On June 30th, 1994 the first promotional MiniDiscs were given away with an copy of Rolling Stone Magazine. It was issue RS 685. I can't say it went down in infamy because for the most part no one cared. The MiniDisc held 1 gigabyte of data, which at the time was decent. The fact that the ATRAC audio was lossy was irrelevant. Consumers were already attracted to MP3s which were even worse. CD-Rs were prohibitively expensive. It was a short time window of opportunity and they screwed it up with copy protection. Yet there remains a reason that it remains more enduring than the DAT ( Digital Audio Tape) and the DCC (Digital Compact Cassette.) But in a 4 way race coming in second is still not the same as winning.
Most sources claim it was marketed starting in 1992 but I think that's a tad premature. A 1992 article in Popular Science described it as under development at Sony, and described it as a "miniature version of the compact disc." It's safe to say the advertising campaign began in 1991, there were a number of fluff promotional articles that year. The big promo push began in 1994 with the distribution of promotional comps. Like this one.
In 2007 they dropped the copy protection and the device found greater utility for recording... not playback. But it was too late, by then it was utterly obsolete. The indicators were there. Digital formats were on the rise, and despite the sentimental (and temporary) resurgence of vinyl... all physical formats were doomed. In 2013 Sony announced the end of their production by March of 2013.
The track listing is available here. The final track is a promotional message that I'd love to hear but I sold my player years ago on Ebay.
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A nice summary of poor minidisc. I was a huge fan, initially drawn to use them for radio production, then as my primary portable audio player until getting my first iPhone in 2008.
ReplyDeleteOne small correction: the first minidiscs actually held only about 200 MB of data. The audio was compressed using ATRAC, which is similar to MP3, but predates it. When Hi-MD debuted in 2006 or so those discs had 1 GB of data, in addition to uncompressed audio and the ability to defeat copy protection.
That's true about the capacity.. I should have been more clear. Despite the low quality audio...I still want to hear that promotional message.
ReplyDeleteI've got a few working minidisc players in my closet at the moment, gathering dust. I was a huge proponent of it back when the only portable mp3 player was a bulky and expensive Diamond Rio. I remember at the time most of my coworkers still used store bought CDs or tapes; no one used CD-Rs or any other writable medium to make music compilations. Meanwhile I had around 250 CDs copied to MD, so if (and when) something bad would happen to my discs in the rough and tumble factory I worked in, I always had the CD safe at home. Thanks to minidiscs I always had something new to listen to since I could always record Music Choice or talk shows off satellite radio. And I never needed more than a handful of discs at a time, unlike CD-Rs which were write once.
ReplyDeleteThanks to the explosion of MD popularity in Japan, I was awash in goofy designed blank MDs from a company called Minidisco. They were a lot more interesting to look at than boring old CDs!
At one point I bought a 20GB iRiver music player, but it sat unused for so long the battery died. It wasn't until just a few years ago, after sourcing a replacement battery, that I began the transition from MD to mp3 (and now FLAC and mp4 files). Now, between smartphones and the little iRiver, running Rockbox software, I don't use the MD players at all.
Finally, I don't think MDs had low quality audio at all. At least not after the second-gen ATRAC was released. I always found that compression scheme far superior to MP3s, and I still do to be honest. It was designed by audio engineers (for sounds), not tin-eared computer engineers (for file sizes) and the difference is obvious, IMHO. The fact that tracks could be edited on the fly was just icing on the cake.
Care to rip one promo track? You are welcome to keep the disc.
ReplyDeleteI'll rip it for you if no one else will. I've got a multi-track mini-disc recorder sitting in my office storage. Up until he died about 5 years ago, a guy used it to produce radio shows for the SC educational radio network.
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