Slashdot Mirror
Sony Announces End For MiniDisc Walkman
Beloved of concert tapers for their small size, shock resistance, and long battery life, MiniDisc recorders never much caught on with the general public. I remember playing with one in the early '90s — before high-quality solid state stereo recorders were affordable — and looking forward to the day that I would have one of my own. Playback-only decks were available, but understandably (in retrospect) never became big sellers; when MiniDisc was introduced, CDs were still a recent comer, and 8-track was fresh in the mind. Music fans were probably tired of replacing their vinyl and cassettes with the Next Big Thing. Still, with its cheap media and decent portable recorders, MiniDisc struck a chord for some uses, and stuck around better than the Digital Compact Cassette. Now, 19 years after the introduction of the MiniDisc format, Sony has announced that it will stop shipping its MiniDisc Walkman products in September, though it will continue to produce blank media.
Are you like seroius? i just bought 1 like W T F
Still exist?
So I guess people who used to use portable MiniDisc recorders will have to switch to portable flash-based or hard drive-based recorders once their MiniDisc recorders give out. What brands are any good?
I wanted a cheap MD-Data drive but they weren't available at the time; to me, Minidisk recorders themselves mostly became affordable just around the time that they were ceasing to look the best option. Maybe if I'd been older and had more funds, things would have been different. It's all a bit of a shame though because it was a cool technology that I did want to play with.
They were awesome for recording music. I still have mine somewhere I believe. It is sort of a shame to see them die but the disks are a hassle.
with its cheap media and decent portable recorders
There were a lot of things to describe minidisc, but cheap is not one of them. It was not cheap in comparison to any other media you could buy at the time, which may well have been a part of why so few people ever bought it. Minidisc was a neat idea, but it was never at a practical price point.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Never much caught on in the U.S., you mean.
In the late 1990's, early 2000's portable minidisc players/recorders were incredibly popular in Japan and Europe.
Sony has tried again and again to get its proprietary media formats accepted by the public, but with the exception of the 3 1/2" floppy (when Apple and HP chose it over the other two competing formats), none ever stuck. And even that was a failure as a digital camera media format. The next closest was Beta, which lost against VHS, with only a niche afterlife in the different BetaCam format.
UMD is all but dead (once the PSP goes end-of-life it will truly be dead), Memory Stick (the Duo version, at least) is still holding on due to Sony's own Not Invented Here mentality about the industry standard, MiniDisc never was more than a niche in the US. Anything else they came up with is so obscure that I can't even remember it right now.
Farewell and good riddance to another orphan Sony media.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I haven't found anything else with comparable audio quality. I know the ageing ATRAC codec used on Minidiscs are inferior to the latest generation codecs, such as AAC, but the D/A converters and amplifiers were far superior to those in the latest portable units, even iPods which are not just hampered by poor amplifiers, but also shoddy encoding and a high level of dynamic compression in iTunes. And I must say that as a portable recorder they actually seem to be cheaper than comparable solid state recorders.
Since floppy discs have died I have missed having a medium which I could copy to then give away and which could be reused as easily.
I worked in the radio industry from 2003-2005. MiniDisc was huge then. Unfortunately, Sony in all their "stop piracy" wisdom made it almost impossible to transfer digital content OFF a disc. It was easy enough to record digital content onto the disc (I would hook it up to digital out on my cable box, and record hours of music), but if you wanted to transfer off the disc, you had to do it via the analogue headphone port, or you need a specialized high-end deck.
That was the most frustrating part of the MiniDisc format. My $300 MD player/recorder was crippled. It would have been nice to record an event (plugged into the board at a wedding), and then dump the audio to my computer for editing. But nooooo....Sony didn't want to give me that flexibility.
Sony sucks?
(This is Slashdot after all...maybe we can fit in something about "nano" whatzits too...)
It was 1991, dummy. mp3 came around in 1993.
MiniDisc was the only game in town and there was nothing wrong with creating ATRAC when there was nothing else out there.
Besides, it didn't matter that it used ATRAC because it only output and input PCM data, just like a CD player or DAT recorder did. It only input and output 32Khz PCM audio in real-time. There was no USB and transferring 200MB (the size of a MiniDisc) over serial was impractical.
SCMS (the copy protection) was annoying, but it was put on because of the labels, Sony didn't want to limit their product. But their previous product, DAT was driven off the market by the music labels, so if they wanted their new venture to succeed they had to do something for the labels. It was trivial to strip.
Sony continuing to use ATRAC for music once storage-based players came around that you loaded by copying files was dumb. They should have noticed it was hurting their products' viability a lot earlier.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
It was very much a 50's format. Hardly anyone had bought one for a decade. The format was losing popularity by the end of the 1970's. Even Vinyl outlasted the format.
Compact cassette was still fresh in the mind, and minidisc was seen as a replacement recordable medium - a benefit not provided by CD.
Sony is a company that cannot balance its products and services against its media and publishing. It is torn between offering innovative products and services and keeping media and publishing happy. Microsoft attempted to please media and publishing interests and Vista was the result. Microsoft saw the error in this but Sony cannot simply because it is too entrenched in those interests because it embodies those interests.
In general, I think it can be shown that media and publishing interests will never EVER be satisfied. The more they are given, the more they want and we all know inherently, there is no limit to greed. We see this in music, video and game entertainment industries all over. We all bemoan the changes they keep imposing but we, the consumer, are unable to influence their changes enough. Ideally, we vote with our dollars, but in reality, when we do, they arrive at the wrong conclusions and blame "piracy" and crap like that.
It did it over S/PDIF (usually optical).
I left two of those off.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
When Minidisc was announced I thought it would be a perfect removable storage solution; at the time people were using Syquest drives for "large" (44 and 88 MB) removable storage, and they were pricy; there was a market waiting for something cheaper yet still reasonably fast. I think a Minidisc could hold 250MB or something like that - good storage at the time, relatively cheap, and would probably have been pretty reliable.
However, Sony's anti-piracy worries made Minidisc inaccessible digitally - there were no Minidisc readers/writers and you could only use it for recording/playback of ANALOG audio!
Soon Iomega came out with the very popular 100MB ZIP drives and Sony's window of opportunity closed - and we got to enjoy crappy Iomega quality and the infamous "Click-of Death".
Sony does come out with cool tech sometimes, but their entertainment division screws it up every time. I guess Sony made their money from Minidisc, but they could have done so much more with it.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
I had a minidisc player in college that I purchased for two reasons. One, you could hold a few albums' worth of cds on a single disc, so you could carry around a larger library, and the ability to fast forward from track to track made it a lot more convenient than cassette recorders for putting together mixtapes but having the ability to skip and rewind songs. Those features were quickly overtaken by mp3 players, with even more accessibility.
The second reason I liked the minidisc was that it had a mic input. I carried around a small microphone, and I occasionally recorded bits of shows, or I recorded ambience to use in little sound projects that I had. Today I have an iPod touch with a built-in mic, which is plenty adequate for recording those bits of audio in the real world that I want to hang onto. However, the iPod doesn't have a mic input, so I can't stick in a better mic and record something at a higher quality. But that one feature isn't really enough for most people to still want to carry around a disk of physical memory. Maybe someday I'll break out that little recorder for field recording again.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Minidisc was released to market in 1992, cds we're already on the market for multiple years at the time and 8tracks hadn't been around in over 20 years. Oh wait timothy submitted this, we're lucky it makes any grammatical sense, being factual would just be icing on the cake.
I remember downloading .mp3s from Audio Galaxy over my dial up connection at 15 minutes per song, and then recording them to my portable MiniDisc player via a sound card with a digital optical cable port back in '97 or '98. Good times. I tried to listen to some of them a couple of years ago, but the format must not be very stable, cause the discs were all dead.
You mentioned a timeline when you said:
'When they were released,'
That's 1991, before mp3. Let's set you didn't mean mp3, what else did you mean in 1991? There was no other digital formats except CD and DAT and MiniDisc was compatible with them because it used S/PDIF as input and output. You set a timeline to 1991 and then complain about things that don't make sense in 1991.
Proprietary doesn't mean anything in this context. Secure Digital is proprietary too, it's just widely adopted. Probably the SD Card Association was more reasonable on pricing than Sony when it comes to licensing fees. And SD took off.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital#Openness_of_standards
'MagicGate'
MagicGate is no different than the "Secure" part of Secure Digital. Device makers can use it to write content in such a way that it can only be read back on that device.
HDCP is Intel, not Sony.
I'm not sure where SDMI came from I can't find any info that says Sony was behind it.
A lot better things than MiniDisc came out later, but in 1991, it was the best thing going. Sony stupid kept trying to ride that instead of jumping into the new business of mp3 players and they paid the price for it.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
God, ATRAC sounded awful. A guy at work had an ATRAC3 device. We took one of my CDs and recorded a song. I took about three seconds to hear the obvious artifacts. It had the worst temporal stepping of decaying sounds I have ever heard.
What I miss most from my old MZ-R35, is the headphone remote. By modern standards it was large, with more controls than an iPod Shuffle, but everything was usable one handed by touch alone. The rewind/seek controls were a twist cap. I had a half hearted go at adapting one, but it would take more SMD fu than I can muster.
So long Mini-Disc
In the Matrix, when Neo is selling digital drugs to the couple at his apartment door, the delivery device was a Sony mini disc. The mini discs were hidden inside the hollowed out Simulacra & Simulation book.
I had a MD player back when I was impersonating a gym rat. Kind of a pain to use, but more convenient than a cassette or CD Walkman. I liked that it ran on a single AA battery for a few hours and had a digital optical input. I think it was less than $100, but the discs were expensive and hard to find.
A few years later I got into operating portable satellite ham radio. Most people record their QSOs because things happen too quickly to log contacts. The MD was easy to interface with my radio, had a way to mark important spots on the recording with one button, and fit in a pocket.
So it WAS a useful format for some things, but basically had no purpose once mp3 players and digital recorders came on the market. Now a cell phone held next to the speaker of my radio works good enough for logging, and if I want better quality a cheap Olympus digital recorder will perform as well as the MD recorder.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Minidisc was a terrific cassette replacement for radio reporters. I used consumer (not pro) units during a stint in Eastern Europe in the late 90s, including covering the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Much better audio quality (no tape hiss), and the MD Walkman recorders weighed a fraction of the Sony cassette recorders most of us used. Plus, there were usability features like track-marking and time stamps and long-duration recordings that were a vast improvement over analog cassettes.
Pro hardware was extensively used in radio studios as a replacement for tape carts, which were cousins of the 8-track, and were widely used for playing commercials, jingles, PSAs, and singles back in the top-40 era. The radio network where I used to work still has MD recorders in many if not most of their studios. I used to use them to record a backup copy of telephone interviews, which were recorded to a server somewhere for editing. Having the MD backup saved my tuchus on more than one occasion.
CDs were still a recent comer, and 8-track was fresh in the mind.
More to the point, VHS vs. Betamax was still fresh in the mind. I seem to recall that DCC, DAT and Minidisc all popped up at around the same time (plus, digital audio recording had been one of the selling points of Video 8 before it got sidelined into camcorders) and it was clear that one or two of them would fail. Maybe people just decided to sit on their money and see who won the war. Turned out, none of them really did (although it was only DCC that, deservedly, sunk without trace).
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
seriously if sony had jumped on dvd type discs and had mp3 compatibility earlier I don't think the ipod would have taken over so quickly.
lose != loose
There are ways to format optical RW media to behave like floppies
Thing is, CD-R is so cheap, ~10c per GB, that it doesn't really matter that they are single-use (not very green, but I suspect that Gaia has bigger fish to fry). Apart from the issues with packet-writing, RW discs have always been sufficiently more expensive to ensure that it made economical sense to use write-once discs.
It always seems sacrilege, but I suppose those of us who were around in the 80s have registered CDs as objects of value, and haven't really registered the fact that they're now cheaper than floppies ever were, and that's before allowing for inflation and taking into account the 1000x capacity increase.
Glad i am not the only one. I still would love to see cheap 5x-10x packs of small usb sticks or similar.
Yeah. They seem to have bottomed out at several bucks a pop... OK for giving away to customers/contacts where you might get some "intangible" payback, but not really hand-out-without-thinking material. They could do cheap plastic ones with no metal shroud, just contacts (I had some double-ended SD cards like that that could plug into a SD slot or a USB port, but they were 1G, which was quite big at the time, not cheap enough to be disposable).
For give-away media, CD-R is still king.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I had one, and copied plenty of ripped and downloaded music to mine without any problem at all. It had surprising battery life, decent play time on a disk, overall a nice device. The home unit i had worked well for a long time.
I never did try to buy music on native disks, partially for the reasons you mentioned, but also due to lack of selection.
They could still compete well with the early MP3 players, but once the ipod came out, you could see the handwriting on the wall and it was just a matter of time.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Bring back the Elcaset!
MiniDisc is a rare example where the mainstream mostly seemed to understand that something is garbage precisely because it's proprietary. Very few implementations, zero competition, needlessly overpriced at every point from the hardware to the media, realization that someday the media simply won't be available at any price -- people understood, with features and performance being secondary concerns. They don't generalize, but with miniDisc, they "got it."
Of course, there were enough people who didn't get it, that it still lasted a couple decades. This doesn't serve as a lesson to Sony or companies like them that they can't make money buy selling crap, but I think it really does mean that sometimes, products dedicated to lockin will be doomed to have insignificant share.
I think there was a niche generation that really really got into MD in a big way. Here in Europe there was a pretty sizeable take-up of it but it was largely word of mouth. I got a portable recorder in '96, within a year about half a dozen of my friends had similar machines. Far smaller than a portable CD or cassette player with great rechargeable battery life. The discs were small enough you could pocket dozens of them for sharing and swapping.
Over the years the portable players got smaller and smaller. After picking up a deck perfect album duplicates could be made, and with CD multichangers you could preprogram a 'mix tape' and let it run and record. My last portable player was my beloved Panasonic SJ-MJ70 which is one of the most beautiful electronic products ever put on this earth.
This was all reasonably affordable. My deck was £100 as were all the portables in the local Richer Sounds. The discs got to be really cheap - under £1 per disc as the format got more popular. I had shoeboxes full of discs, hundreds of them. Never had one fail. Cloning the TOC could get an 80m disc from any 74m disc!
Granted we were all into our music. When an album was £10 you didn't really want to carry it around or lend it out and MD was a great way to preserve the originals. The hardware costs are far more reasonable when you consider the lack of wear and tear on original media. I think the downfall of MD wasn't just the rise of the mp3 player but the movement away from the album format that came along with it. No longer would the MD be seen as one or two albums per disc, but more as a twenty song hard limit. When an mp3 player could take 100 albums and play anything in any order the argument for discrete chunks of music over different media was a losing one. Even though 128kbps mp3s didn't sound nearly as good as SD MD ATRAC it was mostly unnoticed.
But in the 90s the use of MD as data storage would have been a revolution. It would have undercut the cost of Zip and Jazz drives hugely and was durable and consumer friendly. Had Sony not been so beholden to their entertainment division they would have cornered the removable media market.
The format's lack of impact in the US tends to mute widespread online celebration of the format, but in some markets it did really well. In my class of '99 I would guess about 25% of people used it. Personally the death knell was when my new SACD player refused to do a digital output for me to make an MD copy. CDs were fine but not the few SACDs I'd invested in. Adios Sony and soon I was on a G2 iPod.
I haven't even touched on studio use. But I remember fondly the days of a player in one pocket, bunch of albums in another, and meeting someone at a prearranged time (no mobile phones!).
The flash memory format known as SD might as well be. Just make sure a reader/writter is installed everywhere, like most netbooks have. Multicard readers are very cheap and come in 3 1/2" size to use floppy slots.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
Ah, MiniDisc. You may not be missed, but you will be remembered fondly.
MD was by far the best option for musically-inclined travelers throughout the 1990s.
Small, durable, shockproof, long battery life. You could dub lossless digital optical from a CD or another MD. The best players had inline remotes (with a little backlit LCD) that let you control & tweak every function without taking it out of your pocket.
Sony invented the format, but Aiwa made the best portable units.
I remember rocking up in Goa in the late 90's, where long-term visitors would post signs for their trance collections on MD.
I remember many long ferry, train, and bus rides in southeast asia that would have been intolerable without my trusty MD player and a couple dozen discs in my backpack.
Of course MD has been obsolete for a decade. And now I can get the same results from an app on my iPhone. But it was great during its time.
R.I.P., MD.
I had a minidisc recorder that had a software suite for loadng up tracks from CD etc. It also burnt CDs in ATRAC format for playback in their portable CD players. I burnt quite a few disks on the promise of better quality than MP3 and used this to master certain irreplacable tracks. Turns out, the DRM protection stops the disks being played on any other PC than the one they were recorded on. Didn't find that out until that PC was gone. Result, I've lost some very important recordings and it's yet another reason I now avoid Sony like the plague.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I don't know how much you value your backups but saving via a lossy compression seems like a recipe for problems.
http://www.yutbuyprisebestsale.com/
Maybe 10 years ago, wallyworld closed them out and I bought a handful of them for 50.00 us each. Then I picked up whatever discs I could and have been using them ever since. I don't usually use the full hi-md ability since I bought mostly the cheaper discs, but for the most part, I get hours of play off my mp3 downloads while I cut the grass, paint the house, whatever. I can't remember ever having a single failure with them. Not many things I have still work after 10 years of banging around like these guys. Ya, 1.5v AA batteries seem to last forever. I have seen many other data logging uses for them as well, and some folks even record bird calls in the field with them. We'll see how my Zune hd holds up as comparison. As for drm stuff, maybe the files I listen to aren't protected, but I have not had a problem dl from disc to my pc to edit the pile or re-copy to a different disc.
Sad story!