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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
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.
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.
Still exist?
Exactly! Who knew? When they were released, they came out with their proprietary and incompatible ATRAC compression scheme, and some kind of copy-bit DRM, so I knew there was never any chance of me accidentally buying one. I figured they just faded into the mists of history as another example of Sony sh!tting on their customers. Apparently it was a much longer walk into the mists than I thought.
John
A musician friend of mine just picked up a TASCAM DP-008. He was debating on whether he should buy a USB-2 or a Firewire based A to D system, and decided something he could take along to live shows without bringing the whole laptop and cable thing was even better. I think he paid about $299 for it.
Takes SDHC cards, so an 8GB card will hold a lot of sound. But while it's an "8" track device, it can only record two tracks at a time (you can record two while playing back up to six others, supposedly it's good for live performances playing backing tracks.) And he's said the built-in microphones were "adequate".
John
Does blu ray really reach the definition of "accepted by the public" though?
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.
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.
Rip them to SACD Or MS PlayForSure
Nobody have been burned trusting their music to Sony or MS, ever!
Actually, your iPod touch does have a mic input, that extra metal band on the headphone jack. It's how I use my G3 Ipod touch for skype, since it lacks the internal microphone. There's a tiny little microphone built into the wire of the original equipment headphone that comes with the iPod. That built in mic is the only thing that justifies the high price of the Apple brand original equipment earbuds that you can buy for a pricey $30.
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
Same here. I remember reading about MD-Data when it was first released. A 140MB removable drive, with cheap disks (a fraction of the price of ZIP disks, only 2-3 times more expensive than floppy disks), smaller than floppy disks and much smaller than CDs. When they were released, my computer had a 60MB hard disk, MD-Data sounded amazing but I never actually saw one.
If Sony had pushed MD-Data a bit more, they'd have owned the floppy-replacement market. MD Data was much more suited to laptop use than recordable CDs and took less space than a floppy disk drive. They would probably have held that market until flash drives became cheap. With the 1GB disks, it would probably have lasted until quite recently.
I don't think Sony even made a laptop with one, which was a huge shame. They should have made MD-Data the only built-in removable storage device on their laptops, made floppy drives optional on their desktops, and licensed the drives to a second source for other manufacturers. People would have complained for a bit, then wondered how they managed with the bulky 3.5" disks that only had 1% the capacity of a MiniDisc. Using them just for music was a huge waste.
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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!).
I think there was more to it than that. First and foremost, the media was extremely expensive. Second, there was no real bundling anywhere - few if any car stereos had them built in, nor did stereo minisystems, and no desktops or laptops could use them outside of the player (if you don't believe this is important, do you know anyone who's burnt an audio CD within the past decade? any of those people burn 'em on a standalone CD deck?). Third, the expensive media and players never paid off as being anything except a digital audio player - no data, no digital cameras, no video games. Costly and cost effective are two different things. Minidisc had the former down to a science.
Yes, while that largely reiterates what you stated above, I don't think it was that the public understood that this was the case as much as the fact that going Minidisc required a conscious effort. Customers had to decide to buy a portable minidisc player, as well as a home stereo minidisc player, and then transfer all their CDs to that format. By contrast, by time one or two friends had a minidisc player in my circle, CD-RW drives were standard fare in desktops (and in all but the most bottom level laptops), cars and home stereos had CD players, portable CD players had a median price of $50-$60 (higher for the Sony and Panasonic ones, but Chinese no-names were easily $25). All we had to do was either buy CDs and play them, or buy blank media and...play them. At a quarter a pop, blank CDs didn't need the rewriteability that Minidisc had. It wasn't that consumers said "they're proprietary", they said "CD is everywhere, so switching is pointless".