Sony To Make Its Last MiniDisc System Next Month

An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports that Sony, the creators of the MiniDisc audio format, are to deliver their last MiniDisc stereo system in March. Launched over 20 years ago in late 1992 as a would-be successor to the original audio cassette, MiniDisc outlasted Philips' rival Digital Compact Cassette format, but never enjoyed major success outside Japan. Other manufacturers will continue making MiniDisc players, but this is a sign that — over ten years after the first iPod — the MiniDisc now belongs to a bygone era."

Comments

Killed by DRM and licensing

[gmhowell]

I remember looking at these in the early 90's. They seemed interesting, but the inability to easily make copies due to idiotic DRM made it uninteresting to me. And I'm sure that Sony was asking absurd licensing fees for others to make players (like the home Betamax days).

And rather than Sony learn any lessons, they have doubled down. For two decades. Is it any wonder their stock and their corporate goodwill are both in the shitter?

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[rudy_wayne]

I was going through a closet just today and threw out about 20 blank minidiscs that had never been used.

Several years ago I bought a portable minidisc player. Battery life was terrible. I literally had to carry a couple of AA batteries with me at all times. But even worse was getting music onto the player. There were only two choices -- a program made by Sony that was a complete piece of shit, or, a plugin for Realplayer.

And, for added amusement, transferring songs onto the player from my computer was very slow because they all had to be converted into Sony's propriietary, DRM infested ATRAC format.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[rudy_wayne]

The DRM certainly didn't help, but what really killed the minidisc was the introduction of the iPod and other MP3 players. Instead of constantly swapping out discs (each minidisc held 1 CD worth of music) you could just load up your MP3 player with dozens, or hundreds, of CDs. Once MP3 players came along, the minidisc went the way of the cassette Walkman.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[hcs_$reboot]

The first iPod was released in 2001. I don't think it was the reason. I owned a MD player in the mid-90s and - as said gmhowell above - the system lacks flexibility when it comes to copying. Besides that, the MD player was great!

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[dubbreak]

The DRM was definitely silly and I think that's what held it back. I had a couple MD players. In the era of 128mb solid state and cd mp3 players they were awesome. Lasted a month on a single AA (cd mp3 players would last a few days at best on 2xAA). Add extra memory cheap as compared to solid state. Super durable storage (much more resilient than CDs).

The Canadian software was a lot more lenient on copying mp3s over (converting to AAC). IIRC you could copy an mp3 to devices 3 times before syncing it back as deleted off a device. Stupid limitation when with comparable devices you could make as many MP3 cds as you wanted or copy to mass storage type devices with no limitations. Other huge down side was not being able to get digital copies back off the device via the USB cable. You could use the optical out and record from that, but no drag and drop. It was a great device to plug into a mixer when doing a jam or even a show (high quality recording), but you couldn't easily get the digital file off. You should have been able to just grab it via USB like a comparable device, but that would encourage copyright infringement or something. Normal Sony behavior.

I loved the format. I could have a few different mixes, throw them in my backpack and not worry. Carry an extra battery for when it finally got low and I was good to go. No skipping, pretty small (for the era) and reliable as could be. I really think the DRM and not licensing it were the reasons it never took off. That and not being able to use it as mass storage. In university as a computer science student having that as storage would have been extremely useful. Oh well. One more dead format to add to the pile.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[mug funky]

you could install the sony shit and use GraphEdit to wrangle it to your will, but generally it was never worth having to real-time play everything like the analog days.

great hardware, terrible software. this is how sony roll.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Kenshin]

Battery life was fine on mine. It ran for ages off one AA battery.

Mine wasn't a "Net MD" player, so I got music into it by recording. I had a TOS Link cable out from my sound card, and just played a playlist while it recorded. Ya, it was a bit slow that way, but MP3 players at the time were expensive and very small capacity and CD players were chunky.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

Sony's use of "MagicGate" DRM on the computer-to-MiniDisc link was inexcusable, as was their removal of line inputs from later MiniDisc "recorders" (so that you had to go through the DRMed computer-to-MiniDisc path). Their decision to separate MD-Åudio from MD-Data wasn't too great, and their slowness in releasing a high-density MiniDisc format (for a long time, they just pushed higher compression rates - LP2 and LP4) didn't help MiniDisc's cause.

They probably could and should have lobbied against the copy protection / DRM, recorder tax, and media tax provisions of the AHRA. Especially given that they bought out the Columbia/CBS studios and record company around the time of the DAT fight. (Hope I'm getting my timeline straight here.)

However, ATRAC in and of itself was not an evil thing. MP3 _players_ came out around - what - 1999? MiniDisc _recorders_ came out in 1992, and they had to be able to compress audio in real-time, not just to decompress it. ATRAC was no doubt designed to allow for real-time compression with the sort of embedded computing power that was available at the time.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Pentium100]

And unlike a lot of the MP3 players, most MD devices could record from analog sources (line input or microphone). Sound quality was pretty good and Hi-MD devices could record uncompressed audio (the downside was that a regular MD could only hold ~20 minutes of PCM recording, Hi-MD discs could hold more).

I still use MD to listen to digital audio when I'm not at home (for analog I use a cassette walkman). I also use it when someone asks me to makea digital copy of ananalog source (cassette, record etc) - I record to MD uncompressed then copy the recording to my PC - no need to use the PC for realtime stuff...

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[sd4f]

Yea, you couldn't extract audio digitally off a MD, definitely not easily, all the consumer level gear wouldn't allow it. So once it was on a MD, you could only record it to something else via analogue.

I didn't use hi md, so im not sure what that was like, but md was a really great replacement for a cassette player, on the basis that you used it in the same ways, ie copied music onto it, made recordings which were better quality, but didn't need to copy over to something else. Once flash started to get cheaper, there wasn't any real reason to look back at md though.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[smegfault]

For me it was a logical step up from cassette tapes, especially at a time when mp3s weren't very good and not very abundant, and CD-RWs were prohibitively expensive. I used tons of MDs to copy CDs off my friends, first analogue and then with an optical cable. It was just as slow as cassette tapes but not subject to being eaten by my tape deck and they sounded much, much better and they let me shuffle and edit. It also seemed a lot more practical than its ghastly contemporary DCC, which was more of an evil stepsister of cassette tapes minus the slow decline in sound quality (well, only if you cleaned the heads regularly...) I liked the small, sturdy size of the disks, too. Back then (early teens) I had no idea what DRM was and although I must've copied hundreds of CDs I've never encountered a problem with DRM, only when I tried to copy from MD to MD. Yeah, MD went into a quick decline when (re)writable CDs came along but for a while they were a very practical stop-gap between cassette tapes and the MP3 era.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[gmhowell]

The DRM certainly didn't help, but what really killed the minidisc was the introduction of the iPod and other MP3 players. Instead of constantly swapping out discs (each minidisc held 1 CD worth of music) you could just load up your MP3 player with dozens, or hundreds, of CDs. Once MP3 players came along, the minidisc went the way of the cassette Walkman.

I know that's what it says in the article and on Wikipedia. But by the time MP3 players came along, MD was already dead. The cassette Walkman went away. Except in Japan, MD never arrived.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[sd4f]

I don't think sony has much in the tank left, sure they beat HD-DVD, but can you honestly say that blu-ray is a successful technology?

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[iamagloworm]

"if you get caught using that..."
"i know. this never happened. you don't exist."

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

> I was going through a closet just today and threw out about 20
> blank minidiscs that had never been used.

have you not heard of eBay? those things are worth something to someone man, especially as they become rare as hare's teeth.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[gmhowell]

One feature I particularly liked (again, ca. 92-93, not a decade later like some are referring to) was the incredible resiliency to skipping. Portable CD players of the time were dreadful for skipping. This by itself may have convinced me to pick up a player if it weren't for the problems I mentioned above.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[smegfault]

The portable recorders are still very popular with local radio stations (always strapped for cash) doing field interviews as they're compact and rugged and sound good. Plus, the stations often use MD-decks for playing jingles and commercials, so the interview can be easily transferred and edited.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[TheGratefulNet]

drm? you mean scms?

we solved that with DAT using scms-strippers. I was never into MD but I think they did have spdif inputs and outputs, on some models.

but that's not the point. the point is that they used lossy compression and DAT was literal (lossless). so even spdif->scms-stripper->spdif, you still get a less than perfect copy with MD and DCC. with DAT, it was always perfect if scms=00 (the 2 bits that 'stick' once set and let copies go on forever, even using consumer decks).

ah, the DAT tape memories. I still have dat decks but no one really fixes them or cares anymore.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[TheGratefulNet]

DAT decks didn't skip, either, but they DID do digital 'buzzsaw'. mostly due to tensioning issues and using the thin (90 meter and longer) tapes vs the industry standard 60 meter (2 hour) tapes. or if you didn't have a CLA on your deck, you'd get buzzsaw sooner or later.

I'm remembering the sony car DAT deck. what a thing, in its day! it even had remote 10 disc cd changer that you could put in the trunk. the sony car dat was pretty unique and expensive. imagine a spinning vcr-like head in a car system. its almost funny now that I think of it. DAT decks had problems just sitting still and sony put one in a car DIN mount size meant for bouncing in a car environ. and car temp swings, too. pretty ballsy engineering move and oddly enough, that was one of the better DAT decks out there, period.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[smegfault]

There are no early mp3-players "contemporary with the introduction of minidisc". I had an MD-deck in 1993. The first widely available unit was the Audible.com mobileplayer in 1997 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_media_player#Audible.com_MobilePlayer) which had a pathetic 2MB storage capacity. It took almost 10 years for the price of CD-RWs to fall enough to become a feasible alternative to MDs, especially if you erased and re-recorded a lot like me.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[smegfault]

imagine a spinning vcr-like head in a car system. its almost funny now that I think of it.

They'll be saying that about CDs in 20 years.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[rthille]

I've got a Sony MD/CD player that will 'high speed' copy from the CD to the MiniDisc. It didn't have optical out to get the audio off my old MDs (mostly copies of my old Vinyl), so I hard-hacked it to add one. I never had one of the NetMD versions. Don't think I would have gotten one of the MDs at all due to the DRM if they started with that crap. One of these days I'll finish copying the MD's to my laptop and eBay the MD/CD box (and the portable MD player/recorder). They were nice tech for the time, but technology long since passed them by.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[pwizard2]

Some of the early CD-RW discs seemed to have stability problems. From my experience if you left them around long enough they would "go bad" and wouldn't blank properly. If you tried to burn then again after that they would become unusable. The discs were kept at proper room temperature and were nearly scratch-free. Maybe I was just unlucky but I lost well over 50% of my early discs to this problem. Even some DVD+RWs were affected by it. The whole experience kind of turned me off to rewritable media especially after high-capacity USB drives got cheap.

I haven't bought any new CD-RW or DVD+RW discs in over 5 years so I have no idea if new ones are any better.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[smegfault]

No, I've had the same experience. My first CD-burner unit (a Philips unit) would consistently wreck at least one out of three CD-R burns. Pretty frustrating as it was a 1x speed burner, so you had to wait for over an hour only to find out the writing operation failed and you had yourself a pretty expensive shiny coaster. Of the last three-pack of DVD+RWs I bought, only one still works after two years of very light use. The other ones would just refuse to be blanked.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[AK Marc]

MD sucked because the DRM was such that you couldn't copy files to it. I want to copy at 48x speed or faster. Only being able to record at real speed sucks.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, they're worth $1.49 each before expenses. So he threw away $30. That's 14 hours of labour for someone working tip-free as a waitress! Or about 1 hour of labour for someone making a half decent wage, or about 1/4 hour of labour for a rich person.

Completely not worth the effort of selling unless you happen to be making literal peanuts.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Opportunist]

The recorders were actually stellar. Problem was just to get out again what you recorded unless you wanted to use the analogue hole. Which, coincidentally, was crappy enough that you could as well just record to a cassette tape.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

*exits time travel pod*

GREAT GREAT MANY TIMES GREAT GRANDFATHER!! DON'T DO IT!! Go get those disks, and put them back in the closet! Those things are collector's items in my great great grandmother's time, and if you hadn't thrown them out, she would have been filthy freaking rich! Go get them, put them in the closet again, and when you die, they'll be put into someone else's closet, and handed down, until I can finally reap the rewards!

*muttering to self*

If I could travel through space as easily as I can travel through time, I'd go slap that old fool around for awhile!

*to Grandfather*

GO! NOW!! DO IT NOW!!!! Get those disks back into a safe place! All of them, including the one with a crack in it! I'm checking right now to see that you've done it.

*climbs back into time travel pod*

*disappears*

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[phantomfive]

But even worse was getting music onto the player. There were only two choices -- a program made by Sony that was a complete piece of shit, or, a plugin for Realplayer. And, for added amusement, transferring songs onto the player from my computer was very slow because they all had to be converted into Sony's propriietary, DRM infested ATRAC format.

This is a good description of why Apple was successful with the ipod.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[jcr]

Yeah, they screwed up DAT the same way. Made them both useless for sound editing.

-jcr

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[dgatwood]

I'd have probably taken them to Goodwill. In most places, when they get things that nobody wants, they turn around and sell them on eBay or Amazon, and the revenue goes to fund their continuing operations. Plus if you're itemizing anyway, it's a tax write-off.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[symbolset]

Philips took $50M cash to make that happen.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

I did the same. I never bought music on minidiscs. CDs were just more readily available and cheaper and I preferred mixing my music together myself. CD players were just too clunky, ate through batteries even faster and most of them would just skip even with "skip protection". On the lithium-ion battery my minidisc player would also last for ages.
Definitely more sturdy than my disk based ipods. In the last 6 years I dropped 2 of them and killed the HDD.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[davester666]

Apple was lucky. They didn't "own" music, just resold it, so they didn't have people in-house forcing them to cripple the product.

What I still find amazing was how fast the music industry was able to legislate DAT tape into oblivion, but they weren't able to do the same thing to MP3 players.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[BronsCon]

Offpissing. I think I found a new word that I like.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Pale Dot]

Once MP3 players came along, the minidisc went the way of the cassette Walkman.

Smartphones are the new Walkman. None of my friends own mp3 players anymore.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[BasilBrush]

Absolutely. That was the reason for one of it's niche successes. They were great for doing theatre sound effects. Cassette had not replaced reel to reel tape decks because the quality wasn't good enough. And because auto-stop was needed at the end of tracks - with reel to reel, you spliced in a section of transparent tape between tracks to make that happen.

But MD, with it's high quality, analogue recording, built in editing, and the autostop feature on some models made it a great replacement for those old reel to reel tape decks.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[xenobyte]

Well, blu-ray was the superior technology in that race... Not great but the better one...

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[FishTankX]

not cheaper than free. if it aint broke dont fix it. if they already own it it makes sense

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

Because MP3 players didn't have a record button? The industry types who killed home DAT were too stupid to realize that an MP3 player is like a little portable hard drive and yopu can copy things off of it,

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[phantomfive]

The music industry was dying and extremely worried at the time.

I knew some people who worked in the industry (as recording technicians, not as artists), and there was a huge depression over everyone. They were worried that music-downloading was going to destroy their jobs, and music, etc. They were basically desperate when Apple came to them and told them how to make money off this new market (remember all they had was Real at the time). It was like Apple had cleared away the clouds and bright sun was shining again.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Luckyo]

This is normal for low quality RW optical media. RW disks are photosensitive media, and exposure to light slowly "kills" them.

Generally, these disks are not meant to last years. Some high quality ones are, but they cost far more then cheap ones that crapped themselves in barely a year or so.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[DrXym]

It was with the introduction of MagicGate and Minidisc that Sony began to lose its marbles. Somebody in that company must have given themselves a big pat on the back when they hobbled the hardware with DRM and ATRAC3. They probably thought the public would roll over and eat that shit up, but instead the public just shunned Sony and started buying from the competition who used more open industry standards.

I wouldn't be surprised if the media arm foisted this insanity on to the consumer electronics arm but it's all Sony as far as the end user is concerned. About the only ray of sanity in Sony was the PSP and PS3 which were pretty standards friendly and still are but even there it's not hard to see signs of interference. e.g. the PS3 has for the last 18 months or so enforced Cinavia audio watermarks which appear in some DVD and Blu Ray discs. Will it stop people ripping discs into media files? Of course not. Instead they'll just buy non-Sony kit to play it on. It's self defeating.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Alioth]

You can engineer spinning head type things for bumpy environments. I have a Sony Digital-8 video recorder. It has been strapped to a racing sidecar outfit (with virtually no suspension travel), an extreme vibration environment if there ever was one. The recording didn't miss a beat. (These days I use solid state recorders).

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Jane Q. Public]

"And rather than Sony learn any lessons, they have doubled down. For two decades. Is it any wonder their stock and their corporate goodwill are both in the shitter?"

Jesus, doesn't anybody here remember any history? Come on, folks, this is so far off as to be just plain BS.

The reason MiniDiscs had DRM in the U.S. (but not Japan) wasn't Sony, it was Congress! The music industry panicked over MiniDisc because it was a "perfect" copy. That meant that unlike cassettes, you could copy endlessly and it wouldn't degrade in quality, like cassette tapes did.

Hrm, that calls for some more history. MiniDisc came out -- in Japan -- before recordable CDs. The recording industry had fought both cassettes and CDs, unsuccessfully. But when faced with MiniDisc they lobbied Congress HARD, and the outcome was that Congress banned the importing or making of MiniDisc players until they implemented a DRM system that limited copying.

SONY at the time was NOT known for DRM. Remember, Sony had, not too long before, fought in court on the other side of the battle, to make sure videotapes were legal.

So it was Congress that is at fault here. Manufacturers wanted nothing to do with creating a DRM system in hardware. And consumers in the U.S., by and large, were uninterested in a DRM-laden system. The result was that it took a good 10 years before MiniDisc was widely available here. You could get them; a few were made with DRM. But they were rare and expensive. And the entire 10 years, Japan used them DRM-free.

So stop blaming Sony. You're pointing your fingers in the wrong direction. It was the recording industry -- and a compliant Congress -- who were entirely at fault.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[kiddygrinder]

they weren't that bad, the quality was fine with 4 cds to the disc

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[webmistressrachel]

|| Every time a MiniDisc article gets posted on slashdot, I pull out my collection of players and recordings I made back in the 90s

Wow - every time an MD-related article gets on the front page of Slashdot, I go and buy another MZ-RH1 off of eBay.

Soon the BBC, ITV, et al will come begging for decent recording equipment, when the only stuff available is disgusting, shoddy, yet "good enough for all you idiots" MP3 format. More fool the lot of you. I'd rather work around dirty and awkward DRM, but with a CD-quality analog hole than anything limited to compressed (MP3, WMA) formats.

I've also noticed that WMA has deprecated WMA lossless on portable devices sometime in last 5 years - an excellent indicator of things yet to come.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[webmistressrachel]

Correction - for pedants - WMA hasn't deprecated anything. Microsoft has deprecated WMA lossless.

There, fixed that for myself.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Gordonjcp]

What DRM? My Minidisc recorders all accepted and sent plain ordinary SP/DIF and had a menu option to ignore SCMS which is about the only thing close to DRM. These weren't the high-end ones intended for broadcast and theatre, they were just a plain ordinary MD walkman and MD hifi separate.

It was incredibly easy to copy to and from MD from DAT or from a PC with a soundcard that supported SP/DIF. At the time I was using an SB Live! Value which didn't have all its codecs populated - but the unpopulated ones could be set up as SP/DIF in and out so I made an optical adaptor for it.

ATRAC was bloody good for its day, and I still think it sounds better than MP3 did at far higher bitrates.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[demonlapin]

MP3 fell under computing devices, not home audio. Same as CD-R's, actually; computers were allowed to write to CD-R anything they liked, while standalone recorders had to use those special "music" CD-R's.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[craigminah]

I used SoundJam to get music onto it through that wacky USB to fiber optic converter.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[vlm]

You need to balance the time spent vs the reward vs the opportunity cost. The delta of adding item #2 (or #30) to an existing sale is very low, so find someone who's a seller, and trade them say $10 for them. You get a free lunch at the labor expense of perhaps 5 minutes, which is a decent rate of pay, or at least a free drink or two, and they get $20 for an extra 10 minutes labor.

I will say if you're not a seller, the fixed costs of being a seller are a killer. My local post office is at least an hour round trip, no matter if I ship one or 50 boxes, for example. Finding the tape dispenser after its been misplaced takes 15 minutes no matter if I'm wrapping one box or 50 boxes.

Another issue is I'm not really eligible for overtime. It doesn't matter if I'm getting "pretty good rate" 40 hours per week, if I want to work a 41st hour either it isn't happening or I'd have to go to McDonalds or something. Suddenly my labor equivalent pay rate drops from more than skilled tradesmen get to minimum wage flunkie pushing a broom. There are way too many unemployed people to seriously consider contracting and I don't want a long term contract I just want to work one hour this week and thats it, blah blah blah.

There's a zero sum collector metagame going on with ebay too. Trade trade trade just like a stock exchange daytrader with the optimistic goal of always improving your collection without losing too much money in bad trades, ebay fees, and postage. My dad played that as a hobby for many years after retirement, most likely everyone in the general field of antique radios did business with him in the early 00s. About a decade ago I inherited some rather exotic machinery like a R390 and some other stuff, note that he used and greatly enjoyed this stuff, it didn't just get "collected". Everyone's got a hobby, except the really boring people anyway, and there's certainly worse ways to spend your time and money.

Finally I know people who can't admit ebay selling is no longer profitable, but they enjoy it anyway as a hobby. What I mean is, that in the late 90s you could practically earn a retirement income selling for other people on consignment (essentially turning yourself into a data entry clerk / shipping clerk), but no longer. So earning $1/hr equivalent isn't any inherently stupider than earning 1M ISK/hr on eve or whatever the economic system is on WoW. If you're trying to live off that you'll be looked at as a moron, but as a literal game where the only reward is beating the other guy, its not a bad "sport". I will publicly admit that for about one summer a couple years back, probably around 05 or 06, I was a small time Eve Online commodities daytrader, and I had my ups and downs but based on claimed goldfarmer exchange rates I was earning at least twenty cents per hour long term average, although I never turned my ISK into $. As a hobby it was fun and competitive. I had "friends" doing much better so I'm not going to brag. None the less an enjoyable economic simulation. Lots of the same with ebay, they wanna WIN that POS or they wanna SELL that POS more than anything having to do with either the POS itself or the $ involved.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Dogtanian]

Squandering the potential of MiniDisc through over-zealous DRM, self-interest (and conflict of interest) as well as Sony's general arrogance seems to be its story in a nutshell.

The underlying technology of even the original MiniDiscs had the potential to be *way* more flexible and powerful than it was ever allowed to be. By the standards of the early-1990s it had masses of storage and random access, leading to the possibility of file-like transfer of music tracks. Granted, back then- years before MP3s rose to prominence- people didn't consume music as "files" nor have computers powerful enough to do anything with them anyway, and veering too far from the familiar paradigm probably would have confused and scared Joe Public.

However, the potential to handle and transfer tracks in a file-like way *would* have been something people would have liked- if marketed correctly- even then. Instead, they forced people to dub things in real-time and restricted digital copying.

And they could still have marketed it as a data format once established and provided they kept things clear. Had they done that, it may well have replaced the 1.44MB floppy. To be honest, Sony had the *technology* (and storage space) to do some of what MP3 players did almost a decade later, but they forced it into being little more than a digital audio cassette with random access.

Even when they did improve the format and allow some data use, they forced users to play silly buggers with their crappy software and restrictions.

And let's not get into how, when MP3 *did* come along, their self-interest, NIH and arrogance led them to drag their heels to such an extent that a personal computer company (which is what Apple had been up until that point) steal the market for portable audio from the company that had invented the Walkman and led it for 20 years. It's easy to forget how ludicrous that would have sounded in the mid-to-late-90s, but the market was Sony's to lose- they had the technology and the name- but they totally squandered it. They lost that market, and it was no-one's fault but their own.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[drinkypoo]

great hardware, terrible software. this is how sony roll.

That's what they like.

Unfortunately, they haven't made great hardware approximately since the Minidisc era. And Sony has never been able to make an optical drive with a decent lifetime. You're looking at the world through Sony-colored glasses. I bet you think the PS3 was probably too cheap.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[drinkypoo]

eBay selling is plenty profitable if you know what you're selling. You can't just sell any shit. Unloading someone's wad of Wii games won't bring shit but you can still get good money for Metroid Fusion, see?

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[tibit]

You're silly. These days it'd be way cheaper to have an engineering intern get a development kit of some sort, and turn it into a portable recorder/player. There are plenty of CPU development kits with decent audio A/D and D/A on board or pluggable via USB. Plenty also have SD card slots. You could probably make a decent player/recorder using a beaglebone with a USB audio I/O device, a couple buttons, a small display, and a battery pack. Probably $300 for the whole thing, plus intern's time. It really makes no sense to look for an on-the-market device of such a sort unless it fits the bill perfectly. Maybe there are such things out there... Who the heck will buy an obsolete device that you need to put work into for any sort of software support -- no point at all. Put the work into the new thing.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Pieroxy]

CD-R dates back to 1990 while the MiniDisc was first introduced in 1992 (unless Wikipedia is wrong, that is). It was also apparently released in Japan 1 month before the US release, which points to your story being bullshit or at least wildly inaccurate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-R

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[tgd]

I remember looking at these in the early 90's. They seemed interesting, but the inability to easily make copies due to idiotic DRM made it uninteresting to me. And I'm sure that Sony was asking absurd licensing fees for others to make players (like the home Betamax days).

And rather than Sony learn any lessons, they have doubled down. For two decades. Is it any wonder their stock and their corporate goodwill are both in the shitter?

I used one for almost ten years, and never had an issue with it. If you bought music on it, perhaps... but if you bought CDs and just burned mix MDs, it worked great. I used it daily on my commute and when I traveled until I got my first iPod. It was durable, had great battery life, etc ... ideal, particularly as compared to a portable CD player.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[bemymonkey]

I had a "NetMD", so I had to use the software, but the battery life was fine there too. Ran much longer than a Discman off the same amount of batteries (took a single AA as well, IIRC)... that thing got an insane amount of use.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[fustakrakich]

Soon the BBC, ITV, et al will come begging for decent recording equipment...

I doubt it

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Dr. Evil]

The real niche for these were digital recording for reporters, sound sampling and radio and stuff. Great tool.

The less useful market in North America was as the rich-kid's tape player. You could seek tracks, it was a little smaller and had a little better battery life. The audio quality was cleaner too, but you had to dub all your music to the things and it wasn't practical to buy pre-recorded media. The selection was too small.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[pnutjam]

Let's not forget about that great Sony innovation, MemoryStick.
I remember working in Best buy around 1997. One of the audio guys told me that the Sony rep had shown them some demo stuff that had all the music on something the size of a stick of gum. He said that this was going to replace CD's and it was the future format.
Years later, I realized this guy must have been talking about Memory Stick, the SD card's mentally disabled cousin.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[jedidiah]

In 1998, there were car MP3 players with capacities comparable to some modern smart phones. Blank CD media was also getting pretty cheap and certainly comparable to MD media as CDs had an 8:1 advantage.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[UnknownSoldier]

> Squandering the potential of MiniDisc through over-zealous DRM, self-interest (and conflict of interest) as well as Sony's general arrogance seems to be its story in a nutshell.

You've hit the nail right on the head! Sony's arrogance will be their down fall. They still haven't gotten over their Apple envy -- here Sony invents one of the most popular music devices -- the Walkman -- and completely fumbles the ball with digital music by allowing Apple to disrupt them! Due to greed one division of Sony was suing another division of Sony!?!? The music division sued the storage division back in 2002! WTF? http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=569 . That article also sums up the problem:

"The industries are in a dysfunctional relationship," says Forrester Research analyst Josh Bernoff. "They're codependent; they need each other. There is no consumer electronics industry without content, and there is no content industry without devices to play it on."

DVD-Audio failed big time because people couldn't rip and backup their music like they can with CDs.

Sony: If at first you can't get the the masses to literally buy into your proprietary vendor lock in, you try, and try, and try again...

I can't take credit for the following list. ( http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2559450&cid=38276024 )

Failed Sony Formats...
* Betamax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax
* MiniDisc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc
* HiFD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_HiFD
* SSDS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDDS
* BroadBand eBook http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Reader
* Memory Stick http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Stick (almost dead)
* HDV http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDV dying
* Super Audio CD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Audio_CD
* Universal Media Disc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Media_Disc (dying)

Successful Sony Formats...
* CD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc
* Blu-ray http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc

When you have a hardware company that doesn't understand the first clue about "How the frick can a consumer even brick their TV via firmware upgrades in the first place???" it is not hard to see the writing on the wall. Only by understanding the holy trinity: Hardware, Software, User Experience, will Tech companies survive in the 21st century.

Sony constantly refuses to respect its customers.

--
Only cowards use censorship.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[cdrguru]

CD-RW and DVD+/-RW discs are not "photosensitive" in any regard. They are written to by heating spots on the disc with a laser - heat, not light. The material in a rewritable disc is a metallic alloy which has two stable states - amorphous and crystalline. By heating and cooling the material in different ways (slow or fast) the material changes state.

I will agree that CD-RW and generally all RW forms of DVD media are not long-term storage. It is unclear exactly what is happening in the disc but what it appears is some of the higher-energy state crystalline material spontanously reverts to a lower energy amorphous state. When enough of the written to spots do this a sector is unreadable. There are around 350,000 sectors on a CD-RW so this process can take quite a while to render a disc completely unreadable, but it can happen.

One problem with more recent discs is the alloy layer has been made thinner and thinner to be more responsive to laser energy at higher writing speeds. I have CD-RW (2x) discs from 1997 that are perfectly readable. I have seen discs from 2004 that were completely unreadable six months after being written. The quality of the disc, the thickness of the alloy layer and the storage conditions can all play a role in how long a rewritable disc will remain readable.

In 2010 I was able to recover files from a number of DVD-RW discs that were recorded in 2003, so long term storage is possible. It needed a better-than-average drive to read the discs, but they were readable.

There is some indication that strong UV will affect RW media although this is not any sort of photosensitivity but instead it is an energy transfer - the UV putting enough energy into the alloy layer to change crystalline spots into amorphous. Sunlight is going to take a long, long time to do this. I have heard of people "recovering" RW media with a EPROM UV light, however.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[cdrguru]

Olympus LS10 or LS11. 48Khz stereo PCM with line inputs in a handheld device. I strongly recommend using 32GB SDHC cards as these files get pretty large.

Yes, digital recording exists today, but it isn't a consumer product.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[cdrguru]

There were no CD recorders in 1990. Around 1993 the first CD recorder was introduced but it cost around $50,000. 1994 saw "consumer" CD recorders for as little as $1000. It took until 1997 until they dropped to around $350 for home CD recording to take off.

I worked for a company in 1994 and 1995 that was involved in making CD-R discs for people because we had one of the $50,000 machines.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[operagost]

My BDP-S590 Blu-ray player might not be great, but it's at least very good. I bought it because I was interested in the streaming and DLNA features, and it seemed to be the only player on the market that didn't have complaints about being too underpowered to actually use these. That's been my experience: I've been streaming HD and playing both audio and video over my DLNA network without a hitch. The only reason it's not GREAT is because the video formats it will play locally is smaller than my old LG DVD player, and for some reason the list of formats it will play over DLNA is even smaller. It's documented in the manual (on actual PAPER), but you don't realize this until you buy it, and with so many codecs out there it's difficult to know what you need.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[drinkypoo]

If it's DLNA compliant at least you can transcode with PS3MediaServer or similar...

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[operagost]

DAT could do a bit-for-bit perfect copy of a CD, whereas MP3 by definition is a lossy format. The industry wasn't quite as concerned because they were still focused on the idea of people making bootlegs that were indistinguishable from the original recording-- not realizing that 128kbps MP3s still sounded better than cassette dubs and were "good enough" that most listeners couldn't tell.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Pieroxy]

Then the Wikipedia link I provided for your reading is completely and utterly wrong. I suggest you go and edit it.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[tlhIngan]

What I still find amazing was how fast the music industry was able to legislate DAT tape into oblivion, but they weren't able to do the same thing to MP3 players.

Well, DAT was created by a company that owned a record company, so that' was easy.

But they DID go after MP3. Remember the big ass case against Diamond (who made the Rio, which was one of the first widely available in North America)? It was a follow on to the Napster lawsuits.

Or the Apple one over "Rip Mix Burn"?

Hell, it's why the original iPod lacked the easy ability to copy music off of (ignoring the fact that the database was easier).

Plus most MP3 players at the time required a PC to operate - most DAT players were both recorders and players.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[RatherBeAnonymous]

Hens are quite used to not having teeth. Now a hare with no teeth will be in sorry shape.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[StuartHankins]

Yeah. I wish that donations made more sense. I used to donate to charities all the time. But the way it works in my area is you drive up to the back of a strip mall in a shady neighborhood, you park your car and unload it and go in, then you fill out the form yourself. They provide no proof or record and don't even sign the form, so it's practically useless. I could write anything. In the past, they signed it and attested that at least you donated those items which felt more official even if legally it meant nothing.

I don't like risk for no reward and sadly nowadays I usually just throw things away if no one in my immediate circle can use it. Granted I don't typically have extremely expensive items like TVs but lots of clothes and other stuff. Small appliances. Etc. And no I won't use Craigslist for the same safety reasons. I have a home gym in my apartment now that I am contemplating putting out by the Dumpster because I don't want people in my house looking at my other stuff.

Maybe I'm being silly but I can't afford to have my place ransacked and there have been too many instances of that in my area.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[RatherBeAnonymous]

No, I've had the same experience.

My first CD-burner unit (a Philips unit) would consistently wreck at least one out of three CD-R burns.

That was probably the fault of the IDE interface. IDE was not consistent enough, especially if the drive was on the same cable as the hard drive, or a source CD reader if you were copying directly from disk to disk. Each IDE cable was a data bus where the drives would have to contend for bandwidth, and the IDE master drive could preempt the slave drive. My first burner was a Plextor SCSI unit, and it was extremely reliable.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[UnknowingFool]

This is a good description of why Apple was successful with the ipod

How do you figure? The first iPods used FireWire 400 which was way faster than USB 1 and sometimes USB2 as the theoretical max of USB 2 is 480. Real life usage varies. Later versions used USB 2 so the iPod being slower to transfer is debatable. As for proprietary, Apple's DRMed Fairplay and Apple Lossless are proprietary. iPods can play MP3 and AAC which are also proprietary; however, these formats are not controlled by Apple. Consumers were required to use Fairplay when buying from the Music Store only; they were not required to use it to transfer music to iPods from computers. Apple no longer has DRM on their retail music now.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[phantomfive]

Because everything else at the time was painful to use. I don't understand the point of your post at all.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[UnknowingFool]

This was your exact words:

But even worse was getting music onto the player. There were only two choices -- a program made by Sony that was a complete piece of shit, or, a plugin for Realplayer. And, for added amusement, transferring songs onto the player from my computer was very slow because they all had to be converted into Sony's propriietary, DRM infested ATRAC format.

This is a good description of why Apple was successful with the ipod.

You made the implication that Apple was sucessful because transferred songs slowly and that they used a proprietary DRM infested format.

MP3 and AAC are not DRMed but are proprietary formats almost everyone supports. FairPlay was but only required with music bought from the Music Store. As for slow transfer, FireWire was faster than USB1 and in some cases USB2 (which everyone used until USB3 came along)

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Soluzar]

Buying music on MD was always a bad idea anyway. It was a more compressed format than CD, and who needs that? I just did like you and the previous post. Copied my music by playing each track in real time. Never had a NetMD.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[phantomfive]

Read the earlier post, where I quoted, "But even worse was getting music onto the player. There were only two choices -- a program made by Sony that was a complete piece of shit, or, a plugin for Realplayer. And, for added amusement, transferring songs onto the player from my computer was very slow "

Maybe you are not old enough to remember how bad Realplayer was, but it was bad. DRM is just one part of the problem, and so was slow transfer speed.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[UnknowingFool]

Of I remember RealPlayer. I also had a Diamond Rio which used the parallel port for transfer. Talk about slow. DRM and transfer speed were not the only things holding back digital media players. Interfaces were often poor; for example, subjecting the user to file based transfer or manually using their crappy programs. To give Apple credit they were one of the first to understand simplifying the interface by removing steps would get more consumers to use technology. Plugging in the cable was enough to start a music transfer.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[kaatochacha]

This exactly. Had these a while back, perfectly fit what I needed, Except Sony's ridiculous DRM totally killed it. In car analogies, it was like a fantastically priced car that held 12 passengers and got 100 miles/gallon which looked like a Ferrari, but had square wheels making it undriveable.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[ChrisMaple]

The CD is at least as much a Phillips invention as Sony.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[sts2nihon]

I loved Minidisc, especially the last-generation Hi-MD recorders. My MZ-DH10P with its color screen and (crappy but usable) built-in camera was, IMO, the coolest bit of technology I ever had in my hand at the time. But SonicStage was absolute garbage software. The last release freed up a little bit of the DRM restrictions (getting rid of the three-transfer rule), but it was still clunky and behind the times. Once I bought an iPhone, I had no reason to carry around a separate media player any more, nor any type of physical media. RIP Minidisc. For this avid collector, you will always be missed.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[mattack2]

I bet you think the PS3 was probably too cheap.

Well, the PS3 was the cheapest BluRay player for a long time, and tied with other standalone players but with more features for even longer. Also, doesn't the PS3 get more BluRay related upgrades that don't go to standalone players?

(BTW, as far as I can remember, I have never played a BluRay movie in my PS3, and only got one on the Black Friday 2011 dealâ¦. I would rather pay a fee for PS2 emulation than 're-buy' the collections, though I'm doing that for a few that have gotten REALLY cheap, like $5-$6/game in multi-game collections.)

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Dogtanian]

Addendum; it looks like they did try marketing it as a data storage device in the early days, but played silly buggers with compatibility and managed to kill it off.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Dogtanian]

For a time, between about 1997 and 2003 they were quite popular, at least in Europe.

They did enjoy a brief period of increased (but still relatively moderate and short-lived) popularity here at the turn of the millennium; i.e. the immediate pre-iPod era, when the only MP3 players were impractical, overpriced geek toys.

But even that "peak" was only an improvement relative to their almost nonexistent sales prior to that point- they never came remotely close to the popularity of CDs and cassettes, and quickly faded when the iPod came along.

(Having wondered what had caused that blip of popularity after years of doing nothing, I guessed that it primarily had to do with price reductions making them affordable to teens and twentysomethings. The BBC article seems to confirm this, stating that they slashed them to a third of the cost).

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[lexman098]

CD-RW prices never really fell enough to be feasible. It was always better to buy a huge spool of cheap CD-Rs.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[evilviper]

Several years ago I bought a portable minidisc player. Battery life was terrible. I literally had to carry a couple of AA batteries with me at all times. But even worse was getting music onto the player. There were only two choices -- a program made by Sony that was a complete piece of shit, or, a plugin for Realplayer.

Battery-life for Sony's MiniDisc players/recorders was always about 4-5X better than Sony's portable CD players. If you're complaining about battery life, it's because you're comparing devices from entirely different generations. Go find one of Sony's earliest CD players with (3 second!) skip protections. As I recall, battery life was 2-4 hours. No doubt your Minidisc does far better.

But even worse was getting music onto the player. There were only two choices -- a program made by Sony that was a complete piece of shit, or, a plugin for Realplayer.

You mean for USB transfers... You could just hit the "record" button and connect it to your sound-card via analog or digital cables. And there certainly were 3rd party programs put together because Sony's software sucked so badly.

And, for added amusement, transferring songs onto the player from my computer was very slow because they all had to be converted into Sony's propriietary, DRM infested ATRAC format.

ATRAC and Minidiscs pre-date MP3s. It's actually a based on MP2, and a very good quality format. If Minidiscs could even play MP3s directly, the battery life you think was "horrible" would have leap-frogged to "god-awful".

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[evilviper]

what really killed the minidisc was the introduction of the iPod and other MP3 players

Nope, Minidiscs were dead long before that. CD-Burners are what killed it. It was cheap and easy to burn your MP3 collection to an audio CD you could play anywhere, so that's what people did. Then with the advent of portable CD players which could play regular MP3 files burned to CD-R, MiniDisc was doomed.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[nwf]

Yep, looked at the DRM and the fact that the audio sounded worse and CDs and thought "who would buy this?" and passed it over. DCC was the same, although much worse. Who would want to digitize the least convenient and least durable music portable transport mechanism known to man? Well, there was the 8 Track, I guess.

I used to love Sony products. I purchased a SLV-R5 S-VHS recorder back in the day. It was awesome at the time. I junked it a while ago, and it was amusing to see how much discrete circuitry was crammed into the thing. It still has the honor of coming with the best remote control of any AV device I've used since.

However, over the years, Sony electronics have come to be equated in my mind with technology that's a few years out of date and over priced. I do like my PS3, but it's definitely out of date, although it's the best Netflix player I have.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[smegfault]

Probably, yes. Although at 1x speed (300kb/sec? I forget) that shouldn't have been an issue, even in those days. But it left me with wrecked CDs nonetheless ;-) My second burner was an IDE Lite-On (rebranded Plextor model) with buffer underrun protection and it was a champ in the same computer. Still have it, and still works.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[smegfault]

Agreed, by the time they were affordable USB storage was cheap and widely available. I only use CD-RWs now to do OS installs on old computers that refuse to boot off USB.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[smegfault]

In 1998, there were car MP3 players with capacities comparable to some modern smart phones.

I take it you're talking about the short-lived Empeg Car? Those started at $1100 and the first production run was 400 units. By 2001, fewer than 6000 units were made. Yes, they were there, but how is a $1k+ car unit a feasible alternative to a 3" portable MD player that ran on 1 AA battery? I was in my teens in the 90s and I didn't own a car, I was just a teen trying to listen to some angsty teeny music and MDs were the medium for me before broadband and cheap CD-Rs.

Blank CD media was also getting pretty cheap and certainly comparable to MD media as CDs had an 8:1 advantage.

In what sense did they have an 8:1 advantage? Data storage? I never used MDs to store data, it was for music. Comparable? Blank CDs couldn't be erased and re-used nor could you edit them after recording. Portable CD-players that actually read writable CDs were scarce and expensive. And why would I hook up a home CD player with a CD-R if I can hook up my computer and play the crappy 128kbps 90s MP3s directly? YMMV but it took a while for CDs to become a viable alternative for me. BTW - all my 90s MDs still work. Maybe 1 out of 10 of my 90s CD-Rs still work and the last ones are dying fast.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[cheesybagel]

In 1994 people were using Iomega ZIP drives which suffered from none of that DRM nonsense. Then CD-RW became commonplace. Sony had a short time frame to be successful with MiniDisc for data storage purposes. They only needed to sell a couple of drives which connected to parallel and IDE ports, use the exact same media as the recordable audio MiniDisc for manufacturing scale effects to kick in, and license their production earning the money on licensing. They blew it. I bet all the changes to MiniDisc data to suit their music recording side of the business were the cause for all the data product delays.

Sure the audio tracks needed to be compressed somehow so you could fit a CD album in a lower capacity device but it did not need to have DRM built-in.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[wiredlogic]

They did introduce it as a data format with the MD Data drive. It was SCSI only and couldn't compete against significantly cheaper Zip drives. It also had no support for inter-operation with MD audio discs beyond analog audio playback.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[mattack2]

MP3 is a more compressed format than CD.

I'm not actually even really disagreeing with you, I like(d) having the CDs as "backup".. I'm just pointing out that lots of people seem to be fine with buying lower quality versions, and when they get cheap enough (e.g. the Amazon specials), I'll buy the digital versions instead of a CD.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[jedwidz]

Every hen has an 'egg tooth' at birth, so not really that rare. (Not easy to prove it's not from a rooster though, and not strictly a tooth.)

Chicken nipples on the other hand...

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[smegfault]

not cheaper than free. if it aint broke dont fix it. if they already own it it makes sense

This. All the local radio stations I ever visited were hard up for cash and almost all hardware was 10+ years old at the very least.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Jane Q. Public]

Um, no, it depends on context. The context of this discussion was consumer products. According to the Wikipedia article that you linked to:

"CD-R recording systems available in 1990 were similar to the washing machine-sized Meridian CD Publisher..."

Did you somehow miss that? Even an early MiniDisc player would fit in your pocket (if you had big pockets). But a CD-R? It probably wouldn't even fit through your door.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[gmhowell]

Another paint chip eater.

Who lobbied Congress? MPAA? RIAA? And what large Japanese company was and is a member of these fine trade organizations?

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Pieroxy]

CDGuru stated "Around 1993 the first CD recorder was introduced but it cost around $50,000"

I think that is in direct contradiction with the wikipedia article that claimed: "By 1992 the cost of typical recorders was down to $10–12,000" and "CD-R recording systems available in 1990 were..."

Did you somehow miss that?

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Jane Q. Public]

"CDGuru stated "Around 1993 the first CD recorder was introduced but it cost around $50,000""

Okay, but your argument with him or her is your business. *I* was referring to your earlier comment to me:

"CD-R dates back to 1990 while the MiniDisc was first introduced in 1992 (unless Wikipedia is wrong, that is). It was also apparently released in Japan 1 month before the US release, which points to your story being bullshit or at least wildly inaccurate."

Which has been shown in this context, i.e., that of consumer goods, to be bullshit. Or at least wildly inaccurate.

Pardon me for replying at the wrong spot in the comment heirarchy.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Pieroxy]

Ah, it's you, sorry about the confusion...

You said that "Congress banned the importing or making of MiniDisc players until they implemented a DRM system that limited copying" which implied in my mind that the mini disc were released in Japan before the US, and unless SONY devised their DRM scheme in three weeks - highly doubtful IMO - the Wikipedia article disproved your point (Japan November, US December). Maybe there is some data missing in the Wikipedia Article after all since it doesn't mention any of this at all.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[tibit]

~$150 on eBay. Not quite an impulse buy, but in the price range of a consumer pocket camera. Sounds like a consumer product to me :) Thanks for letting me know about this little nugget, though, maybe I'll get it for myself -- there are times when I feel like interviewing perfect strangers, so this might work for it. 48kHz 16 bit stereo PCM is 0.73 GB per hour, assuming 5% overhead. A 32 GB card is more than a day of continuous recording, should be plenty enough.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[operagost]

That sounds cool. I went with Serviio because they have a free version and it runs as a service, but I haven't been able to figure out how to transcode. I assume it's because it's the free version, or I'm clueless, or both.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[OdinOdin_]

The battery life of mine was great, I believe this was due to the way the unit span up the disc to read a chunk of data then shutdown the motor while it decoded and played, IIRC it would do this every ~5 to 8 seconds. They only held around 120Mb in a Sony audio codec to store the same minutes a CD could.

Actually pretty decent

[KC1P]

These seemed to be marketed to people who wanted to make mini-disc mix tapes, which seemed weirdly specific and obviously didn't catch on. But they were really good for recording live music and sucking it into a computer. Flash is obviously much better, but MD was around for eons before flash got cheap...

Re:Actually pretty decent

[rudy_wayne]

I remember reading somewhere, long ago, that the minidisc was originally envisioned as a higher capacity replacement for the floppy disc and storage for digital cameras (I once had a Sony camera that stored the pictures on a floppy disk)..

Re:Fond memories.

[_merlin]

Hey kid, I'd left school behind before Hi-MD existed. Back in the '90s I worked in radio and we used MiniDisc for jingles, station IDs, ads, etc. Far more convenient than the old way of doing it on 30-second 8-track carts. You could have all the samples you needed for a day on two MiniDiscs. The ATRAC compression used on MiniDisc sounded pretty good if you started with a good source, but for some reason re-compressing something that had previously been compressed with MP3 sounded awful. Something about the combined artefacts of the two compression schemes was nasty, so you never wanted to record your MP3s off Napster onto MiniDisc. Now get off my lawn!

Neat for the time, but useless today

[oldhack]

I bought (and still have in storage) this thing way back when, thought a useful replacement for walkman. Audio quality comparable to CD, but in a more durable packaging.

Don't know much about how DRM killed its prospect.

Whatever, today, its dying is not even a non-issue. Other than my nostalgia for the miniaturized electro-mechanical devices, its death is not even a whimper.

Who the fuck uses this thing today anyways?! Why did they keep making these things?

Re:Neat for the time, but useless today

[Darkness404]

Japan. A lot of products that failed in (or failed to make a large impact) in the US were fairly popular in Japan. The Japanese market is a strange one, a country where high-tech reigns supreme and so do... fax machines?

Re:Neat for the time, but useless today

[Kenshin]

We still use a fax machine at my office here in Canada.

I hate that thing, I'd rather just email a PDF, but suppliers still have a fetish for them for product orders.

Re:Neat for the time, but useless today

[demonlapin]

They probably invested in fax->computer image software back when digital signatures were new but faxed ones were established case law.

Re:Neat for the time, but useless today

[camperdave]

A lot of businesses only accept faxed copies of signed documents. Sure it makes more sense to scan and email, but you have to do what the client wants.

Re:Neat for the time, but useless today

[Kenshin]

We get faxes through a virtual fax number. The service converts them to PDF and emails them to us. Saves a hell of a lot of paper, because most of what we get is spam.

Re:Neat for the time, but useless today

[oldhack]

That explains how the S. Koreans managed to take over from the (once) mighty Japanese electronics industry.

Re:Neat for the time, but useless today

[AK Marc]

Yeah, but what good does it do when I sign, scan, and email it to my sister to fax from her work?

Re:Neat for the time, but useless today

[fustakrakich]

I still have a modem in my machine... "Print to fax"

Re:Neat for the time, but useless today

[camperdave]

Bully for you! By the time you've received the fax, printed it out, signed it, scanned it, and print-to-faxed back... might as well just use a fax machine. Especially since everyone in the office can use it, and you don't have to run fax lines to 50 machines.

Re:Neat for the time, but useless today

[camperdave]

As long as they get a hard copy by fax, they don't care by which route it came. Sadly, these folks are dealing with people's money.

Re:Neat for the time, but useless today

[fustakrakich]

...you don't have to run fax lines to 50 machines.

shared printer. You use what you have.

Poor bootleggers will remember mini-disc fondly

[Anonymous Coward]

There were many of us who couldn't afford the Sony DATs like the M1(MSRP $1,000, sold anywhere between 500-900 used). We loved music and we loved "archiving" it. The mini-disc was a very reliable way to do this and get a reasonably good quality. It was not quite DAT or CD, but it was much better than tape. It was far easier to sneak in that a DAT or tape recorder as well.

This was a pre-smartphone where concert security as at a high. We had to duct/masking tape our mini-discs to the inside of our thigh at menu venues to sneak it in. We'd then proceed to the bathroom to undo that and attach it to our microphones that we spent almost as much on as our mini-disc players. We'd periodically check our device worrying that we forgot to hit the record button or that we forgot to activate the hold switch.

I will remember my MZR-55 fondly. Even though my original MZR-55 battery has corroded and since been thrown away, i am still able to play my bootlegs back via the AA add-on attachment that was necessary for longer shows.

Re:Poor bootleggers will remember mini-disc fondly

[TheRealRainFall]

Thought i was logged in an could edit typos later. Sorry about that. Menu=many. That=than.

Re:Poor bootleggers will remember mini-disc fondly

[Kawahee]

logged in ... could edit

Wait, what?

EDIT: Never realised I could do this.

Re:Poor bootleggers will remember mini-disc fondly

[demonlapin]

Huh? How? You mean the "continue editing" on preview, or a real after-you-submitted edit?

Re:Poor bootleggers will remember mini-disc fondly

[Sancho]

You can edit? For the longest time, you couldn't.

Re:Poor bootleggers will remember mini-disc fondly

[tbird81]

Can we edit? I'm just posting this as a test.

Re:Poor bootleggers will remember mini-disc fondly

[tbird81]

No.

Re:Poor bootleggers will remember mini-disc fondly

[bigstrat2003]

I don't think that you can actually edit a comment once posted (or at least, I can't find a way). What did you do?

Re:Poor bootleggers will remember mini-disc fondly

[serviscope_minor]

No.

No, of course not. This is not a bug in slashdot or a missing feature, it is a feature.

Much as people like to whine, the comment threads on slashdot are the reason to visit and despite the sometimes dubious quality are better than all but the most special interest forums and of course on a much broader range of topics.

An edit button is not a good match for robust discussions, since people can (and do) go back and change the pos when they get a reply that they don't like, making the replies look odd, and then they get strange replies based on the changed version of the GP's post.

Edit buttons work well for some kinds of forum, especially, the smaller less anonymous ones. On slashdot where people tend to read the posts and pay little attention to the name of the posters I think an edit button would be a bad idea.

There have been many "advanced feature" suggestions made to the slashdot staff over the years which they have not implemented and I'm sure that slashcode isn't the barrier. The reason is that the feature set of slashdot really seems to promote good, robust discussion.

And before anyone claims that the discussion on slashdot is not good: I won't take you seriously unless you can point me to somewhere which is consisently better.

Re:Poor bootleggers will remember mini-disc fondly

[demonlapin]

Ok... never heard of that and neither has Google. Snipe hunting on /.?

Sony shares are great.

[tuppe666]

Is it any wonder their stock and their corporate goodwill are both in the shitter?

I suspect any Goodwill is more down to the growth of competing technology form Apple/Microsoft/Samsung as for their shares currently at a third in just months...ironically the same that Apple has fallen in *six*

Re:finally

[hcs_$reboot]

only Japan has a management culture weird enough to keep pumping money into half-baked products like MiniDisc without anyone batting an eyelid

That's not true. The MiniDisc was a great product, I owned and used one for a long time. In Japan it got a pretty decent success, a MD player was usually embedded in hifi systems, and it was also used to exchange data. One problem if any was the DRM (for MDs having music like CDs).

The main problem that was not mentioned here yet, was the Western protectionism. Western countries wanted to slow down the electronics invasion coming from Japan. MD was not "revolutionary" enough to create a need in Western countries that would have counter balanced the anti-Japan products protectionism.

Does this describe Sony?

[tuppe666]

Don't worry, Sony will just create another "god damn fucking piece of shit oh god i hate you sony please die in a ditch" proprietary format.

This describes Apple and Microsoft, Sony by comparison follows standards...Compare and ebook readers; phones; consoles to the competition and you will find standard connectors; standard components; standard formats.

Good enough for Neo.

[Brad1138]

The most recognition I ever saw for this was that Neo used them.

Re:Good enough for Neo.

[bill_mcgonigle]

The most recognition I ever saw for this was that Neo used them.

popular in a dystopian parallel universe. This makes sense.

Re:Good enough for Neo.

[detritus.]

"Agent Smith will have fun time finding a drive to decipher my encrypted data stenographed in a Rage Against The Machine mini disc. I'll never get caught!"

Re:Good enough for Neo.

[tgd]

The most recognition I ever saw for this was that Neo used them.

Also used to record the memory/experience recordings in Strange Days.

Besides DRM

[Jafafa Hots]

Minidisc used lossy compression, but did so before MP3.
Still being a physical format on a spinning disc, with a lossey codec devised early on, before much experience was gained, which was not well-rated... that killed it for me.

Sony at the time (as usual) was hoping to replace the open CD format with their closed format. It wasn't just about portability. They wanted to sell pre-recorded discs and kill the CD.

I'm amazed it has taken them this long to stop making them... I hope they lost money on it.

It made about as much sense as ministick memory.

Re:Besides DRM

[TheGratefulNet]

at the time, digital audio for consumers was 3 choices: MD, DCC and DAT. DAT was finicky and expensive. DCC and MD came later and battled it out. DCC tried to get the cassette form factor guys to accept them. no one I knew (I was into digital audio in the 80's and 90's) had DCC. MD was more reliable than DAT, though, in many ways. it was lossy, but it didn't mistrack like DAT did.

for live music tapers (I used to) you could pick MD or DAT. again, most people wanted lossless recording, so we never saw MD tapers, only DAT tapers at shows.

DAT stayed alive for studios, where 2 track 44.1k audio was needed. MD was intended pretty much ONLY for consumers.

(and so ends our history lesson for today) ;)

Re:Besides DRM

[Nefarious Wheel]

...Sony at the time (as usual) was hoping to replace the open CD format with their closed format. It wasn't just about portability. They wanted to sell pre-recorded discs and kill the CD.

I'm amazed it has taken them this long to stop making them... I hope they lost money on it...

Remember that Sony is one of the powers behind the RIAA; the limitations of the MD would have been the result of a deliberate corporate decision to hobble the format. Being able to copy content digitally, accurately, would have been utter anathema to Sony.

And if you don't get the problem with Sony, they have a long, long history of egregiously bad corporate citizenship. This is extensively documented in Groklaw. It's horrible. They love to litigate, and being a customer is no guarantee they'll treat you fairly or honestly.

Re:Fond memories.

[fyngyrz]

I think I retired in the 1990's

I don't exactly remember...

I have poopheimer's. That's where you forget shit.

Re:They'll be back

[Brad1138]

I really don't get all the vitriol aimed at Sony over the last decade or so. I have sold their TVs and other electronic equipment, owned their Playstations, I can think of far worse companies. And Blue ray is a very good media.

Allow me to summarise the article summary

[OhANameWhatName]

The BBC reports that Sony, the creators of the MiniDisc audio format, ... now belongs to a bygone era.

:)
But more seriously, the era of proprietry formats and manufacturer specific devices is over. If you make your own 'special' device, it's going to be more expensive than the competition. Some modern device manufacturers counter this by creating a device eco-system or brand which makes the device better for the user for one or more reasons.

Sony has never quite grasped that you can't beat, cajole, bribe or force people to do what you want. It's possible to encourage, enthrall and excite .. but it's not possible to control a global electronics market. Despite which, this 20 year demonstration of near complete failure still won't help Sony to adapt to modern markets. It's sad that the few heads at the top of Sony are slowly destroying what was once the most exciting designer of high quality electronic goods.

Re:Allow me to summarise the article summary

[Anonymous Coward]

The BBC reports that Sony, the creators of the MiniDisc audio format, ... now belongs to a bygone era.

:)

But more seriously, the era of proprietry formats and manufacturer specific devices is over. If you make your own 'special' device, it's going to be more expensive than the competition. Some modern device manufacturers counter this by creating a device eco-system or brand which makes the device better for the user for one or more reasons.

Sony has never quite grasped that you can't beat, cajole, bribe or force people to do what you want. It's possible to encourage, enthrall and excite .. but it's not possible to control a global electronics market. Despite which, this 20 year demonstration of near complete failure still won't help Sony to adapt to modern markets. It's sad that the few heads at the top of Sony are slowly destroying what was once the most exciting designer of high quality electronic goods.

Sony was destroyed the year they became content producers. From then on, their entire CE devices would be hampered/killed by idiotic DRM. The visonary days of Akio Morita were dead. And what few "interesting" devices Sony had, they had because Morita pushed for them. Such as the smallest world band radio receiver, unequaled even to this day.
Sony nowadays is just a name with no substance behind it.

Pity

[gweihir]

MOD media (the mini-disk technology) keep data and music reliable for more than half a century. Data on the crappy SSD technology gets shaky after a few years.

Re:They'll be back

[tbird81]

They are in the recording industry.

Re:Remember their Memory sticks?

[gmhowell]

Yep. I remember not buying one of their tv's due to this 'feature'.

Re:Angry, Dumb Fanboy Meltdown

[promythyus]

Not even. Blu-ray is fine, if you're still interested in the dying optical medium.

Blu-ray isn't a shitty non-standard that nobody else uses, however.

Yet another reminder

[symbolset]

Not only does Sony sell you stuff that doesn't work with your other stuff, they will sell you content on that incompatible stuff so that when they give up the ghost on that proprietary format you have to buy the White Album AGAIN on their new, proprietary format that's totally better than the old one.

Re:Yet another reminder

[GoogleShill]

Is that really any different than purchasing the White Album on vinyl, 8-track, cassette and then CD?

Are we still talking about this.

[tuppe666]

sony root kit
sony root kit

Sony got kicked over this 8 years ago, and they deserved to, but today it looks very stupid when every Application on your smartphone not only looks at your music...but looks at everything about you. In fact increasingly we are *forced* to give away your rights...you installed Windows 8 recently.

Re:Allow me to provide a correct summary

[the plant doctor]

Sadly, I'm not sure if this was satire or meant to be a real post.

NetMD

[thegarbz]

Sounds like a NetMD player. Terrible idea. At a time when I was looking at replacing my trusty old MD player which was the staple of my childhood music collection (DRM free mind you since it was of the manually record / playback variety like a tapedeck) the obvious contender was some kind of MP3 player. Then Sony shows up with the abortion that was NetMD. All songs required conversion, it didn't work on any software other than windows, and it was far larger than the competition physically.

Not sure what your battery life problem is but I literally traveled all over the country on a roadtrip using an MD player and charging the batteries overnight. The CD players of the era couldn't keep up.

Re:finally

[MemoryDragon]

Minidisk never got a foot hold in the western world because of its DRM nothing else.

Reread my post.

[tuppe666]

"Everyone else does it too" is not a good excuse.

No the point is then *nobody* did it then and Sonys behaviour looked over reaching and abusive; it paid the price. Today any Application on an Apple smartphone does *worse* [including Apples own] and it get a free pass. Quite the reverse is true its not "everybody else does it too" its more "Apple does it not Sony"

ATRAC = Pain in the ass

[clickclickdrone]

I had a Minidisc player (still do actually) and it was pretty good for what it did. However, I also had a Sony CD Walkan that played CDs recorded in ATRAC as a way to pack more on. The player has long since gone and when I went to play the CDs back on my PC to get the music back off them (original sources no longer available) it turns out they will only play back on the original PC that recorded them. WTF? I have the original Sony software that was used to create and previously play the CDs but now I have a different PC, no dice. If anyone knows of a DRM stripper for ATRAC CDs, I'd be very grateful. One of the CDs has a recording of a deceased friend and the original cassette has gone.

Re:ATRAC = Pain in the ass

[ScottyKUtah]

Found this thread.. People offer a couple of solutions, plus a link to a program that is supposed to strip it out. Haven't tried it myself.

http://forums.sonyinsider.com/topic/3624-removing-drm-from-atrac-files/

Another thought, is it possible to recreate the specs of the old computer using VMware Player?

Re:finally

[serviscope_minor]

The main problem that was not mentioned here yet, was the Western protectionism.

What? That has to be one of the bizarrest claims I've heard about minidisc.

Minidisc had some decent advantages: smaller than tapes, random access and didn't chew up the tapes. But it was quite expensive. Back when I was at school the quality of ones portable music (i.e. tape) player was a big thing. Almost noone had MD since they were more expensive and the battery life was worse.

The thing is that most people carried around a D120 with the tracks of the day on. Random access wasn't particularly necessary, since one generally didn't expect it and didn't put stuff on the tape you didn't like. Also decent tape players could skip over a single track pretty quickly and entirely automatically, negating some of the advantage. And noone used original tapes in the portable players, at least not after the first original expensive tape had been eaten.

You also neeed special kit (an MD recorder), whereas the cheapest tape recorders were dirt cheap, which made sharing tapes etc much harder.

Basically in that market, they didn't quite have critical mass. At tha time, the teenage market was important since teenagers obsess over music and most adults didn't yet see the point of expensive portable tape players, especially as the effort to get the most out of them was high compared to MP3 players. Most adults simply don't have the time.

Most people thought minidiscs were cool. A few had them. A few people had parents with an MD player in the hifi unit. We would coo over them and obsess a bit and marvel over the smallness of an MD player, then generally go back to our tapes.

You are right in that MD wasn't revolutionary enough. The advantages weren't ever quite high enough. Partly that is Sony's fault. Because they obsess over "licensing" and "content" and other such bullshit they insisted on playing it too close. If they'd given manufacturers free reign it might well have taken off to a much greater extent.

Oh yeah, and we'd have had data MDs too that were common and didn't totally suck.

MiniWhatNow ?

[B0Hax0]

It pains me. To see that the mini-disk atrocity, is still being manufactured to date. The Zune, will always be the best media player out there!!

Really?

[DirtyLiar]

this is a sign that-over ten years after the first iPod-the MiniDisc now belongs to a bygone era.

Really? That was the sign?

Hmm...

Android Phone best MP3 Player

[tuppe666]

It pains me. To see that the mini-disk atrocity, is still being manufactured to date. The Zune, will always be the best media player out there!!

Its kind of odd seeing you odd off-topic post. I do partially sympathise, as I personally found the Salsa Clip the greatest MP3 player of its type, before I got a smartphone.

Here is the thing though the Zune was not very good. It got a free pass by the media, but essentially it was a poor iPod clone [built on Apples model] , late to party, after Microsoft had thrown its *preferred partners* under the bus when Microsoft wanted a bigger (read Apple profits) piece of the pie, with a more mature offering designed in secret away from its partners. Notice the familiar game plan...and similar [lack of] success rates with Windows phone and Windows Surface.

Android took away Apples market in iPhones now selling 5x as many smartphones as Apple, it did so by not copying Apple, and did the same with iPad.

Re:Android Phone best MP3 Player

[kaatochacha]

I had/have a Zune HD, and it was fantastic. It was also 1.5 years late to the party. The interface was far better than the iPods, but too little, too late.

Re:finally

[SternisheFan]

That or it was an shitty product. I'm starting to remember the DAT/Minidisk wars.. ..Debates. Funny thing, i never bought any of the two systems, instead i went right ahead to mp3's.

-Ahh, that day i decided to rip my cd-collection and store the music on my computer, those where the days.

Yep, same here, never looked back after mp3s. I've even spent the last 6 months borrowing my local library's CDs and ripping them to Mp3. All that music is backed up to micro Sdcards and 64gb flashdrives, and now I have all the music I'd lost from the days of older formats, and far more. Finally it's a great time to be a music lover!

Re:They'll be back

[jonwil]

I made the stupid mistake of buying a Sony Cyber-Shot point & shoot camera (that used SONY's own crappy memory format). Worst piece of junk I ever owned.

Wasted opportunity

[Chuffpole]

I was always bemused that they didn't seize the chance to make data drives (using the exact same discs as the audio gear - see wikipedia for what really happened) and really market them well. At the time, 100MB robust Read/Write discs would have been really brilliant.

I bought into it for audio, in 1996. Those discs, protected nicely in their little cases, have lasted well and still play. The price of the blank media came down nicely while I was really using it, but I've recently transfered it all to WAV/FLAC/MP3 and the whole lot now sits in shoe box amongst the junk in the loft to confuse my descendents who will one day wonder what it is :)

If they had embraced the format for all its possibilities, it could have been massive.

over ten years after the first iPod

[gravis777]

over ten years after the first iPod

Statements like this aggrivate me - mainly coming from Apple Fanboys and ignorant masses. Apple's iPod was nothing new or revolutionary. The iPod is 12 years old - but the portable MP3 player is 16 years old. Apple did not even introduce the first MP3 player with a harddrive, it was NOT the largest capacity when it came out, did not work with Windows, and there was no iTunes when it came out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3_player#History

In fact, the iPod did not really even sell that well until around 2005 - roughly 8 years after the first MP3 player came out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Total_ipod_sales.svg

Re:over ten years after the first iPod

[Lumpy]

but it was the first one that did not SUCK. I had a Diamond RIO and it's UI and operation utterly sucked. most everything after that continued to suck in durability and usability until the ipod came out.

Re:over ten years after the first iPod

[kaatochacha]

Wait, did you just compare an iPod to Martin Luther King Jr.?

It was incredibly popular.....

[Lumpy]

in the Bootleg scene. Sony Minidisc units were the favorite as they would RECORD. you went into the bar with the binaurial mics in your lapel or headphones and your minidisc recorder. The bouncer searches you and only finds a minidisc player and lets you in. You then record the concert better than the guy at the mixing board.

they were a LOT cheaper to get than a pocket DAT and would get past security a lot easier.

Re:It was incredibly popular.....

[Hatta]

The bouncer searches you and only finds a minidisc player and lets you in. You then record the concert better than the guy at the mixing board.

I've heard a lot of concert recordings, and I've never heard one that sounds better than a soundboard. That includes Grateful Dead shows recorded on professional mics on a 15' stand going straight to DAT.

Re:It was incredibly popular.....

[Lumpy]

Look for "binaurial" recordings. they utterly capture the concert better than the sound guy can.

Re:They'll be back

[Lumpy]

You are funny. I see higher failure rates on Sony products. (Integrator so I see thousands a year) and sorry, but BluRay is not a "very good media" HDDVD was, BluRay is more expensive and chock full of DRM, making it an inferior media.

Re:finally

[vlm]

I've even spent the last 6 months borrowing my local library's CDs and ripping them to Mp3.

Something I've noticed with library disks is you really get to see how the seething masses really treat optical media, and it isn't pretty. I have cds that are over 20 years old and still looking good (no aluminum bit rot, thankfully) but the library disks are apparently used by people with sandpaper fingertips. Even my kids can't savage disks like library patrons.

I'm sure its very annoying to have a skip in one musical song, but its infuriating when the last 30 minutes of a DVD is unwatchable or you can only listen to half an audiobook.

I'm surprised how well paper degrades gracefully and slowly in a public library environment but optical media get insta-trashed.

In the early 00s I would take my laptop to the library and before checking out a disk I'd scan it to see if I'd even be able to use it at home.

Citation needed

[sjbe]

The reason MiniDiscs had DRM in the U.S. (but not Japan) wasn't Sony, it was Congress!

Citation needed. I can find no evidence to support this claim.
Let's examine the timeline shall we?
* In 1987 Sony purchased CBS Records which is renamed Sony Music Entertainment in 1991
* In 1992 Sony introduces the MiniDisc.

So shortly after Sony enters the music business as a content producer suddenly their latest offerings for playing music are loaded with DRM. Almost none of the competing technologies were loaded with similar DRM. The companies that made competing products were not in the content creation business and thus had no internal conflict of interest. When MP3 players came along Sony continued to try to push DRM on their music players despite most competitors lacking similar restrictions. All these were internal decisions to the company that cannot be blamed on anyone but Sony themselves.

And somehow you think this is the fault of Congress?

Re:Citation needed

[RattFink]

The parent is right. Back then Sony had a lot of division between the Consumer Electronics divisions and the Entertainment divisions.

By the late 1980s, several manufacturers were prepared to introduce read/write digital audio formats to the United States. These new formats were a significant improvement over the newly introduced read-only digital format of the compact disc, allowing consumers to make perfect, multi-generation copies of digital audio recordings. Most prominent among these formats was Digital Audio Tape (DAT), followed in the early 1990s by Philips' Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) and Sony's Minidisc.

DAT was available as early as 1987 in Japan and Europe, but device manufacturers delayed introducing the format to the United States in the face of opposition from the recording industry. The recording industry, fearing that the ability to make perfect, multi-generation copies would spur widespread copyright infringement and lost sales, had two main points of leverage over device makers. First, consumer electronics manufacturers felt they needed the recording industry's cooperation to induce consumers – many of whom were in the process of replacing their cassettes and records with compact discs – to embrace a new music format. Second, device makers feared a lawsuit for contributory copyright infringement. [1]

Despite their strong playing hand, the recording industry failed to convince consumer electronics companies to voluntarily adopt copy restriction technology. The recording industry concurrently sought a legislative solution to the perceived threat posed by perfect multi-generation copies, introducing legislation mandating that device makers incorporate copy protection technology as early as 1987.[2] These efforts were defeated by the consumer electronics industry along with songwriters and music publishers, who rejected any solution that did not compensate copyright owners for lost sales due to home taping.[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act

Re:Citation needed

[evilviper]

So shortly after Sony enters the music business as a content producer suddenly their latest offerings for playing music are loaded with DRM. Almost none of the competing technologies were loaded with similar DRM.

The "Audio Home Recording Act" of 1992 was the cause, as it MANDATED copy production in CONSUMER products that could make digital recordings. This timing coincides with the introduction of MiniDiscs, DCC tapes, and shortly after DAT tapes. There are NO competing products that lack copy protection. Even stand-alone CD recorders (not computer drives) have built-in copy protection like SCMS found on Minidiscs, DATs, and DCC. The only blame Sony has, in this, is not FIGHTING against this legislation harder, though they had ample resources to do so, and were more interested than any other manufacturer, with the possible exception of Philips.

There are two exceptions, which is why we aren't completely inundated with SCMS today.

The first is that the law only applies to "consumer" products. If you purchase more expensive studio DAT recorders, you can get away without SCMS. The same is true of Minidisc, though, there were Tascam units that would ignore SCMS and allow unlimited copying.

The second is computers. Apparently, they don't qualify under the act as consumer audio recording devices, so if you make your recording devices stupid enough, and require a computer to shift the bits around, then you don't need to implement copy protection.

Re-write History Much

[tuppe666]

but it was the first one that did not SUCK. I had a Diamond RIO and it's UI and operation utterly sucked. most everything after that continued to suck in durability and usability until the ipod came out.

I'm always astonished how Apple users feel the need to rewrite history...especially considering the irony. Apple lifted the UI wholesale from Creative. It got know as the 'ZEN' patent, Apple got Creative to go away with $100Million Dollars and the chance to make third party accessories.

http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/05/6838-2/

Re:Re-write History Much

[Lumpy]

I also had a Zen, the zen did not operate like the ipod. It has some similarities...

Have you even touched any of the devices mentioned? Because you seem to not have ever touched and used any. I own them all, and have used them all. The lawsuits were bogus at best. Just as bogus as the current ones by apple and the others out there.

I'm always astonished how Apple haters feel the need to act as if they are experts when in reality they have never touched any of the devices and there fore know absolutely nothing at all about the subject they are talking about.

I dont think that the iPod was the "best" in any way. I actually loved some of the early devices, and currently think that android devices are better. But for the typical dumb user... an iPod is the easiest to use.

Should have caught on better

[KenDown]

I can never figure out why Sony didn't really push these more/harder. I made tons of my own discs (akk, mixed tapes!) and they sounded great. hey could be recorded over thousands of times with no sound quality loss. I really liked them. Sadly, caught up in the iPod current, I too left them behind for the lure of Apple. I don't understand why Sony didn't put them in every computer they made though? They could have been used as a CD replacement.

In Japan...

[OldSport]

I lived in Japan during the heyday of the MD, and it was a pretty cool set up. I had a stereo that could make copies from CDs at 4x speed, and a playback-only portable player whose battery lasted for ages. As far as I can remember, DRM was not initially a problem. In fact, at all the video/CD rental shops in Japan, they had huge bins of blank MDs which people would buy when they rented CDs – basically they were being encouraged to just take them home and copy them. (Since CDs at that time in Japan cost upwards of US$30, it made a lot more sense to spend $2 to rent the CD and another dollar on the MD.) It was just what you did. It's pretty much unthinkable these days, when you consider the direction Japan has gone in terms of digital rights management and so on, but even just 5 years ago, it was the norm.

I remember the first issue I had with DRM – I had bought Air's "Talkie Walkie" and tried to copy it, and the stereo showed an error. (I then tried to play it back in my computer, and it wouldn't work, which is when I threw the CD in the trash and downloaded a pirated copy.) That said, I actually rarely used my MD system to pirate things – at that point in time, it was the most convenient way to have portable music. And now that I am more conscious of the audio limitations of MP3s, I would actually use that MD set up quite a bit if I still had it.

Re:ATRAC for sound quality? Really?

[Gordonjcp]

So the prison had a nicer view than the halfway house. Enjoy your stay there.

I'm not really sure what you're saying here. I'm guessing it's an allusion to *something* but I can't work out what.

Here's a hint. Marginal improvements in sound quality are unimportant to most people most of the time. Enjoyment of music does not require being able to get every last bit (no pun intended) of nuance from the performance

As a musician, the actual sound quality isn't that important to me. I'm certainly not one of those golden-eared audiophiles that can tell the difference between different brands of mains fuses just by listening to the audio. However, I find mp3 pretty much unlistenable, even at 320kbps. ATRAC handles transients much more cleanly. You could actually hear percussion parts, rather than have them smeared out into a blurry slurred mud of noise.

Re:finally

[UnknowingFool]

I always thought that Sony completely missed the market when it came to re-recordable data MDs. After all by the time the MD came out, 3 1/2" floppies were beginning to be useless as 1.44MB was too small for most files. CD-Rs were very expensive hardware-wise (and not re-recordable), and there was so much disagreement over +/- RW that it would be years before these would be avaible. Had Sony stepped in, they could have had a universal floppy replacement for a long time.

Re:ATRAC for sound quality? Really?

[sjbe]

I'm not really sure what you're saying here. I'm guessing it's an allusion to *something* but I can't work out what.

ATRAC as implemented by Sony has a lot of pretty restrictive DRM - i.e. a "prison". MP3 has its drawbacks but is a lot more open. Even if ATRAC sounds better no one really wants to use it due to the extra helping of DRM.

As a musician, the actual sound quality isn't that important to me. I'm certainly not one of those golden-eared audiophiles that can tell the difference between different brands of mains fuses just by listening to the audio. However, I find mp3 pretty much unlistenable, even at 320kbps.

Those audiophiles you refer to seem to disappear every time an actual double blind study is performed. I don't deny that ATRAC may have some technical advantages but MP3s are hardly the only alternative format. The DRM problems with ATRAC more than outweigh any technical advantages it may possess. If sound quality is important you probably would want to use a lossless format anyway at least for the master recordings.

Fuit Lover

[tuppe666]

I'm always astonished how Apple haters...

I'm sorry you lost all credence. The only group who can get away with that language are rap stars.

Re:ATRAC for sound quality? Really?

[Gordonjcp]

ATRAC as implemented by Sony has a lot of pretty restrictive DRM - i.e. a "prison".

In what way? An MD player spits out a stream of plain ordinary S/PDIF audio, and a recorder accepts plain ordinary S/PDIF audio.
There is no DRM. There is no possibility of DRM. You can use it with anything.

AWESOME for the time.

[swb]

It was AWESOME for the time it came out, especially as a cassette replacement.

Cassettes were fragile, made all kinds of noise with tape hiss, bulky (carrying more than 2-3 when commuting was a headache), at best you had "music search" which would fast forward to the next gap in the program otherwise there was no random access or shuffle, they could be reused but I always found this to be less than desirable without using a degauss gizmo or recording white noise over the tape and then re-using it.

The deck would edit (delete songs, trim songs), you could title tracks and get exact MM:SS readouts (no more mix tapes with awkward spaces at the end), the media itself were compact so carrying a half-dozen commuting wasn't a hassle, the media were far more durable and reusable.

About the only thing I thought was "bad" was that duration seemed to max out at 74 minutes (I was a C-90 cassette user) and the walkman unit that I owned seemed to be a little heavy on batteries, but that wasn't a huge issue for commuting (I swapped in fresh NiMH AAs daily).

Totally obsolete now. It's too bad Sony didn't wise up and make the Walkman units USB compatible for disc read/write and let them play MP3 files. I would have kept using mine for a long time as 160 megs would have made for a decent number of MP3s.

Re:Dingleberry

[Lumpy]

You never had any so I am still on top :-)

Re:They'll be back

[Brad1138]

HDDVD was an inferior product, and DRM isn't about the media, you can encode DRM in/on anything. That is like saying you don't like the new bridge because of the graffiti on it. Not sure how you can say Bluray is more expensive, it is cheap now, way more than HDDVD ever was. It was more expensive at first because it was more advanced.

Agreed, Sony home audio is not the best quality, but it is what it is, at it's price point.