This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Sony made some really sexy devices, but the format itself just came out too late for it to have widespread consumer appeal. MP3 was just way more convenient, and a lot of folks still rocked discmans like myself.
That said: it was actually a very popular format for the media. I was a journalism student 2001-2005 and it was the format we recorded all interviews on. The radio station where I worked at had MD gear, but also used Marantz compactflash recorders, which I personally preferred.
I had a MD player in 2004. I actually preferred it over MP3 at the time. With a similar priced MP3 player you could only fit a few songs, but with MD you could have several MDs and not have to keep overwriting songs. Both were rewritable if needed though. Both were filled the same way by being connected to a PC.
Well, if by ‘similar priced’ you mean: a very cheap player, it might make sense.
But in 2004, I carried an iPod 4G which had either 20 or 40 gigabytes of storage. You’d need a backpack full of MD’s to match that, even if you put lower quality songs on there. I had my iPod filled with everything from podcasts, audiobooks, complete albums and enough random music to never hear the same song in a month. Absolutely loved that iPod!
Ipods were extremely out of my price range as a teen in poverty. MDs were selling at deep discount, and the MP3 players in stores were 8-32 MB. And I wasn't going to get money for the 32 if 8 was there and nobody around me understood the limitations of only holding 3 songs.
Honestly I forgot that iPods existed back then because the price was nowhere near realistic. It probably would have been preferable to MD though if money didn't matter.
MD always felt like a ripoff to me because you had to buy a bunch of overpriced disks from the sole supplier and then carry them all around in a little wallet.
As soon as the first hard drive MP3 players like the Rio came out, MD was a dead end.
Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!
where it positioned itself as a promising alternative to CDs.
Well, to cassettes actually... or both.
It was both. They promoted the sound quality and ease of use of a CD, the reliability and ability to recording of cassettes and smaller form factor than both.
MD was superior to CD from a portability point of view, especially in personal players like the Walkman or car stereos.
I had a MD car stereo in around 1997. CD quality sound, without the jumping of a CD every time you hit a pothole.
My friend recorded many concert bootlegs using MD.
Yes! Slip the sound board guy your discman and $20 and get a perfect recording. I remember a few times where there were a stack of discmans and walkmans (Walkman?) recording.
The format never made it big in Canada so I was oblivious.
But I still have many Walkman models, and I love them.
It probably would have dominated the market for a good while if Sony hadnt taken so long to ship mini disk storage drives for computers.
Sony also could have let them play mp3s. The last thing you wanted to do with a poorly encoded 128kbps mp3 was transcode it to another lossy format. But nobody was sharing atrac files.
Never heard of mini disk storage drives, but now I have to search if there is one that works on modern computers.
I remember having that "net" version of a MiniDisc player, and I would have kept it but it was SO slow to copy music from your computer onto the device.
Plus eBay had those stick shaped MP3 players for about £25 which could hold around an album's worth of music, and transfer times were much faster; although slow by today's standard
I also had the NetMD! Mine was blue
I miss my MD player. Easily one of the best gadgets I ever owned.
I really loved my mini disc player. I used it for years before I finally got an iPod.
If they made the data drives more widely available I'd probably still be using one today. They're effectively CD-RWs with a built-in case.
I think they topped out at around 250/500MB, though. Not exactly a lot of room. You’re probably better off with a thumb drive.
Hi-MD went up to 1gb. UMD, used in the PSP, went up to 1.8gb.
Great writeup.
It's so frustrating that every even remotely interesting thing from the past is now part of its own collector scene... You can't find decent models for less than 100€ and even then they don't come with their proprietary battery. Net-MD ones cost even more (without Net-MD you need to spend even more on a HI-FI MD deck to copy tracks over).
The model pictured it one of the later Hi-MD machines that are just Unobtainium these days.
Feels like these were barely a thing for a month before mp3 players took off.
I remember people talking about how small media storage was getting
Records - > Tapes - > CDs
People thought they'd eventually all the pill sized but still contain exactly one album or one movie.
We never thought 'what if I could fit every album I own on one Disc?'
I remember showing my iPod to my uncle who had a hige music collection and telling him that his whole wall of albums could fit on this white rectangle and then some. He was impressed but didn't see much value until he thought about driving in the car.
