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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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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)
I wrote a column[jambands.com] on jambands.com expressing that mp3 players are liable to be the next medium if they're not destroyed by Congress. A 100 gig notebook size hard drive would give the ability to have 700+ hours of music at 256k. That people would be interested in.
I'm not putting down the "mother is the necessity of invention" concept. Just the idea that to create an integrated device, it must be totally incompatible with all devices. The CD is amazing: originally a read-only music format, it's now also read/write, holds data, pictures (with sony cameras that burn cds), movies (video cd), and compressed music (MP3 CD players). It also comes in a couple of form factors - the regular 8cm, the smaller version, and the credit card shape.
I think that the thing that is different about the dataplay (and that the article just barely touches upon this) is the pervasive use of encryption. His main goal is not to integrate the functionality of all devices, but to create an incompatible and secure format. Yet, the reasons why businesses would want this are a little harder to explain to the average person, so I'm just poking fun at his "I want to integrate all these evil incompatibilities" cover story.
(yep, just feeding the trolls...)
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I hope this is true, but only time will tell. If they allow these disks to be available for recording on a computer, unrestricted (as CD-R is currently), the record companies would surely complain.
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.