Think about it, they came out in 1992, they offered skipfree music (considering this was at a time when mp3 players were unheard of an CD walkmen were the norm), they offered a lot of storage space, crystal clear audio, real time optical recording, and crazy long battery life. On top of that the device itself was neigh indestructible (I know a few people that still use theirs since they fucking launched) and the medium was also stupid tough as well.
MP3 players have a few advantages, for example the extra storage space to shove a bunch of songs onto them and smaller size, but the sound quality is shit in comparison and having over 13 hours of music on one MD was plenty for most, and if you wanted more just slide in another one.
Hassle with proprietary shenanigans. Pricy. Too well established existing formats already out there. Hi-MD launched in 2004, too late to have any chance against the iPod / MP3 player market explosion.
I used to have this exact model, it was definitely not skip free, you had about a 4 sec buffer before it shit the bed.
you could throw around mp3 players, this things door would jam if you dropped it 20cm
Jackson Gomez
Man, I have had one for over 18 years. It has never skipped once and has been through the shit. Son of bitch is almost unbreakable.
>Proprietary Yup, big flaw. Sonic stage was shit >Pricy Fuck no. They were not cheap, but they were cheaper than a lot of mp3 players at the time. >Two well established existing formats already out there Tape wore down and CDs were nightmares with scratches and skips not to mention chugging battery life. There was no compare >Hi-MD launched in 2004 I agree this was a bad thing. Manly because minidisc players were and still are pretty heavily loved by audiophiles. Releasing something that compresses the shit out of your music is kind of the opposite of doing what the audiophiles want and they were kind of your only market, Sony.
Cooper Anderson
there's actually nothing wrong with them there's a beauty to their aesthetic and the method of file production that will likely result in a revival
if you're a special kind of person in regards to compiling your music by hand, MDs are very cool. Most people just don't care anymore so they lost out to iFag.
Sony made fucking CD Walkmans that had MP3 support, that means 700mb of self burnt libraries of MP3s on the cheap, with 15 second or more antiskip buffers and dual rechargeable AA batteries. for long life.
Xavier Campbell
Sony fucks up every new invention they come out with by making it proprietary Otherwise it was opposed heavily by American companies because of the fear of piracy.
Chase Evans
cassette walkmans were cheaper, and most people considered them 'good enough' it's not enough to be the best technically, you also have to compete with price and convenience as well
Gabriel Morris
Because they were mid-range
And everything electronic that's mid-range, niche, or without industry backing, fails horribly when put against a mass consumer market.
Cassette and CD players had the low-end and had an existing library and user-base.
These occupied an odd-middle ground where nobody really bought stuff.
Because not enough people had them, there was no big-trading groups like Cassettes and CDs had. You couldn't go down to a flea market and get 10 of the latest CDs, burnt by somebody, for $15 and have a good day. You had to have a computer, the software, and know where and how to get music to load one of these up, if you didn't want to pay store-retail prices for music. And surprise! By the time enough people had computers for that stuff, MP3 players were already popular. So nobody who was cheap wanted one.
Some audiophiles cared. But the ones who mattered, didn't care for them. The audiophiles that spend $4,000 on sound rocks don't do portable media. They wanted master-tapes. These weren't.
The niche amount of audiophiles who cared, couldn't make these viable, and a lot still jumped ship as digital media players got better.
Jeremiah Collins
Sony's insistence on DRM. Pricey. And by the time it came down, CDRs got to be more commonplace and affordable.
but desu, if you lived outside Japan where they had MD players installed in their car's radioes, you had poor support and they were expensive. I only had one because my dad got a discount at the Sony Store. Putting music on one of these was kinda ass.
Samuel Smith
They also had a digital readout that announced what was playing , if you had a recorder you could type in all the info , and when that track came up it would tell you whatever it is you typed.
Zachary Bailey
Too expensive + DRM
Elijah Foster
Digital Audio Players were better than CD or Mini Disc players the moment they came about solely because of the battery life. Digital Audio players were not powering a motor to spin the disc so they had longer lasting batteries by a significant margin. They only really took off in popularity because of the widespread usage of Napster in the early 2000s. I doubt Mp3 players would have taken off as much as they had if not for this scene. Amusingly enough Apple owes it's entire turnaround to the piracy scene. The Ipod was probably their biggest hit in two decades and that propelled their turnaround from a third rate tech company into the juggernaut of today.
Wyatt Wright
>proprietary anytime i see or hear that word i think of either 1. apple 3. real player
Nathan Johnson
>DAP had better battery life
False, the battery on a MD player lasted a fucktardedly long time. I still don't know how the hell Sony made that happen given moving parts and a laser, but with several hours of use a day I rarely had to replace my battery more than once a month.
Shit was crazy.
Nolan Smith
did any albums even release on mini disc? so you basically had to use napster.
Connor Bailey
>did any albums even release on mini disc? yea, but not many
David Carter
well there you go. Normies want shit you can just go to the store and buy, especially before online shopping.
Aiden Baker
Because optical disks are pure profit, also the software for these carried the Sony rootkit, so it's totally impossible to use them today.
Justin Bell
Expensive device, few and expensive media for it. People obviously stuck with CD until MP3 players.
> this was at a time when mp3 players were unheard of an CD walkmen were the norm And those CD walkmen got a long buffer much cheaper really quickly. You generally weren't constantly shaking the device for 20-60 seconds or whatever, so that basically killed that advantage.
Connor Reed
It's amazing how they made the MD players so efficient with all those moving parts.
You could get 52 hours from a single AA when Flash based MP3 players at the time could barely crack 20 hours.
Colton Young
>The niche amount of audiophiles who cared, couldn't make these viable Did audiophiles ever make any larger company viable?
They're great for some individuals who resell some decorated chink shit at >20:1 profit:expenses, but I don't think they could carry anything of the size of Sony or such anyhow.
Nathaniel Long
Fuck MiniDisc, Sony made it such a pain in the ass to actually transfer music to one using a PC
Angel Wilson
sony killed the mini disk with their proprietary bullshit it had so much potential
Juan Perez
>mp3 players were unheard of Bull fucking shit dude. MP3 players were literally the reason mini disc never caught on.
t. minidisc owner.
Connor Jackson
Starting from late 2000 or so, before that battery life was nothing special.
That was also around the time when P2P music sharing with Napster and such was probably the primary feature normies used the internet for.
As said, it did not support that usage well. CDs did, people had long figured out how to burn audio CDs and people also quickly figured out how to use or burn MP3 CDs.
Kayden Baker
Yeah, once they opened up Sonicstage a bit more to support WMA, AAC and MP3 files it was already way too late.
Jack Walker
/thread
Anthony Jackson
>Techmoan has a really good video covering the subject:
Came here to post this. Great video, explains it perfectly.
Carson Morgan
mp3's didn't take off until the early 2000's, a good 8+ years after MD came out
Jose Smith
They didn't fail in Japan
Easton Clark
ATTRAC 3 / Sonic killed it. Apple has been following the same path. Hahaha.
Adam Flores
Apple already killed the ipod a long time ago
Brandon Morales
>they came out in 1992 Yes, but they were still expensive in the '90s. By the time the price started coming down, MP3 players were becoming a thing, pretty much matching or exceeding MD players' other advantages.
And Sony's asinine software didn't do them any favors at this point. Dragging and dropping a bunch of MP3s onto a player was much easier and faster than doing the import and checkout thing with MD, let alone the conversion and writing onto the discs.
>the sound quality is shit in comparison and having over 13 hours of music on one MD Huh? The most you could get out of an MD was just over 5 hours, and that was at LP4, which had some noticable quality degradation. LP2 was acceptable most of the time, but that was only about 2 1/2 hours on a single disc. (I'm estimating averages here, since MDs came in 72- and 80-minute varieties.)
Some of this would eventually be addressed. Later versions of the software would do away with the checkout bullshit, but you still had to convert before writing to the disc. HiMD would increase the storage, as well as allow for native MP3 playing -- dragging and dropping files onto the disc with no conversion -- but even that had some DRM-type encumberances. But HiMD was expensive, and MP3 players were already entrenched by then.
Colton James
Not just that, but
1) Record companies had already invested in the manufacturing technology to master and press CDs efficiently. MD would be more money for little actual gain.
2) MDs were significantly more expensive than CDs, cutting into profit margins
Colton Hernandez
iirc HiMD requires specific players and HiMD discs too.
Before the Net MDs and Sonicstage, the way to get music on an MD was to record it straight off the source like a cassette tape. You can still get those used and they work and sound great. Fucking battery murderers though.
Brayden Campbell
>the first MD players were big and expensive >CD became cheaper and easier/more universal to use >by the time good MD players came along MP3 players were already in full force
Levi Phillips
My dad's got a Yamaha MD8 multitrack recorder he doesn't use. Thinking of "borrowing" it, but the last time I tried recording on it I couldn't figure out how to index the tracks so they could be skipped through, and my Net MD is long gone.
What's the best MDP with recording that takes a AA? Most of the players I see on ebay for cheap take shitty rechargeable NiMH gum sticks. Anyone got a favorite model?
Eli Clark
I don't see how they failed in their time. They were everywhere in the mid to late 90's. Then of course they couldn't compete with mp3 players, but who would expect them to?
