The MiniDisc: the failure of a forgotten format (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: The MiniDisc: the failure of a forgotten format (2020)

#71

Post by JohnTHaller » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 4:56 PM UTC

zinekeller wrote: post #9

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. P.S. British viewpoint by Techmoan (which pointed out the American-centric "MiniDisc is a failure"): https://www.yo…

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?

Re: The MiniDisc: the failure of a forgotten format (2020)

#72

Post by kitsunesoba » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

zinekeller wrote: post #9

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. P.S. British viewpoint by Techmoan (which pointed out the American-centric "MiniDisc is a failure"): https://www.yo…

The second linked video is excellent, highly recommend. Watched it a few days ago on a whim and was surprised by how deep MD’s history is.

Re: The MiniDisc: the failure of a forgotten format (2020)

#73

Post by OldGoodNewBad » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 6:25 PM UTC

LeoPanthera wrote: post #4

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 Mini…

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.

Re: The MiniDisc: the failure of a forgotten format (2020)

#74

Post by danfritz » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 6:37 PM UTC

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!

Re: The MiniDisc: the failure of a forgotten format (2020)

#75

Post by ghaff » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 6:57 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #55

aktuel wrote: post #14

I guess the iPod is also a failure then since no one uses them anymore.

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame. 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 c…

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.)

Re: The MiniDisc: the failure of a forgotten format (2020)

#76

Post by vr46 » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 7:06 PM UTC

LeoPanthera wrote: post #4

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 Mini…

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.

Re: The MiniDisc: the failure of a forgotten format (2020)

#77

Post by fzzzy » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 7:17 PM UTC

JohnTHaller wrote: post #71

zinekeller wrote: post #9

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. P.S. British viewpoint by Techmoan (which pointed out the American-centric "MiniDisc is a failure"): https://www.yo…

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 on…

Look on ebay for decks with ps/2 keyboard inputs.

Check minidisc.org

Re: The MiniDisc: the failure of a forgotten format (2020)

#78

Post by fzzzy » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 7:18 PM UTC

kiksy wrote: post #31

arpa wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true, but the SPDIF playback/record is essentially dubbing :(

The model I had allowed for only 1 digital copy, after that generation it had to be analogue before another digital copy could be made.

I think they meant it's realtime (dubbing) rather than faster than realtime copying.

Re: The MiniDisc: the failure of a forgotten format (2020)

#79

Post by matthewdgreen » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 7:22 PM UTC

yftsui wrote: post #44

vosper wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MiniDisc was a huge success for Sony, and was the winner of the tape-replacement format war in virtually every country - except the USA. No, it wasn’t. Walkman, discman, ipod. _That’s_ how it went virtually everywhere

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.

Fun trip though!

Re: The MiniDisc: the failure of a forgotten format (2020)

#80

Post by rualca » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 7:42 PM UTC

vladvasiliu wrote: post #46

LeoPanthera wrote: post #4

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 Mini…

> 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 b…

> 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.