They say history is written by the winners, but when it comes to technology, history is written by Americans.
MiniDisc was a huge success for Sony, and was the winner of the tape-replacement format war in virtually every country - except the USA.
It was so successful that Sony is still making blank MiniDiscs today. (Though they are not sold there, Americans can type MDW80T into eBay if they'd like some brand-new MiniDiscs.)
I grew up in the UK and for nearly a decade portable MD players were virtually ubiquitous on the Tube. Only the iPod began to end that era, and it certainly wasn't instant.
I had one of the later models that had LP features, so up to 4x the music on a disc at a lower quality. It was also a recorder, which was so handy, and something no iPod ever offered. Many of my friends had players, 1 even had an in car player. That's in the UK. I think the big issue was that many people assumed Minidisc was supposed to be a replacement for CDs, rather, than a replacement for cassette. It's understandable why it wasn't marketed this way, but if it had, I think it would of taken off much quicker in the mid/late 90's.
Thinking about it maybe I do remember some marketing about it being a cassette replacement. A quick Google brought up this, which is assume is a Sony advert.
> MiniDisc was a huge success for Sony, and was the winner of the tape-replacement format war in virtually every country - except the USA
Well, don't know about "virtually", but in Europe I only know one person who had one, and I don't remember seeing any on the street / bus / metro.
I remember people having tape walkmans, then portable CD players for a short while, than massively switching to MP3 players when they became available, probably because CD players were extremely unpractical. I used to have an MP3-capable CD player, which kind of mitigated the problem, but it was still not great.
I remember looking at minidisc players at the time, and the MP3 CD looked much more practical to load with music and also much cheaper, so I went with that.
> Well, don't know about "virtually", but in Europe I only know one person who had one, and I don't remember seeing any on the street / bus / metro.
I owned a couple of portable minidisc players in the 90s, one of which was stolen. I recall that they were relatively expensive when compared with cassette players, but they were not that rare.
Maybe because people weren't buying pre-recorded MiniDiscs? But as far as I can tell, that wasn't the point...
In the late 90s I had a Sharp 722 (in champagne gold iirc) and you could plug that thing into a pair of decks (UK Garage at that time) and get rich, beautiful sound out of it – fully captured the texture of the vinyl.
CDs were awkward, needed to lie horizontal, and prone to skipping and getting scratched up.
MiniDisc was never a replacement for CDs, but a replacement for cassettes – and at that, they were great.
There was something quite nice about the audible quality of MiniDisc compression.
Is this past year of COVID to blame? I had been rekindling some nostalgia for my brief foray into MiniDisc over two decades ago (it had been too brief). And then my daughter, born after the iPod but likely channelling part of that retro zeitgeist, wanted to experiment with/explore cassette tapes. No, no, MiniDisc, I said. And then I proceeded to buy way too many of the devices on eBay.
I have a bigger collection now of both players and discs than I did when I first dipped my toe into MiniDisc.
I think both she and I enjoy mix-tape vs. playlist. Trying to pick songs to fit within 80 or 74 minutes.
And then somehow the "I want to hear something mellow" and then the physical insertion of a disc.... Something tangible in an increasingly intangible world?
Not everywhere. UK was the second best selling region after Japan. And while you can still buy new blank MDs, you can still buy new tape and tape decks too. They all suck but you can.
In Canada I never saw one outside a store, never saw a prerecorded MD album even in a store. I knew a lot of people who had portable CD players before MP3 players took off.
Indeed. I was in Belgium and was a MD user but they weren't that big in Belgium. France neither IIRC. I was into it because I had family in Japan bringing me the goodies on every visit (blank discs, portable players, etc.).
And commercial exhibition, every large theatre/cinema/auditorium/performance space I worked in up until 2008 when I changed track had a rack mounted MD player hooked up to the automation to do announcements.
Sony was really at its peak during early 2000s, MD was the crown of jewel, single battery supporting that kind of play back time with a spinning disc inside is really impressive.
However in terms of market share, it is still behind tape and CD even in Asia. New albums released directly in MD is super rare, most of the time you need to have a CD, buy the CD version then record it to an empty MD.
When I was a kid, only “rich kids” had a MD and a CD, majority were just using CD or even tape. Cheap MP3s started coming out around 2000 but never took off, then iPod and its mimics basically killed Tape, CD and MD all together.
Sony has to be a case study in something. They had pretty much the Apple stores of the day (though not at nearly the same scale). You'd browse the one at the Metreon in SF to see the cool consumer electronics (as well as some pretty nice laptops for the time). Now? They're pretty much one of the many more or less interchangeable electronics manufacturers. Many categories of which where Sony was a premium (mainstream) provider like home stereos seem much diminished, at least anecdotally.
That's almost certainly part of it. The Japanese electronics (and camera) makers have always been pretty bad at software--at least above the firmware level. That didn't used to matter so much but now so much about software and ecosystems (or platforms as you put it).
> it definitely wasn’t a ‘huge success’ in the Netherlands.
Fair enough, the land of Philips :P
(But in all seriousness, plain CDs were more popular in certain regions in Europe because "why have a different device for music?". It isn't as drastic as in America though, where it is a product that looks like and feels like never released to consumers.)
I remember wanting a Minidisc player, but they were to expensive. In elementary school we had portable CD players and in highschool I got a MPMan which played mp3s off an 128MB flash card.
Sony didn’t even care about iPod or MP3 for a few years after 2001, as it didn’t hit its bottom line, release of NW-E400 was the turning point, prior to that it is mostly MiniDisc.
I visited Sony Japan in 1999-2000 to give them a demo of the new audio codec my company (AT&T Labs) was co-developing with Fraunhofer. We were trying to convince them to buy into our crazy plan of selling music over the Internet. (Needless to say, neither AT&T nor Sony won that battle, but AAC did.) We spent some time in a studio with some of their top studio engineers playing tracks on AAC and Sony’s proprietary ATRAC3 at different BPS, trying to decide which was better. They agreed that AAC worked better at lower encoding rates, but it didn’t move them —- they were too focused on hardware.
I got interested in MD during high school in the late 90s/early 2000s. I was the only person I knew that owned a MiniDisc recorder/player, and my friends and I recorded what were basically podcasts onto my two boxes of blank discs. It's a damn shame the format didn't catch on in the US, I loved the it.
Minidisc is still going, it’s no vinyl revival but bands are releasing new music on MD, there’s a pretty healthy market on eBay for hardware, albums and blanks! Obviously there’s a hard limit to all this as nothing is in production anymore and minidiscs aren’t as infinitely rebuildable as turntables.
Minidisc was a HUGE commercial flop, with a paltry number of releases. It found utility in some pro audio racks but in no nation did it ever come close to replacing DAT in pro audio applications, or cassette tapes for music copying or distribution.
> Minidisc was a HUGE commercial flop, with a paltry number of releases.
What I remember from my minidisc days were that at least the ones I owned were all recorders. Even though I bought zero minidisc albums, I had a few minidiscs with albums recorded from CDs.
Even though minidisc wasn't ubiquitous, I'm not sure that the number of releases is a good measuring stick.
In east Asia, it is true that it holds the high end Walkman market till at least 2003. People see MP3s as cheap plastic toys until iPod and iRiver took off.
Minidisc came out at the wrong time. It was just a bit too hard to copy your own music to it. A single record on MD cost WAY too much compared to Cassettes or CDs.
It would've been amazing to buy a whole discography on MD, it would've fit there easily.
MD is on my list of the most coolest technologies that just fizzled out in the mainstream.
Ah yes, another American-centric viewpoint (which is correct, no qualms about that part) but in other countries (probably with the exclusion of inner reaches of Africa and, uhm, Canada) MiniDisc (at the late 1990's and early 2000's)... is just there: a reliable way to have portable copies of your music.
Americans remember it being a failure. UK folks remember it being a massive success. In a way, they're both right.
It sold 5m players in Japan. UK was its second most popular market. It achieved success in some countries in Asia and Europe as well, but almost nothing in North or South America. I've never seen one in person here in the US outside of an electronics store.
On a related note, I've always wanted to try one out. Any suggestions on a site/video breaking down good options for a recorder/player today with digital inputs and the ability to enter text?
What really killed this format is the draconian copy protection that crippled the software for getting the tracks on device (for NET MD players). Other method(s) of getting sound on MD was essentially dubbing, like you would with MC. Other players removed the artificial barriers of getting your music on device, and it turned out that antipiracy measures are not a feature... which is a shame, because the feel and sound of MD players is pretty damn great, and the wired remote with minimal backlit display is god tier UX compared to anything that was/is on the market. I bought my first secondhand MD player in 2015, and it was the best thing. It even had AA battery adapter(!!!)
This. MD was kind of a weird cross-over between a disk with a filesystem (which the iPod was in its first iterations) and a CD. And it sucked as both - it could not be used as a file system because you had to use Sony's proprietary tools to get anything onto it and off of it, _and_ it sucked as as a CD because the only equipment that could get data off of it would do it either real-time (too slow) or - at best - at 4x realtime. That while CD-R reader drives already could read at 32x realtime. The DRM also had a nice property that you needed a proprietary Sony app to get music onto and off of a MD, this app was horrible _and_ it was only available for Windows.
MDs did indeed stay in widespread use for professional sound recording where convenience was less important than reliability, they were quite reliable. This only turned around once flash storage started becoming fast and affordable.
I worked at Best Buy from 97-02 and don’t recall having a any prerecorded content for MD’s or if we did it was almost non existent. Your explanation is the correct answer as the onerous drm and Sony way of doing things limited the market appeal. I think they eased up the restrictions when MP3’s starting getting big but then it was too late.
Sony did this to themselves multiple times. Because they always had done other division they wanted to not cannibalize, or some Not-Invemted-Here. E.g them too long using memory stick instead of sd cards.
But you could play the music over SPDIF and record it while playing. I cannot remember having had problems with that. (Until my self-built SPDIF adapter broke...) Also other than stated in the article, MD used its own compression format so you could put 700 MB uncompressed audio onto a 130 MB disc. But in times of > 10 GB storage it makes no sense anymore to use replaceable cartridges. Just put it all on the player. That's what ultimately killed it.
It could have gotten a second life though with MD Data but the drives for that were just too expensive.
I bought an Aiwa mini-stereo with CD & MD that came with a portable MD player. The portable had a AA battery attachment, and I could go most of the day on the rechargeable and pop that on when needed. I bought 10 blank MD's to record and re-record with whatever I wanted, and that was all I needed for 3 years. It was great.
That was the amazing thing about the format. It didn't need much of a network effect to work as you could just record your own stuff. And obviously, as soon as one person in the group got one, many others followed. It was great.
You may be right for the vast majority of users but I was a nerdy power user already back then and this was never an issue.
I loved my MD player but what really killed it for me were affordable mp3 players. And I never owned an iPod. But I did own several other mp3 players, and eventually smartphones with mp3 playing capability (before iphone).
And once I got my first Android the game was over for MD in my view.
Recordable MiniDiscs use a magneto-optical system to write data; a laser heats one side of the disc to its Curie point, making the material in the disc susceptible to a magnetic field; a magnetic head on the other side of the disc alters the polarity of the heated area, recording the digital data onto the disk. Playback is accomplished with the laser alone: taking advantage of the magneto-optic Kerr effect; the player senses the polarization of the reflected light and thus interprets a 1 or a 0. Recordable MDs can be rerecorded repeatedly; Sony claims up to one million times.
I still have several portable MD players I bought new in the early 2000s. At the time, even on high spec PCs, the software was slow as hell to convert music to their proprietary format. MP3 wasn't speedy, but it wasn't nearly as slow as converting to ATRAC. I remember it taking on the order of hours to copy a CD to MD. The quality was better than MP3 so it was worth it in the end, but an annoyance nonetheless, and probably didn't help adoption in the US (we want it now dammit!).
> The MP3 format spelled the beginning of the end for the MiniDisc.
That should be "the iPod spelled the end". MP3 and MD coexisted for quite a few years before the iPod's arrival.
How much later? The experience I described was about 2000-2001, and it was far from seconds.
To be fair, encoding to MP3 wasn't exactly speedy on the machines at the time (compared to the present day), but converting to ATRAC was significantly slower.
My Sony tape deck needed some repair (the rubber parts dried up from age) and I took it to a Sony repair shop. They said it would be expensive to repair, and I could get a minidisc player cheaper and it would sound better.
They were right. That was the end of my reel-to-reel.
Lately I’ve been enjoying physical artefacts more and picked up a minidisc player and some blank discs. I’ve had fun printing labels out and putting albums onto it.
There’s also a pretty fun synthwave scene producing new work on minidiscs, the music is a guilty pleasure of mine particularly while coding so I’m having a lot of fun with the format.
The original iPod wasn’t a thunderous success but Apple continued to iterate on it and when they release a non-FireWire version that worked with Windows it really took off.
Had they dogmatically insisted on FireWire and Mac only it may have remained a niche thing.
And of course it greatly contributed to the success of the iPhone because why not get an iPod that could make calls and save pocket space?
Neither the original iPod nor the original iPhone were really devices that most people really viewed as world-changing on their release. I got on at the 4th gen click-wheel iPod and the iPhone 3GS and those were the on-ramps for a lot of other people do. (And I wasn't a Mac user until 2010.)
When iPod sales peaked, Apple was selling as many in a single fiscal quarter as the number of MiniDisc players Sony sold over 20 years… about 22 million.
During the brief period of my youth that I was in a band, we recorded on MiniDisc. Being able to do 4-track digital recordings was pretty cool, in a way I didn't really appreciate back then beyond rewinding being less of a hassle.
Can't claim I knew this at the time (wasn't my equipment) but Google tells me now this required MD Data discs. Normal audio discs would be limited to 2 tracks. Still, seemed nifty back in the day.
Am I the only one on here that actually bought the Sony minidisc with a scsi interface? I had it plugged into my Mac G3 and was used for backing up video projects that I was shooting on miniDV tape at the time. I also used it for playing music, but never bought pre recorded albums.
This... I was an early MD adopter for music and I remember trying to find info as to how to use these for data but it wasn't possible. Funnily enough I totally forgot how I would record them: I know I'd transfer my songs from CDs to minidiscs, but I forgot how.
At approximately the same time, on my Mac, I was using the Iomega ZIP drives, ranging from 100 to 250 MB if my memory serves me correctly. These always felt heavy and bulky compared to the minidiscs.
The form factor of the MD was really cool and kinda still is.
I still have mine in the attic (lives in my cable/bits box that has moved with me for 20 years ..) I'll try and dig it out later, see what I was listening to then!
It served me well during my GCSE's!
But when the iPod Nano came out, and I could fit a load of songs on it, and physically fit it in the 'watch' pocket of my jeans - the minidisc went in the box and never came out.
My dad had a full collection of minidics and our car had a mini discs player. I remember my dad telling me it was a superior technology but sadly wouldn't get any traction.
I never had a minidics player, I had cd's and after that a USB player with 32mb of storage. A year later I could get the same model with 64mb storage for the same price!
I wonder if the UK had more of a culture of "home taping". The UK also has commercial-free BBC radio so recording stuff from the radio was more rewarding.
MiniDisc was a huge success for Sony, and was the winner of the tape-replacement format war in virtually every country - except the USA.
It was so successful that Sony is still making blank MiniDiscs today. (Though they are not sold there, Americans can type MDW80T into eBay if they'd like some brand-new MiniDiscs.)
I grew up in the UK and for nearly a decade portable MD players were virtually ubiquitous on the Tube. Only the iPod began to end that era, and it certainly wasn't instant.