I can't explain why I thought MiniDisc was such a cool format. Maybe it was just its appearance in the Matrix. Maybe it was the Japanese "strangeness" of the format, and the difficulty of getting one in the United States.
I was finally able to afford one near the end of the format's life, around the time that MP3 players were becoming endemic. I honestly couldn't make any case for why it was better, and it was significantly less convenient. But I still loved using it.
I need to dig through my "big attic box of outdated electronics" and see if I can still dig it up and see if it works.
I recently imported a Japanese Kei (mini) Truck. A minidisc stereo would be a great theme-appropriate fit for it, if I can find one at a reasonable price.
It was definitely the aesthetics of it. It was _incredibly_ cyberpunk - this great combination of digital storage format, small-size tech-looking disk, the way the players looked and opened - the whole thing was straight out of an anime. It's this artifact from the last moment before tech swerved off that cyberpunk mixture of physical and digital to just straight digital - after that, everything became ephemeral bits, and increasingly the hardware "existed to not exist," as it were - the iPhone, iPad, etc. were all designed as "blank slates" for the software, which was where all the action was.
I think that's why the original Motorola Droid is so loved - it's not just that the hardware was useful and interesting, but it "existed to exist" - it had an aesthetic and was trying to be something by itself, not just to disappear.
I think in the end it was just another example of Sony's proprietary, slightly miniaturized media. Sony had done it over and over and it is not cool at all in that regard.
But the aesthetic design of and the experience of handling it was superb. The discs were often transparent and had just the right amount of internal reflections. Loading mechanism was partially motorized and would make a nice intricate sequence of scratching sounds. A lot of MD devices also used a slightly higher tone than were typical of machine beeps. Everything was figuratively "mint flavored".
And then the new goodness of white plastic and stainless steel, scented with purified industrial alcohols, came in and wiped them all off.
> it was just another example of Sony's proprietary
This pattern predates MemoryStick and even BetaMax (yes, Sony created BetaMax). I have several dictation tape recorders from the early and mid 70s. Norelco, Philips, GE, and Sony. All of them use the same size mini cassettes except… Sony.
I jumped to MD in 1997 because I was still using cassette for mobile music consumption. Because of the media size, there wasn't a pocketable portable CD player, and skipping was a problem (that got fixed later) so I never switched to CD for mobile use.
Compared to tapes, MiniDisc was a godsend: no eaten tapes, random access playback, smaller size, better sound, song titles, and it was just so cool looking. I also used a MiniDisc a lot to record and transcribe meetings at work. The live audio recording was excellent.
The main disadvantage I ran into was that even with an optical digital connection, recording a 60-minute album from CD to MD took 60 minutes. I seldom ran into recordable media or prerecorded titles in the wild, even in New York (although Tower carried them), but there were lots of good online stores back then to buy blanks and new players.
I stuck with it until 2002, when the second-generation iPods showed up. It was easier to carry one thing, and not a player and a bunch of loose discs. I still have a giant anvil road case with a few hundred of them in storage, although who knows if they delaminate or turn into oil over the decades.
A few years back I bought a couple of assorted batch lots off eBay from people selling out of an old collection, or just selling an old collection wholesale. Some new discs still in the cellophane, too - mostly Neige, but I have a couple of Color Club ones in there somewhere. I still have my own small collection bought with high school summer-job money, too. And I have exactly one Hi-MD disc, that came with the MZ-RH1 I bought for ripping - an accident, I think that must have been, since the price I paid matched other player-only sales and didn't include the $60 or so that Hi-MD discs were going for around the same time.
Most failures I've seen have been mechanical, whether due to mistreatment by a prior owner or, with a couple of the TDK ones I bought as a kid, the glue that holds the case window in growing brittle with age.
The media itself, like flash memory, is perishable with enough write cycles, and I think I've run into two discs so far that were mechanically sound but unreadable. Certainly I never had that kind of failure back in the day, and I must've rewritten some of those discs a few dozen times - they weren't cheap then, and summer-job money only stretches so far. Certainly if there are any common failure modes comparable to sticky-shed syndrome, I haven't run into them.
Granted, it's been a couple of years; I wrapped most of the really intensive research once I got my ripping setup in place a little while before the pandemic kicked off. (For unencumbered full-quality digital ripping, you need an MZ-RH1 specifically, plus SonicStage iirc 3.4.3 and some drivers I had to dig a bit to find. I keep meaning to rehost that stuff somewhere along with a howto, but there's lots of other ways I have to spend my time of late - I'd be happy to hand the whole package off as a zipfile with my notes, if someone were interested.)
So I might be overlooking something at this point, especially without referring to notes, but my overall impression is entirely that, given a working recorder or player, all or nearly all of your discs should still be perfectly usable.
Mini-disc players had up to 240hrs of play time on a single charge. No MP3 player has ever had more than about 30hrs of play. Not that I want to go back to mini-disc but it's always been surprising to me that a device with moving parts would perform better than one without.
The moving parts of a MiniDisc are extremely lightweight, and I’m pretty sure the whole electronics of portable MD players were optimized end-to-end to consume as little power as possible. The ATRAC codec was also designed to be implemented directly in silicon and to use minimal energy. MP3 hardware was likely significantly less power-efficient.
I have perhaps the only 110V Sony LISSA stereo system that exists. Sony modified it to 110V for me for a special project. I have all of the components, including the CDP-LSA1 CD player, MDS-LSA1 MiniDisc recorder/player, STR-LSA1 receiver, and Sony speakers but not the new-age modern-looking 2.1 speakers that some later sets shipped with. All of the components interconnect with 1394 (Sony's i.Link), except for the speakers which are conventional analog connections. In about 2002, I used it for a single demo for a few days and, since then, it has sat, unused in my storage shelves. I need to send it to a museum or something.
The smaller disc size than a CD. The built in protection for the disc (I had a shitty car at the time and I think discs got scratched up by the player itself, eventually they were all unplayable). Recording built in. It scratched all the itches of the early 1990s.
The devices themselves were pretty sexy too, portable, full featured.
The killer for me was that it had a direct USB CD-to-MiniDisc cable to transfer CDs, with original quality, proper tracks and all. I would have loved to use it!
Unfortunately once opened, the user manual said something along the lines of “Press he record button, plug the USB-to-jack wire, and in 45 minutes, done! It will recognize the tracks by noticing the silence between them, hopefully you don’t have silences in the music, right? Also don’t fuss too much about the white noise due to impedance, it’s a high-quality transfer we pinky-swear.”
I swore never to buy anything from Sony since 1999. I relapsed in 2016 for ONE purchase. And swore again:
I still have a beautiful MD player from Panasonic not much bigger than a Minidisc in any dimension. I think the iPod really killed Minidisc, because the user experience was simply that much better than other MP3 players, which were generally janky designs from unknown brands.
MiniDisc's killer was none other than Sony itself. Sony's own competing divisions hobbled, crippled, then killed the MiniDisc.
The first issue was cost of the media. MiniDiscs we're just never going to be as cheap to manufacture as CDs. So record companies would have far tighter margins on MiniDiscs than they would for the same album pressed on CD. Unsurprisingly not a lot of record companies bothered producing pre-recorded MiniDiscs outside Japan.
Without pre-recorded albums readily available the only way to get music onto a disc was to record it yourself. So you had your MD player that cost hundreds of dollars you had to plug into some other audio player to record music to take with you. There was no high speed dubbing unless you had an expensive console recorder so your hour long CD took an hour to copy to the MiniDisc.
As the 90s went on Sony also refused to allow MDs to connect to a PC. So you couldn't rip music off a CD (which Sony considered unforgivable piracy) to your PC and then digitally load onto your MiniDisc. That is until they relented and released the NetMD players. But those were crippled in that they would only encode low resolution files but padded them so you only got 80 minutes of play time on a disc (despite the low resolution allowing 160 minutes). Sony also didn't allow their MD data drives to write audio MDs. But no one even had those drives because they were stupid expensive.
All of this inconvenience was happening in a time when portable CD players were dropping in price (and getting audio buffers for skip protection) and coming standard in cars. CD-R drives were also coming down significantly in price along with CD-R media itself. So if you did want to make mixtapes or just make CDs from files you got from the budding MP3 scene you could do so cheaply. Sony was even themselves manufacturing these devices, the DiscMan was a really popular portable CD player!
The MiniDisc was essentially dead by the time the first portable MP3 players came out. Even the iPod wasn't competing against MiniDisc so much as it was CD players which by then added MP3 playback. The iPod didn't really take off until the third generation one was released in 2003.
I say all this loving the aesthetic of MiniDiscs. They look super cool and could have actually been an interesting technology. Unfortunately Sony really likes their proprietary media formats.
I thought only Sony could make MD players? Looking up the Panasonic now - in general I love Panasonic - never had anything from them that was not awesome.
The primary alternative at the time was CDs. MiniDiscs were like cool CDs that wouldn't scratch if you threw them on the desk or in the glove compartment. Also the aesthetics of the players were great...
Too bad the accompanying software was so terrible.
I wonder if the analog side of it was also designed superbly. More modern players happened to succeed not because the creators worked harder, or designed better, but purely by stupid luck of riding the Moore's law curve. But the analog side of things was not subject to Moore's law, and since modern players are cheap, there is no budget for a careful analog design. Hence I would expect older products like MiniDisc to have excellent performance there.
All this without having used one, just some fun armchair speculation.
Man i loved my MD player, i remember thinking in-line remote with the shirt clip was so cool.
Looking back, it was pretty hilarious that transferring songs to the disc was real time (ie 70 minutes to transfer 70 minutes of audio). I really had nothing better to do...
They fixed it in later hardware revisions with NetMD allowing faster than realtime digital downloading, but the software was terrible. There's amazingly been an opensource project slowly iterating and adding functionality to do so in the current age: https://wiki.physik.fu-berlin.de/linux-minidisc/
I would love to import a Honda Acty. A neighbour had one when living in Toronto but seems like they're really difficult/impossible to import to California.
Yeah - it just "felt right" in the hand. I had a modem, with a serial connector dongle that would let my Motorola flip be used with my Newton 120... Dial-up internet in the "palms of your hands" while hanging around in coffee shops circa 1995/6.
> the difficulty of getting one in the United States.
I had never even HEARD of the minidisc before I worked abroad in england from 2004-2006. Then seeing it being both ubiquitous, common, and cheap (and nearing it's EOL) was stunning.
It's just a fun little format. The discs were just the right size and could store a boatload of info for the time. It was back when a 64mb mp3 player was pretty expensive.
I owned a mzr700 at the time cd/mp3 players started to come to the market. It looked like something from the future when compared with the cd/mp3 players at the time. audio quality was amazing and minidisks always worked, no skipping or disk damages, and longer battery life than the cd/mp3 readers
Interesting how so many people comment on the aesthetic but not on the unique capability of MiniDisc: the TOC.
You can delete and reorder tracks and this new state is written back to the disc. There's nothing else that does this.
You can't delete a song from a cassette. You can overwrite it with noise but that's not the same thing as skipping it. It's not random access.
You can't delete a track from a CD either, as they were not writable back then. Even today with a re-writable you can't easily delete a track, you'd need to rewrite the entire disc.
You can't reorder a song on a cassette, obviously. You can't really do this with a CD either, other than rewriting it fully with the new order. You can program a CD player to play songs in a particular order but this is not persisted across players.
MiniDisc can do all of the above and will do it instantly. This allows a music buff to constantly tweak and optimize their playlist. You can quite compare it to your current Spotify playlist, but now physical. No other physical media allows you to manage a playlist like a MiniDisc can.
The reason I know this is my dad's 30 year (and ongoing) denial in this not being a more widespread standard. He has this cute little box with 8 MiniDiscs in it. Each crafted to perfection in personal meaning, genre, order of songs. He plays it every day.
I look at it with admiration. Because it works. It worked when I was a teenager and now that I'm middle-aged, it still does. It didn't get outdated, get 17 trillion UI updates, require a password or have ever-changing terms and conditions. It just plays. For 25+ years in a row.
> You can delete and reorder tracks and this new state is written back to the disc. There's nothing else that does this.
This may be a naive question, but did they suffer from fragmentation? Reordering tracks via the TOC is a simple operation, but after adding and removing and re-adding songs, I would imagine the writer would need to eventually re-write the entire disc to fragmentation issues, or else have a very complex set of metadata.
From memory, you could end up fragmenting things, and I think this would typically result in losing some of the capacity of a disk.
I think people would do a disk to disk dub in these situations as a form of "defrag" operation.
You could also get an 80 minute disk, put it in a recorder and get it to read it, then sneakily swap it with a 74 minute disk without letting the recorder's eject switch trip, then force a TOC write, and you would be able to upgrade a 74 minute disk to an 80 minute version.
I can't really say, at that age I had no idea what fragmentation means so any issues with it would not register.
Statistically though, I imagine reordering to be the most frequent operation. Deletion should be rare since it's a purposeful decision to put the song on the disc in the first place. You might rarely delete one when you get tired of it.
Fragmentation is possible, but unlikely. You'd have to do a lot of cutting and deleting and reordering. And most tracks are reasonably long, so, this wasn't a huge issue.
What killed it is that they weren't really portable the same way flash memory is. An obvious improvement over CD players but the disk would still jump. Plus the disk swapping! Don't know how large your music library is but but having 8 discs for nostalgic reasons is different from having hundreds of them because it's your primary source.
The reason you wouldn't do it with a normal cassette is that there's a side A and a side B. You could reorder one side with enough time and skill, but the other side would now be screwed up. Maybe you could develop a taste for songs that are all about the same length and/or put a lot of buffer between songs, and then this would kinda sorta work.
The other reason is that cassettes sound like shit, even if you have metal tape and a Nakamichi Dragon.
I’m surprised that nobody has mentioned Web MiniDisc yet. This combines the best of web (WASM) and MiniDisc, allowing you to write content to discs from the comfort of your web browser and dispense with all of the awful Sony software.
I wish this was available as a normal text/image written article instead of a video. The content looks cool but the format doesn't work for me; 30 minutes is wayyy too long for this one!
In general I also prefer a written article with pictures, but you can skip-fast-forward through the video in ~5 minutes and still get most of the gist of it.
Minidisc proved very useful for dubbing an audio copy off the front of house mixing board. Sure you could run it to CD but that usually requires a much larger device that takes AC. The minidisc recorder was far smaller, more discreet and able to run from battery. I heard anecdotally it was the bootlegger's device of choice for a while.
I am very happy to see MD on the first page of HN, I can feel it's making a comeback! There's even new pre-recorded MD coming out. But don't look into it or you will end doing like me. I recently bought 3 different players and it's a bit absurd to pay that much for a lower quality of sound, but it does look cool.
I hope it does make a comeback, because I'd love to see some cheap players become available. I've got boxes of minidiscs sitting around, but all my old players have stop working.
There are a few comments comparing Minidiscs to CDs, I think that's the wrong way to look at the format.
My mental model for Minidiscs is much more similar to tape, it was so easy to use them to record. As a teenager this was the most exciting thing about them -- you could record ~CD quality audio from CDs (I had so many MD mixtapes!) or the radio. On top of that, you could make your copy feel polished by adding track markers and names, giving you information about the track playing when listening and letting you skip back and forth between songs.
This was a huge upgrade from cassettes and an upgrade from CDs because you didn't need to go through the rigamarole of burning.
Of course, this doesn't even touch upon industrial design of the units which has already been well covered in this thread. If you'd like to browse through some old units and get a sense of that, I recommend minidisc.org.
Minidisc is really a cool format. Another format which was consider too cool for consumers was DAT. Basically the notion that you could make CD quality digital recordings on a simple mini tape was terrifying to the recording industry.
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I was finally able to afford one near the end of the format's life, around the time that MP3 players were becoming endemic. I honestly couldn't make any case for why it was better, and it was significantly less convenient. But I still loved using it.
I need to dig through my "big attic box of outdated electronics" and see if I can still dig it up and see if it works.
I recently imported a Japanese Kei (mini) Truck. A minidisc stereo would be a great theme-appropriate fit for it, if I can find one at a reasonable price.
I think that's why the original Motorola Droid is so loved - it's not just that the hardware was useful and interesting, but it "existed to exist" - it had an aesthetic and was trying to be something by itself, not just to disappear.
This perfectly fits with the best definition of cyberpunk I’ve ever heard: “the future, but the 80s never ended.”
(Incidentally, I’ve heard Japan described this way as well.)
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But the aesthetic design of and the experience of handling it was superb. The discs were often transparent and had just the right amount of internal reflections. Loading mechanism was partially motorized and would make a nice intricate sequence of scratching sounds. A lot of MD devices also used a slightly higher tone than were typical of machine beeps. Everything was figuratively "mint flavored".
And then the new goodness of white plastic and stainless steel, scented with purified industrial alcohols, came in and wiped them all off.
This pattern predates MemoryStick and even BetaMax (yes, Sony created BetaMax). I have several dictation tape recorders from the early and mid 70s. Norelco, Philips, GE, and Sony. All of them use the same size mini cassettes except… Sony.
Compared to tapes, MiniDisc was a godsend: no eaten tapes, random access playback, smaller size, better sound, song titles, and it was just so cool looking. I also used a MiniDisc a lot to record and transcribe meetings at work. The live audio recording was excellent.
The main disadvantage I ran into was that even with an optical digital connection, recording a 60-minute album from CD to MD took 60 minutes. I seldom ran into recordable media or prerecorded titles in the wild, even in New York (although Tower carried them), but there were lots of good online stores back then to buy blanks and new players.
I stuck with it until 2002, when the second-generation iPods showed up. It was easier to carry one thing, and not a player and a bunch of loose discs. I still have a giant anvil road case with a few hundred of them in storage, although who knows if they delaminate or turn into oil over the decades.
Most failures I've seen have been mechanical, whether due to mistreatment by a prior owner or, with a couple of the TDK ones I bought as a kid, the glue that holds the case window in growing brittle with age.
The media itself, like flash memory, is perishable with enough write cycles, and I think I've run into two discs so far that were mechanically sound but unreadable. Certainly I never had that kind of failure back in the day, and I must've rewritten some of those discs a few dozen times - they weren't cheap then, and summer-job money only stretches so far. Certainly if there are any common failure modes comparable to sticky-shed syndrome, I haven't run into them.
Granted, it's been a couple of years; I wrapped most of the really intensive research once I got my ripping setup in place a little while before the pandemic kicked off. (For unencumbered full-quality digital ripping, you need an MZ-RH1 specifically, plus SonicStage iirc 3.4.3 and some drivers I had to dig a bit to find. I keep meaning to rehost that stuff somewhere along with a howto, but there's lots of other ways I have to spend my time of late - I'd be happy to hand the whole package off as a zipfile with my notes, if someone were interested.)
So I might be overlooking something at this point, especially without referring to notes, but my overall impression is entirely that, given a working recorder or player, all or nearly all of your discs should still be perfectly usable.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Lissa
(edit: fix date. 2002, not 1982.)
The devices themselves were pretty sexy too, portable, full featured.
Unfortunately once opened, the user manual said something along the lines of “Press he record button, plug the USB-to-jack wire, and in 45 minutes, done! It will recognize the tracks by noticing the silence between them, hopefully you don’t have silences in the music, right? Also don’t fuss too much about the white noise due to impedance, it’s a high-quality transfer we pinky-swear.”
I swore never to buy anything from Sony since 1999. I relapsed in 2016 for ONE purchase. And swore again:
Never - buy - SONY.
EVER.
Also, of course, wired remotes with displays.
The first issue was cost of the media. MiniDiscs we're just never going to be as cheap to manufacture as CDs. So record companies would have far tighter margins on MiniDiscs than they would for the same album pressed on CD. Unsurprisingly not a lot of record companies bothered producing pre-recorded MiniDiscs outside Japan.
Without pre-recorded albums readily available the only way to get music onto a disc was to record it yourself. So you had your MD player that cost hundreds of dollars you had to plug into some other audio player to record music to take with you. There was no high speed dubbing unless you had an expensive console recorder so your hour long CD took an hour to copy to the MiniDisc.
As the 90s went on Sony also refused to allow MDs to connect to a PC. So you couldn't rip music off a CD (which Sony considered unforgivable piracy) to your PC and then digitally load onto your MiniDisc. That is until they relented and released the NetMD players. But those were crippled in that they would only encode low resolution files but padded them so you only got 80 minutes of play time on a disc (despite the low resolution allowing 160 minutes). Sony also didn't allow their MD data drives to write audio MDs. But no one even had those drives because they were stupid expensive.
All of this inconvenience was happening in a time when portable CD players were dropping in price (and getting audio buffers for skip protection) and coming standard in cars. CD-R drives were also coming down significantly in price along with CD-R media itself. So if you did want to make mixtapes or just make CDs from files you got from the budding MP3 scene you could do so cheaply. Sony was even themselves manufacturing these devices, the DiscMan was a really popular portable CD player!
The MiniDisc was essentially dead by the time the first portable MP3 players came out. Even the iPod wasn't competing against MiniDisc so much as it was CD players which by then added MP3 playback. The iPod didn't really take off until the third generation one was released in 2003.
I say all this loving the aesthetic of MiniDiscs. They look super cool and could have actually been an interesting technology. Unfortunately Sony really likes their proprietary media formats.
Too bad the accompanying software was so terrible.
All this without having used one, just some fun armchair speculation.
Looking back, it was pretty hilarious that transferring songs to the disc was real time (ie 70 minutes to transfer 70 minutes of audio). I really had nothing better to do...
the subaru sambar? i adore that thing. someone in my neighborhood has one and i get a big ol' grin every time i see it on the road.
It is my all-time favorite form factor.
It was cool in a few laptops to be able to add stuff on but I'm not sure it was anything all that special?
I had never even HEARD of the minidisc before I worked abroad in england from 2004-2006. Then seeing it being both ubiquitous, common, and cheap (and nearing it's EOL) was stunning.
It's just a fun little format. The discs were just the right size and could store a boatload of info for the time. It was back when a 64mb mp3 player was pretty expensive.
You can delete and reorder tracks and this new state is written back to the disc. There's nothing else that does this.
You can't delete a song from a cassette. You can overwrite it with noise but that's not the same thing as skipping it. It's not random access.
You can't delete a track from a CD either, as they were not writable back then. Even today with a re-writable you can't easily delete a track, you'd need to rewrite the entire disc.
You can't reorder a song on a cassette, obviously. You can't really do this with a CD either, other than rewriting it fully with the new order. You can program a CD player to play songs in a particular order but this is not persisted across players.
MiniDisc can do all of the above and will do it instantly. This allows a music buff to constantly tweak and optimize their playlist. You can quite compare it to your current Spotify playlist, but now physical. No other physical media allows you to manage a playlist like a MiniDisc can.
The reason I know this is my dad's 30 year (and ongoing) denial in this not being a more widespread standard. He has this cute little box with 8 MiniDiscs in it. Each crafted to perfection in personal meaning, genre, order of songs. He plays it every day.
I look at it with admiration. Because it works. It worked when I was a teenager and now that I'm middle-aged, it still does. It didn't get outdated, get 17 trillion UI updates, require a password or have ever-changing terms and conditions. It just plays. For 25+ years in a row.
Long may it keep playing.
This may be a naive question, but did they suffer from fragmentation? Reordering tracks via the TOC is a simple operation, but after adding and removing and re-adding songs, I would imagine the writer would need to eventually re-write the entire disc to fragmentation issues, or else have a very complex set of metadata.
I think people would do a disk to disk dub in these situations as a form of "defrag" operation.
You could also get an 80 minute disk, put it in a recorder and get it to read it, then sneakily swap it with a 74 minute disk without letting the recorder's eject switch trip, then force a TOC write, and you would be able to upgrade a 74 minute disk to an 80 minute version.
Statistically though, I imagine reordering to be the most frequent operation. Deletion should be rare since it's a purposeful decision to put the song on the disc in the first place. You might rarely delete one when you get tired of it.
Deleted Comment
> You can't reorder a song on a cassette, obviously.
I've reordered songs on reel-to-reel magnetic tape with a knife and special tape; I don't see why you couldn't do something similar with a cassette...
The other reason is that cassettes sound like shit, even if you have metal tape and a Nakamichi Dragon.
https://stefano.brilli.me/blog/web-minidisc/
Perhaps some clever person will write something to transcribe and screenshot videos automatically.
My mental model for Minidiscs is much more similar to tape, it was so easy to use them to record. As a teenager this was the most exciting thing about them -- you could record ~CD quality audio from CDs (I had so many MD mixtapes!) or the radio. On top of that, you could make your copy feel polished by adding track markers and names, giving you information about the track playing when listening and letting you skip back and forth between songs.
This was a huge upgrade from cassettes and an upgrade from CDs because you didn't need to go through the rigamarole of burning.
Of course, this doesn't even touch upon industrial design of the units which has already been well covered in this thread. If you'd like to browse through some old units and get a sense of that, I recommend minidisc.org.