely larger than an MD itself.
Advantages of MD: They're a lot harder to scratch than CD/vinyl, since they have those protective and durable cases like 3.5" FDs have. My experience with the players is that they are affordable (now), reliable, hardy, and very portable, (in the case of portables). The MD format is superior to MP3 in terms of ease of use, recording and playback. -- You don't have to concern yourself with a computer to burn them, or bitrates, or processing level, etc. They don't have that DRM B.S., and even if you want to copy a DVD's audio, (which mine won't let me using the fiber-optical connection) you can always go analog and do it that way!
I also use MP3, and have a portable, which, compared with MD was more expensive, and more difficult to use... though admittedly not much. The one real annoyance I find with MP3 which has caused me to hang on to MD and continue to use it is the annoying pause between songs, when one track ends and another begins, and how long it takes the player to go between tracks/songs, even right at the end of one and the beginning of another. Listening to "The Wall" on MP3 is frustrating and annoying, since most of it is recorded as one continuous song broken over many tracks. On MD, it's continuous.
It's no surprise, (reading the reply earlier about the MD supplanting audio casettes in Europe/Asia) that others, like me, chose to give up analog tape in favor of MD. They're almost as easy to record with, their easier to use, featureing Random Access to songs.
They have more features- you can input text for each song, each disc, you can record (on some units) in digital via f/o cable, in analog, with adjustable rec. level, you can do synchro-start recording (though I've never tried it), and can switch to mono-recording, which extends an 80-minute MD to 160 minutes, long enough for those snooze-inducing college lectures.
Disadvantages: Used to be, price, but that's fixed now. Really, MD's have little to disrecommend them. Sony even offers an adapter for USB to MD recording, so you can export all those MP3's you've been collecting!
Cesium- Half Life: 25 days and counting!!!
Have you hugged your consitiutionally guaranteed right to freedom of expression today?
"5 Hours of CD quality music", on a 500Mb disk? 500Mb will only hold 50 minutes of CD quality audio. I don't mind compression, I love my MD player, but cramming 5 hours in 500 megs is just ~225Kbit. Good enough to be used as a portable device, but buying pre-recorded ones? I'll just stick to the CD to enjoy at home and record that onto a compressed format for use on the tube.
Now where are those 24/96 audio DVDs!?
Is have only one standard format ... and change it every couple of years!!!
They've made millions out of people that bought CDs when they already had the same in LP.
Last values i had (about 2 years ago) for the cost of manufacturing a CD was 20 pesetas (from a Spanish manufacturer) per CD, minimum order 1000, cd-case included. That's about 8-10 (US$) cents.
No thanks... I don't use mediums which have restrictions, or encryption forced upon me... If you want my money, you're just going to have to live with leaving me alone to my own devices.
Come up with some good content at a decent price and I'll BUY IT. Rip me off, and I'll return the favor many times over...
I see rows of portables in the swedish electronics stores. Prerecorded discs are rare, but blank MDs and players are quite common. Also, MD players have started to replace audio cassettes in stereo equipment.
The last thing we need is a quarter-sized CD. Can anyone imagine trying to plig through a book of those while driving in the car? Or dropping one and not being able to find it? Or inadvertently depositing the newest "Cake" CD in the vending machine at work?
Instead of a SMALLER format, how about massively increasing the capacity of current CD technology? Oh wait, that's already been done - DVD!
Give me a home and car DVD players which will play CD, CDR, CDRW, DVD-RAM with MP3 abilities and I'll upgrade
true - it is about 5:1
The compression is called 'ATRAC' and it is up to about version 4 or 5 now.
This is not a very scientific explanation of how it works -
The encoding removes 'redundant' audio information.
The audiophiles will say that there is no such thing, but the Sony engineers found that the ear can only hear so much, and there is a lot of information that can be removed without altering what the ear hears.
So it is 'lossy' in the sense that there is a lot of information that is squeezed out.
Also, recompression will introduce artifacts, though you can't really hear this until 5-10 generations of digital copies.
MD got a bad rep in the early days because the first ATRAC versions were pretty poor, and they set themselves up in blind listening tests against CD. And lost badly.
Since then, the ATRAC compression has improved dramatically, and in blind tests few people can hear the difference between CD and MD (except for specially generated tones designed to show up the MD) For normal music listening, in the sort of environments that portable users will be using them in (traffic, trains, cars etc) MD sounds as good as CD. MD sound quality is good enough to be used in major radio stations for jingles, ads and inserts, and in small sound studios all over.
Trying to pitch them against CD is about as fair as trying to pitch CD against DAT - in the quality stakes DAT wins hands-down every time, but when it comes to issues like price, convenience, portability, ruggedness, availability etc, DAT is your last choice.
As has been said before, horses for courses
I already have about 300 CDs that I've spent a TON of cash on over the last 10 years. What should I do now? Through away all my CDs and start buying these quarter-sized disks? No thanks. I've already spent enough money, I'm not going to do it all over again.
Schnikies! Can you imagine what treasures will be uncovered every time couches are pillaged for laundry money?
Seriously, though, I know enough people who have a hard time keeping track of Data CDs, much less discs the size of quarters. Why use this technology to create something so miniscule, instead of utilizing it to hammer more data into standard-sized CDs? Admittedly, small size is frequently equated with convenience, but how convenient can this medium be when it accidently falls through the hole in the pocket of my old khakis?
Otto
If the datadensity is such that it can store 500Mb on a quarter sized disk, I'd want a CD-sized disk that can store 50G.
Roger
Give me the ability to carry all the music I've bought over the last 15 years in my pocket, and the ability to navigate easily among all the songs, and I'll be all over it. The solution is (almost) already here: DVD-R. Sure, it's still a bit flakey and the media is expensive, but in time I know the prices will come down, and I think that DVD audio will become another de facto standard. Just think about it: A double-sided dual-layer DVD-R can hold, what, about 20GB of music? Compress that to MP3 or OGG, and have an onboard logic to decode the stream, and you can store the last ten years of music on one disc.
[insert witty comment here]
...Ah,BUT---the Dataplay thingie
is NOT going to be a music-storage device,
but a "universal" DATA-storage device---
I would prefer to have
a SMALL thingie for digital
cameras, and PDA's, and MP3 players,etc.
--and even though Dataplay
needs to be spinning to read the
data,that 250Megabytes-on each-side
is a GREAT advantage
in data storage applications---
This may be an urban legend, but one of my professors once swore up and down that the reason why VHS won over Betamax is that there was a big surge in VCR sales right before Gone With The Wind appeared on network television for the first time, and when Cletus and Earlene went into their local hi-fi shop to buy their first VCR, their overriding criterion was, "Can I fit GWTW on one tape?" Sounds stupid, but there you go.
I looked into the abyss, and the abyss looked into me--and we both winked.
...that, or I'll just have to stick to doing shots.
I looked into the abyss, and the abyss looked into me--and we both winked.
Funny, I just caught something about this on some coverage of the 2001 CES while I was channel surfing... Looks pretty cool. Hope someone actually licenses the hardware to make data drives for them.
Now, on MD's...
Why is everyone saying MDs never went anywhere? Just 'cause their boxen don't have MD drives? 'Shit quality'?? Only popular in the UK and Japan??
First of all, the units are cheap and very useful (My Sharp player/recorder was under $200), the media is uber-cheap, cheaper than memory for an MP3 unit for sure!
As for the quality, mine's several ATRAC generations older than the current units, and it's able to record at very high definition, I recorded several 320kb/s MP3's to one of my MDs (Using my TOSlink optical connection) and you can't tell the difference.
I wouldn't say it isn't popular in the US, many of my friends have MD units, and even the local music store sells MDs and equipment (Though I opt for getting my fix from minidisco, given the obscene prices here...), and I live in VERMONT fer chrissakes! Not exactly the technology center of the country.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*