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In the 60's you had reel-to-reel. In the 70's you had 8-track. In the 80's you had the cassette tape.
By the time the 90's hit, tape-based audio was still doing okay but it was receiving stiff competition from the Compact Disc whose medium was more durable and audio fidelity was far better (There is of course Digital Audio Tape, but I'll discuss that later). Unfortunately the CD lacked something the tape had: Tapes could be erased, edited, and recorded to on the fly. The best the the CD could to to compete with this was the then new CD burner which required a decent computer for audio digitizing, a SCSI interface to interface with the drive, editing software, and of of course you would need your precious CD-R discs.
Oh yeah, and about $3000+ for the burner itself.
There had to be something better. There had to be something cheaper. There was.
Going back to the early 80's a media called the Magneto-Optical Disk was being developed. It could store data (or audio) in a digital form on a high-speed optical medium similar to the CD but with several physical modifications that allowed the media to be erased and rewritten to at any time. By the 90's the technology had advanced far enough that approximately 650mb of data could be stored on a disc that was less than three inches in size.
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Sony was one of the main developers of Magneto-optical drives at the time and in 1992 the Minidisc was born.
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The Minidisc was still a conventional MO disk but a lot smaller than anything else that existed. It allowed for music to be digitally recorded to and played back from a disc. The media itself was stored inside a plastic caddy which only opened once it was loaded inside a recorder or player. This prevented dust from getting on the optical media itself and affecting recording or playback. It also mad them FAR more rugged than both the cassette tape or the CD.
[IMG]http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/100_2611.jpg[/IMG]
Sony loved the idea but they knew that if it was to be the next standard, it had to be everywhere. They promptly developed a massive variety of portable, vehicle, and home minidisc players.
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Sony also further worked on the portable units and wanted to make them the next Walkman. As such the Minidisc has incredibly good skip protection and a variety of players whose list of features ranged from a slim form factor to the ability to record from a SPDIF optical audio source on top of any regular analog stereo source. Portable units were also blessed with a wide range of wired remote controls which could contain the basic control the features, or an LCD, or even an AM/FM tuner.
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Sony continued to develop Minidiscs and the first minor upgrade was an extra six minutes per disc with regular SP recording. Next came LP2 (160 minutes per disc with a loss of quality) and LP4 (320 minutes per disc with a loss of audio quality) and then in 2004 the next generation of Minidisc, the HiMD was born.
[IMG]http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/100_2613.jpg[/IMG]
The HiMD was the latest and last Minidisc technology developed. It stored of 1gb of space which translated to 140 minutes in SP mode and 610 minutes per disc in LP mode. HiMD had also introduced the ability to store your files and data on a formatted minidisc too. This also permitted the older cartridges to hold up to 300mb of data.
Sony had done it all. They had produced an excellent consumer grade digital music player for the masses. The discs along could shrink entire libraries of CD's down to a small pile of cartridges.
[IMG]http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/100_2619.jpg[/IMG]
Yet nothing happened. Today the Minidisc is met with marginal success. It was a hit in Japan but everywhere else it didn't catch on too well. What happened?
For starters, by 1995 the CD-R was getting cheaper. Most people were not audiophiles either so they didn't give two shits if it sounded better. They wanted to just listen to Rush on the CD player they had, even if it meant using a Sound Blaster 16, 486, and spooky software on Windows 3.1. If that failed, you could just stick to tape. Tapes were still half the price of one blank Minidisc. A portable Minidisc player also cost almost three times more than a Walkman.
Now to get back to the Digital Audio Tape, Philips at the time was offering the Digital Compact Cassette and most stores were selling it over Minidisc. To make matters worse, Sonly already had a similar technology called Digital Audio Tape (DAT) which had already been out for a while and was available with portable and home/studio decks. Most people who wanted digital audio were using that instead of switching to Minidisc.
Then there was NetMD.
It was the technology that allowed you to write music on your computer (either recorded or ripped from another format) to your portable minidisc unit in either the SP or LP modes. Sounds like an obvious thing to do right? Well they fucked that up royally. NetMD was one-way. You could write to the disc but you could not read the data back. IT did prevent piracy in a sense but it also meant that if you wanted to change something later you could not read it back, edit, and then write the changes. If you no longer had the original you had to play it back into the computer over an analog input which resulted in an absolute loss of quality. Copy protection was also present through the SPDIF optical signal.
Then there was SonicStage.
[img]http://www.file-extensions.org/imgs/app-picture/6793/sony-sonicstage.jpg[/img]
You think iTunes is bad? SonicStage [i]raped[/i] the idea of digital music management on a computer. It was horribly buggy and also is (yes, is. Not [i]was[/i]) the only way you can write music on your computer to your minidiscs and preserve everything like quality, track names and markers.
Minidisc was struggling by 2000. low cost CD burners and MP3 players were really hurting the bottom line but it was the iPod that finally took Minidisc behind the barn and ended it once and for all. I'm not bashing on the iPod. It's a great next generation music player but it was the final nail that killed it for Minidisc. Sony announced all Minidisc development would halt on July 7 2011 and in September 2011 the last Minidisc player rolled off the line.
MiniDisc may of never made it far but there is still a few people, me being one, who still like the technology over CD. There are some places that I still think even an MP3 player should not go and for those places, I choose the Minidisc.
I'm so sorry. But this is the deadest of formats.
That was a good read, I've never heard of these before.
fucking stupid format I pray to god no one tries to bring this format back ironically like tapes
i wish we had modern floppy discs.
the betamax of optical media
Sweet jesus were there really ever any albums released on these abominations?
I think we had like one device that ever used the MiniDisc, and I can't honestly say I ever remember ever actually using it.
[QUOTE=SolidSnake52;35117565]Sweet jesus were there really ever any albums released on these abominations?
I think we had like one device that ever used the MiniDisc, and I can't honestly say I ever remember ever actually using it.[/QUOTE]
Play-only discs with albums were released. They just never contained any good artists. :v:
Wow, there is a lot of hostility out there.
I had a MiniDisc player in high school. Loved the thing.
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The orange and white one right there.
[B]E:[/B] Thinking about it, because of MiniDisc's, I got really into making mixtapes in high school. :v: I'd sit around for hours making music compilations that were "just right" to me.
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