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.

Comments

Minidiscs never took off?

[chrysalis]

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.

Re:Remove the Restrictions, and they will come...

[dattaway]

Damn. If they remove the restrictions,...

Never happen. Beware of this quote from the article suggesting where they got their funding: "The company has raised $119 million in funding from a number of powerhouses, such as music giant Universal Music Group..."

They have whored themselves and now have satan's baby.

Certain degree of inertia as well...

[ackthpt]

I have 300+ CDs, I'm hardly likely to change formats just because a spiffy new one came out.

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...)

Re:Not true about MD not taking off...

[Craig Maloney]

Actually, I saw prerecorded Minidiscs here in the States (Over in the local Best Buy in fact). The selection was about 1/20th of the CD selection in the same store, but it was most certainly there. You could also find blank media pretty easily, and about every store I went into had at least one or two minidisc models on display.

It'll die

[Dolly_Llama]

Please forgive the marketroid speak but,

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.

Precedent

[fm6]

"Add value" is more than marketroidspeak. It's something you have to think about whenever you introduce a new technology. Examples:

• 8mm video cassettes. Small, better video quality. But not good enough to make anybody switch from VHS.
• Every PDA ever invented, from the ancient WorkSlate to the latest "smart" phones. The idea isn't bad in itself, and there have even been a few successes. But there still isn't enough "added value" to make most people switch from paper-inscription technology.
• Spreadsheet software. The vendors have changed, but everybody still uses the klunky old macro language designed two decades ago for VisiCalc. Not even Microsoft could get people to accept a more elegant spreadsheet language.
• Desktop software. Yeah, I'd rather be using KDE or GNOME or even JavaStation. Anything but MS bloatware. But how to convince everybody to give up their Word/Excel/Powerpoint skill base?
• QWERTY keyboards. Yes, they're inefficient. (Although the inefficiency didn't actually come from a deliberate attempt to slow the machine down.) But who's going to learn typing from scratch?

Re:That's the right thing to do

[famazza]

As I can see you missed my point. First of all, I'm not for, and I'm not against RIAA, I just think that they are acting in a way I don't agree is good for them.

Other point you missed, I have never said that the new technology should be smaller and higher quality, could be one of them, or maybe another technology that would allow smaller discs and higher quality, whatever combination you want.

About the frequency range. Vinyl is still prefered for many enthusiasts due to its unlimited frequency range. In high quality recordings and with high quality equipament the range of infrasounds are very easy to feel and enjoy.

And about few people needing more quality, don't forget what our friend Bill Gates said about more then 640KB. Who said that we need HDTV, but after watching HDTV for a while you feel that convencional TV has a lower quality.

Please, try to keep the last paragraph in mind