Sony MiniDisc: The (Not) Forgotten Audio Format That (Never) Failed
By the early 1990s, the humble compact cassette was starting to show its age. Electronics giant Sony developed what it believed to be the best successor to tape -- but so did a former business partner.
Special thanks to: Viewer Asaf for loaning several MiniDisc portables and accessories; V-Sync Co. Ltd. for providing archival photos; and to fellow KZheadrs LGR, Geek Therapy Radio and Computer Clan for video clips.
Due to KZhead video description character limits, I've posted the complete list of media credits, sources, and additional research material on my Patreon page -- it's freely available for all to access:
/ minidisc-media-51723152
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Music by
Birocratic (birocratic.lnk.to/allYL), Epidemic Sound (www.epidemicsound.com), Lakey Inspired ( / lakeyinspired ) and Dan Mason (danmason.bandcamp.com).
Intro music by BoxCat Games (www.box-cat.com).
For those of us old enough to remember portable CD players skipping all the time, Minidisc was a revolution in portable music.
Even the cheaper (than the alternative) car stereo CDplayers of the day skipped. Used to hate it driving in my old F-150. Any slight bump and the CD skipped.
I mean, you had Discman players with buffers so CDs stopped skipping eventually.
I loved minidisc. It was far more versatile than cd, more fun and just cool
Lol, I remember finally getting a portable CD player and then buying a sick new portable Cassette Player to actually use on the Go. I left the Portable CD player hooked to the home stereo where I made mix tapes from CDs.
@@aprofondir The buffer helped, but they still skipped if you did any sort of activity with them. I remember trying to mow my lawn while listening to a CD, but it was super annoying.
The MiniDisc™ was one of those pieces of tech that actually looked futuristic for it's time. I think they still look cool.
Seriously!
Not to mention Neo sold his hacked booty stored on a MiniDisc in Matrix.
it was even featured in Matrix
It was pretty prominently used in a movie called "Strange Days", too.
Corey I agree totally. I recorded some of my 12 inch vinyl onto minidiscs blanks. I still love minidiscs to this day.
The Japanese exchange student that stayed with my family had a minidisc player, and at the time, that was the coolest thing I had ever seen.
I brought very thin cd player to school in 2002 and American students freaked out. lol
Minidisc will always hold a special place in my heart. I still have my component recording deck, my NetMD portable recorder/player, and a player in my car. I was an early adopter, and I refuse to say goodbye.
I can't help it, MiniDisc feels like the future to me, still.
It's the shiny little disc in the protective case. Growing up on Mission Impossible episodes cemented that kind of thing as equal to "futuristic" in my mind. :-D
@@nickwallette6201 Not to forget "Strange Days" and "The Matrix", minidiscs have been in quite a couple of futuristic movies.
@@herrbasan also in Interstella 5555!
There are 1TB micro SD cards, but they don't look nearly as futuristic as MD
Rofl
Virtually every person I knew who owned a mini disc player would say how great it was for recording their band rehearsals. This seemed to be a thing for many years.
Absolutely.In my home studio I have several medium to master my recordings Even now. I have a 15 IPS 2 track Revox , DAT Mini Disc and Cassette as well as CD and DVD burners in the computer the only format I didn't adopt was DCC. I even went as far as building an auto routing box that senses the source of the music automatically and routes it to the the amp and the other recording devices. Which effectively means if it comes out of the mixer it goes to all recording devices and to the amp and any media played on any device is automatically routed to all recorders and to the amp. However For the last God knows how many years its MP3s on a memory stick And with the same memory stick I can download a protools sessions go to colab with someone on their machine then save the files and come back home to continue working on it. I can then master it convert it to mp3 put back on the stick and plug that in the car. Actual media although nice is pretty much superfluous.
Yep, my first DJ mixtapes were recorded with my MD player in the early 00s.
We.toured with it for years, was made for storing sequences etc. So easy to change the set order around.
Yes the pre recorded albums were very unexciting and flat compressed
A cousin's husband is a producer and he used to work for a big radio station in late 90´s early 2000's. I remember him carrying many MD with him and he explained to me that the station invested a lot in a MD professional equipments since the quality was almost equal to CD, it occupied less space and editing was very easy so they could get lots of radio shows on them and change the songs order in the middle of the show if needed.
I like to think of the MiniDisc as the ultimate physical, digital mixtape. The ability to move, rename, add and delete tracks was a game changer. It was my favorite physical audio media by far. A friend visited Japan in 1999 and noticed that virtually everyone had a CD deck connected to a MiniDisc recording desk connected with a toslink optical cable. Salarypeople would make mixes and take discs with them on the go for all those train rides. I decided to do the same in NYC. I got a Tascam MD recording deck and a couple of super small Sony portable players. The MiniDisc was my source of mobile music entertainment until music apps supported lossless (FLAC) downloads in the 2010s (so I skipped the whole iPod era). I miss my MD hardware.
The Tascam MD decks are higher quality than Sony, and although more expensive it was worth it. I have one Tascam deck that outlasted several Sony models.
I still have my Sony MD 😊
I was an early adopter of MiniDisc. First I had a Sharp portable recorder for recording radio interviews. I then had a number of high-end Sony 19" Hi-Fi units and also in 1996 an in-car Sony MiniDisc head unit with multi-CD changer. I progessed to NetMD and Hi-MD. Today, MiniDisc remains my preferred recording medium.
I miss my old MD player. Ran on a single AA battery for half of forever.
I wish I still had mine too!
I still have mine, just love it. I especiall use on long plane travels, one small battery last the whole journey from Norway to Thailand (I am married to a thai woman) - it takes about 11 hours, and I have all my favourite music on the discs i bring with me. I also have a bigger minidisc player/recorder in my stereo-rack.
@@aslerunarborgersen5175 so jelly!
For the longest I thought I was the only one who remembered these things. It really felt like it would never get better than being able to stop carrying a CD case to school and have a few disks with a ton of totally not pirated music.
@Mark P. I just wish they improved on the format as a data disk. With current blue ray density and the MD form factor we would have really durable mini magneto optical diskettes
The footage you’ve captured for this episode has been such a nostalgia trip. Excellent work.
Should have shown the product placement in Last Action Hero.
I had a Sharp MT15 replaced under warranty for an SR70 in high school. I bought Oasis & NTWICM! from Dixons and copied Linkin Park from someone's CD. Though I recorded a lot from MTV Rocks on our Sky TV box and from Napster via dialup. I remember playing a rude Tom Green song to some girls :) A friend wanted to swap it for his Thomson Lyra 32 Mb MP3 player. A poor choice compared to the 8 disc wallet in my backpack. I remember he ran off once with my Motorola Startac 50 from my easily accessible belt clip haha.
@@dazednconfused31337HD-DVD ???❤ DVD-RAM ???
Been in Japan since '91. Owned almost all of this stuff at one time or another. Making the switch from cassetes to MDs, not really ever getting into CDs, renting music from Tsutaya etc. This was pretty nostalgic for me.
you never experienced good SQ then. CD's are STILL legit. minidiscs were cassette quality/mp3.
@@hardtymz2517 i listen to 320KBIT mp3s and they are fine for my ears
Compact Disc audio is just so sublime.
@@hardtymz2517 Minidiscs are significantly better than mp3 or cassette quality. Wtf are you on about.
I still use MiniDisc at home and in my car. Works great for recording my band’s rehearsals as well as my guitar/bass/drum practice sessions.
Everyone I know that owned a MD player, including myself, loved the format. Judging by the comments here, most people felt that way as well.
Same. It was seriously amazing at the time and I liked it very much.
It was just... Cool. I still have mine somewhere along with all the ripped disks.
I only upgraded from MD, when the 3rd gen iPod with 40Gb arrived.
Yea was a great format. Was just killed by Sony's bad decisions around DRM and lack of computer integration in the times before mp3 players were affordable.
@@mystixa Found my old Sony MZR 55. It still works after not seeing the light of day in almost 20 years. Turns out my minidisc collection included some really rare white labels.
"American record labels hated the arrangement." That's when you know you did the right thing.
Cause it never wore out !!!0
1990: We are afraid of piracy 2000: hold my beer
@@JenXOfficialEDM RIP Dreamcast
And funny thing, it actually flourished well in Japan. Their music industry didn't died out for the fear of piracy, and Sony already knew about it thus implemented a limit as well. They developed a nice balance ecosystem around that benefits consumers, artist, labels and rental shops. That it didn't benefit are the greedy ones.
@@kornkernel2232 I second this. A lot of people were already buying used CDs from ebay. Labels got their big bucks from new CD sales. I'll never forget that one country star who wanted people to be banned from buying his CDs used back in the early 90s.
That metallic blue mini disc player looked so beautiful and still does, can't believe I've seen it again right now after all these years. My old man owned one of these and it was such an awesome little gadget
I own the same one, though it has been through the ringer as its prime use was when I was a teen. But man that image reminded me of the day of unboxing it.
I had a jvc portable minidisc back in 2000. Greatest player I ever owned. Could record from almost any source with the laser input or 3.5 mm Jack. It was easy to organize files and rearrange them. Could record multiple albums on 1 disk and the nest feature was the headphones. Could change tracks and view titles right on the headphones without even using the player itself. It was YEARS ahead of its time.
I invested heavily in MD , as I thought it was a great replacement for the compact cassette and even the CD , I've had a MD player in my car for the last 20 years, and it still works OK and I use it daily , and I have two hi-fi system MD players/recorders & a portable MD Walkman and they all still work OK. Most of my LP's & CD's have been put on to MD too. I was said to see the format die
I bought a MD player for my truck in 1994. We were into the minitruckin' stuff, so it was cool to have a stereo that didn't skip like cd's did. lol. I had to drive over an hour into Dallas to find the discs, so it got tiresome of listening to the same songs over and over. I traded it to a friend and that ended my run with mini discs. That's cool that you still have some of them. I thought the format had died decades ago.
@@jasonmartin7137 Shout out to DFW!
@@kinkane5566 Hell yeah!
unless you are single handedly keeping it alive for yourself
@@jasonmartin7137 listening to a song over n over is how you appreciate music. Nowdays music is like toilet paper. Disposable after a couple of listens.
I really liked MiniDisc. I loved the ability to add, delete, label and reorder tracks. I had a shelf unit, several portable players/recorders and a MiniDisc player in my car. Fun fact: In 'The Matrix,' Neo sold his software on MiniDisc media.
Are you from the US? If so, You are the OTHER guy, besides me who had MiniDisc in his car! I knew NO ONE else who did. (I know it was a "thing" in Japan, of course.) I loved the format!
Originally from Germany and my dad had this! 😁✌️
@@jamesslick4790 I am another guy who had a MD player in the car
I also really like Minidisc although I have only recently (within the last six months) discovered it. I also have a Sony minidisk portable recorder, a Sony Shelf Unit (CD, MD, Cassette, Radio) and an Alpine Car Deck (CD, MD, Radio).
@@Phoenix135tube Cool! Keep this medium alive!
I had a portable Sony minidisk recorder that I used to record my bands practices and the sound quality was quite literally AMAZING! I combined the unit with a Sony stereo microphone for recording purposes. I bought 2 of themover the course of a couple of years cause I used to take it to work and it they took quite a bit of accidental abuse. I wish I still owned one. It would literally record a pin dropping.
I had the same equipment. The small Sony condensor microphone delivered superb recording quality.
I still own all my minidisc recorder’s, players, a boombox and a car stereo. Also have tons of blanks, cases and storage shelfs. Loved the minidisc format! Great video too.
Hi, which boombox was it? I only remember a very cool looking Sony that I kicked myself for not buying (not as much as going for a JVC PC 55 over a JVC RC M90 though 😭).
This was a great trip down memory lane. I used minidiscs extensively in the late 90s when I was a DJ. We used to bring a recording unit with us to raves and clubs to record sets, and the editing functions made it possible to generate a clean mix that could be used as a master to press CDs. I also had a portable unit to listen to music on the go. It really was a great format for the time, though the copyright limitations were a real pain in the ass. Because the minidiscs (even ones you record yourself) don't allow digital copies due to the copy protection features, I wasn't able to make lossless copies of my mixes until just last year when used high-end units finally dropped enough in price. Unfortunately about half of my minidiscs were unreadable by then. So yeah. I have a love/hate relationship with this format, and SONY in general.
Unreadable? Sounds like machine, not disc, failure - minidiscs are magneto-optical discs, which are damned near indestructible. (They’re nothing like CD-R, whose dyes can degrade.) I’ve never had one fail, and I’ve been using them since 1997.
@@tookitogo well, about half of them are unreadable and I've tried 3 different machines, so I think that self-recorded minidiscs *can* fail.
@@NotJustBikes That’s very, very odd! They have an overwhelming reputation for reliability, which is expected from the technology used. Can the unreadable discs be reformatted and recorded, or are they fully dead??
weird crossover seeing you here
@@NotJustBikes I love your videos.
Thanks for making this great video.
hi techmoan
Love you, Techmoan. Your retrospective on minidisc is also great. All of your videos are great for that matter
Love your Sony related videos Techmoan. You always manage to show how innovative Sony was and is.
hey techmoan
End of this video is interesting, but does beg the question; if minidiscs are getting popular again, why wouldn't Sony continue making discs, and maybe even a new player/recorder again...?
We used these as cheap alternatives to record audio for filmmaking. This was a fantastic format.
This is a remarkably high level of detail in such a short documentary piece! Thank you!
This has got to be the definitive MD documentary on KZhead now. Not even the Techmoan one is this good.
I'm gonna tell techmoan on you 🤭🤭
How was this comment 3 days ago?
@@Kevinb1821 Patreon!
@@Kevinb1821 time travel, clear evidence right here.
Now you’re sounding like the green muppet!
As a former Sony employee during the period of the 'rise' and 'fall' of the Minidic, I can say it is quite a nice overview.
How was it watching 'Minidic' rise and fall :D
Sony's marketing was poor which was one of the reasons it failed. I still use mine as a replacement for cassette which is very inferior.
@@smudger671 NetMD was poor as you couldn't transfer your own recordings as mp3 to the computer. Whats the point then?
@@JonathanRichardsonUK some say it was more of a “shrink” 😂
Oh, I adored my Sony Walkman cassette player back in the day! I hate that I can't for the life of me remember what became of it. Whoa, it just hit me. How did people listen to music on the go, pre-Walkman? Not in the car, but just out and about? I wanted the MiniDisc so much! I was always confused as to why they didn't really catch on. Regular CDs were big and awkward. I've always taken public transportation. I remember leaving the house with either a pile of them in my bag, or taken out of the plastic case and put into those sleeves that were like a little book. I still have a couple of those things. MiniDiscs would've been SO much more convenient on the go! I still have my Sony Walkman CD player. Haven't used it recently, but last time I did, it still worked. I also still have small boom box and the CD player still works. I'm old and cranky and still love my CDs. I can't stand listening to music on my phone. I wish I had ever been able to afford the iPod Classic back in the day. I nearly cried when I learned they stopped making them. I never could afford the latest tech until it had been out a long time. But I somehow missed that entire era. In a lot of ways, music has been taken away from me. I have no idea how normal people listen to music these days. I can't stand it on my phone. I swore it would never happen to me, but I guess I'm officially old. Sigh.
Pre-walkman people would have lugged a ghetto blaster around on their shoulders blasting music for everyone in the street to hear. I think that started it all. You can still get walkmans today. they are basically smartphones without the phone part and with a much better dac. Theyre pretty expensive but sound 100x better than the phones crappy dac. For most people phones are good enough so they listen to music on that. Yea I was pretty sad when the ipod and ipod touch died out. 2nd hand theyve gone up a lot in value like minidisc players. I think theres still a market for them but phones are so cheap they cant compete.
I have 2 MiniDisc recorders. I use them to mix my own music, but I had one in the 90s as well. CD recorders came into the picture, but they were expensive. You had a lot of great editing capability on the MiniDisc recorders that CD recorders were not offering yet. Fun toys. Excellent upload!
I do have a minidisc and it's still great after all those years. Great sound,small and it still works perfectly after two decades.
Yep! Me too.
Same, I have a MDS-JE510 that I am using as I type this, main use is as a DAC but I pop in a disc once in a while for casual or ambient music listening. Great video & thanks
@@ShazeemKhan Ha!, I have the exact same model, must have had that for at least 22 years
@@CanyonWanderer *awesome* buddy! Waw thst is hella long, I only have mine about 3 years or so, bought it used,no regrets
Same here. Still have a working portable mini-disc player/recorder.
God, I've always said that minidisc felt like everything good about cassette tapes but distilled into an ideal form. I'm glad I'm not the only one to notice that comparison.
I love how dedicated Sony is to their proprietary formats. They even had a version that recorded video known as the MD data2.
Great video! Brought back lots of great memories. I had a few portable recorders and players. I still remember buying my first Mini disc player from Circuit City and eventually getting into Net MD a few years later. Never tried out HiMD though. I always wanted to pick up a home deck, but unfortunately never did (I remember when MiniDisco was selling a base model for $129). Such a cool piece of tech at the time.
My minidisk was simply the best format I've ever had. I loved my MD player for portable audio. I used to sit on a train with about 20 minidisks, each with two or three albums on them. It made the long journey just fly by!
I had one, the sound was very good and could record.
Nonsense. It was amazing for it’s time. I loved mine, I remember, as a teen it took me forever to save for one which was around 500 dollars on sale. It was great. But things are way better now, as a matter of fact I have a Walkman with a 400gb card and all my music in Flac or Alac. All with album covers. Sound is much better Device is much smaller Sd card for way more music Way easier to put music on it
@@vitorfernandes651 My music library at home is all FLAC as well, but I just put it on my phone in 256 kbit/s AAC for listening on the go. It costs basically nothing (because I have the phone anyways) and the 256 kbit/s AAC is absolutely good enough for listening in the car or with mobile headphones. There's no comparison to the expensive and chunky devices you needed in the past for portable music.
That was a terrific program. Professionally narrated, edited and nicely researched. Thanks for this!
absolutely brilliant info, I must have been sleeping through all them years of MD. I remember MD was offered as a new car option in 1998
What an engaging and well put together piece. Excellent narration and pacing. Immediately subbed! So glad I ran into the channel
I loved my MD player/Rec unit. I still remember the stick remote control I clipped to the fanny pack as I controlled the device while working out. I still have Pink Floyd's Pulse pre-recorded MiniDisc, but I no longer have the player. Ah, those were good times. Thank you for this tremendous lesson on the strange history of the format wars. Well done!
I still have mine and I have a cool car version of the remote on the mini jack that plugs into a car stereo input. I loved my Net-MD so much. It still works and it is sitting on a shelf in my living room with all my memorabilia I treasure. It was such a cool way to carry a huge library of music in your pocket. And I loved how I could record on the fly with it. I was the only person I knew who invested in one.
god I miss this format so much. there's just something special about the tactility of physical media, especially clicky-thunky formats like MD. the sound of the player popping open, the disc slotting in and the loading mechanism snapping shut was just fantastic. listening to music on my phone is convenient as hell but it feels a little soulless.
mediums having physical value/enjoyment are sorta why vynal is still around. >_> Minidisk would almost be worth the dystopic-future that would necessitate its existence/use.
Holy shit I couldn't have said it better, Minidiscs look straight out of a futuristic 80's anime movie.
I wish there was a way to ad BT functionality to the old MD players
I feel the same way with the PSP. I've always found them to be quite similar (unsurprisingly)
You nailed it! There’s no magic in streaming music!
One of the kids in my Scout troop had a MD player in the 90s, when most of us still had tape players. When we saw what it could do (sound quality, song skipping, small size, etc), we all wanted it! While MD might not have become the dominant format, it definitely helped to set expectations for what the next generation of music players had to be.
no scout troop kid could afford one of those back then! drug dealer??
My God, I miss Mini-Discs. In radio we used them for commercials in place of the old carts, and we'd record phone calls and bits and skits for on-air play. They were amazing. I had TONS of MDs on hand at home and work.
I loved mini disc for recording my numerous cd collection,which I then used in my dj business through the 90,s .They took up less space than cds and the music was easily accessible. Brilliant format for music with great sound quality. Should never have stopped their production. Bring them back.
man...mixtapes, walkmans, limewire... this makes me nostalgic.
kazza, etc plus windows messenger, yahoo messenger
@@RIZFERD Indonesian
@@ADeeSHUPA heah6 but I lived aeound the world ij my own alone since childhood
Napster
Right ? I'm a 90s kid and this gives me nostalgia haha
The irony of a lossy recording format being an impediment to adoption of the minidisc while the mp3 eventually prevented minidisc with lossless recording from market success is remarkable. An excellent review of a well executed product that can only be described as a successful failure.
In my view, they shot themselves in the foot when they did "net-md", which converted your majorly lossy mp3 files into larger lossy files instead of just putting them on the damn disc as is, while saying on the box that it "plays mp3 files". Which is kinda like saying that a cassette recorder can play CD's.
It was another MDCT codec hampered by being proprietary and tied to a physical format. Fraunhofer was content to make money off of companies that wanted legit codecs for MP3. Plus MiniDisc was in audiophile price range but audiophiles hate lossy compression.
The problem was that MD was relatively pricey while being lower quality than CD. The kids didn't buy it because it was expensive, and the audiophiles didn't buy it because it was too compressed. Mp3 caught on because it was cheap from the beginning, and it was also open to become better over time because it wasn't a fixed format like MD.
@@robspangler6087 Yes, that was TOTALLY stupid!! Also, their naming of the ATRAC algorithm was quite unfortunate, as A-TRAC sounded too much like 8-Track. Psychologically, they were transmitting a negative message to consumers that this format was not going to stick around!
@@DarylO LOL! All us old farts would be listening to an MD, waiting for a song to fade out, hear a click, and fade in, again. :)
I had both the Sony MiniDisc component deck and portable player…loved every minute of it ! I never cared for cassette recorders, because the tape always got caught in the cartridge. I didn’t think the DCC recorder would catch on.
I STILL have My Mini and Absolutely LOVE IT. 1 AAA battery and you can listen to Impeccable Quality Music in a Combination of Your choice and can even mix music intro and outro one song into next. No Skipping at Any Time No matter the impact. No scratches and easy recording. Almost 60 songs at that time was Amazing. Glad I grabbed one. Sad they didn't catch on. Definitely was before it's time. Also have cassettes and 45"/33" records.
Me too! I still have it along with the little case that holds 5 MD’s in a multi-color pack. I thought it was going to be the future format for sure. Ahh, those were exciting days. 😃👍🏻👍🏻
I loved my minidisc player in middle school. When Sony introduced their atrac3plus format, I went nuts putting dozens of songs on a single minidisc lp
Sadly by then ATRAC was a poor couisin to the vastly more popular MP3 format.
Aside from vinyl, Mini Disc is my favorite physical audio format. Loved my portable MD player in the early 00's. A single AA battery would provide many hours of music before needing a replacement during family trips, making it cost effective. A 4 pack of AAs would be vital during those summers.
This is a good point. By the time NetMD players came around one AA could approach 60 hours of playtime if you used LP4!
I got into Minidisc early, in 1994 or so, and I picked up the smallest portable Walkman unit I could find in addition to a stationary unit MDS 320 at home. The neat thing with the MDS 320 remote control was its keyboard. It had all the letters of the alphabet so adding titles became a breeze. My main motivation to ditch compact cassettes, which I had a large collection of was audio quality and skippable tracks. This was a HUGE improvement over cassettes! Downloading music from Napster and Limewire etc had its own drawbacks: slow download speeds over home modems, risk of downloading something else (viruses), and the music files' audio quality was sometimes poor. Most likely, the music industry tried to poison the well by uploading garbage content. Looking back, the effort needed to just listening to your own playlists (mix-discs) were far more involved than todays streaming options where you simply search the artists or songs you like and drag them into a list and you're done
Very smoothly-edited and exquisitely detailed documentary. For us, it covered a period in our lives we had experienced as average consumers, not technophiles, so it provided a wide tapestry for understanding. Your lighting, graphics and close-up was superb.
Grown up in Japan (starting from casette), I was fortunate to enjoy the full life cycle of Mini Discs. I especially love the size of the disc, it feels so great.
I personally am, due to some reasons, I use the minidisc player for moderate mastering due to a more stable nature.
and it actually also reminds me a bit of like a floppy disk for the pc ha, it was a great format, it still a great shame it didn't take off more and be more of a success, I think if this had of come about in the mid to late 80's I think it would've take more of a strong hold because at the time the CD would've been relatively new and the MD would've been a good competitive media but I really thought it was a great product
CD was always better. And still king today
@@southerncharity7928 I just hate those scratches on them.
I still love MiniDisc; I'm an avid user of them today to record LPs to extend their life, as I did with cassettes in the 70's and 80's. Great to record live music too! Thanks for this video.
Nice how would you record to them today? You found away to hook up to your computer?
@@JCNOAOU You can record from your computer through a DAC, then into the MiniDisc recorder……
I searched at that time for a good quality RECORDER to record sounds outside. You couldn't use the telephone to record things in high quality. And cassette recorder was very poor quality. So MD was the right thing to go with
Does anyone know where I can pick a mini disc player/recorder. Portable or deck
@@modelq68 You are a little late in the game, a decade ago, people were literally giving them away for free! Now everyone wants $400+ minimum.
What a great content! Thank you. I enjoyed it a lot. Personally I always loved the MD. And you are absolutely right if you say that technically the MiniDisc did not fail. The Medium was better than the CD. But to not invest initially a lot of money by lowering the prices to make the product available for the target group they started a struggle that eventually lasted until the iPod changed everything. As someone who grew up with tapes it is crazy to realize that the iPod also is now history for many years.
Your coverage of the MiniDisc just wowed me with that level of detail to the point of even covering rival media and the whole rise of MiniDisc to the present
Wow, that part about music kiosks where you could buy individual songs was mind-blowing to me, it's like a predecessor to iTunes
The big change was moving to all songs being sold that way. 45's you could buy the hit song and that way didn't have to pay for an album.
Yup, the same thing occurs to me. That was a genius way to combat piracy, by making music accessible and cheap enough that the inconvenience of piracy became unattractive. They just didn't understand that the internet is an even more convenient and powerful method to do the same thing.
In 2004 Seattle was one of the test market cities for Starbucks' Hear Music kiosks. You could choose from about 200,000 songs. You picked out the songs you wanted from any artist for one dollar a song. When you paid with your credit card, it would burn a cd for you. (Instant cd mixtape!) They provided the blank disk. I saved hundreds of dollars getting back catalogue "greatest hits" from artists I whose albums I would never have purchased. Who needed Napster?
FYI the Independent record label that sold music for Minidisc via Kiosk which is written in the news is avex trax who popularized many Japanese top singers like Ayumi Hamasaki (She was queen of Jpop in late 90s to early 2000s) , Amie Namuro, Exile, Da Pump even K-pop star BoA (Avex Trax is SM Entertainment partner in Japan) in mid 90s to early 2000s. Most of its consumers were millenials who were still pre-teens and teens in that years, so cheap music purchasing via Kiosk is very logic marketing movement.
Minidisc was my fave for recording from vinyl in the day and still is to me a portable game changer NEVER failed. the industry hated the fact you could record digitally from vinyl...I felt like James Bond was given a devise from Q.
tascam dat. brings back so many memories. since 93 ive only seen one other mini disc user. loved the portable recorder. i still have hundreds of disks that i recorded church services and they are as tho you are there.... even tho its over 20 years
Ive got a minidisc player / recorder. The huge problem with the format was simple. The price. To buy the media it cost a bomb. Every time Sony tries to corner a marketplace with their tech it seems to always end in a train wreck
Came here to say this. I remember buying my first player @ 11 or 12, because the propriety patent was finally lifted. I bought a Sharp player/recorder. I remember someone in an electronics store explaining how VHS was inferior to Beta, but VHS blew up because there was not a Sony patent on it. Interesting how they tried to squeeze so hard, that the ended up not getting good tech in the hands of more consumers.
It's a pattern of theirs. The same problem occurred with UMD and the Vita memory cards. I can't say much on the subject of the Vita cards but their tech nearly always has something that makes them better than the competitor but the price is always so prohibitively high that they ultimately fail to sell. I, like many people, like to think we're willing to spend that bit more for better quality but circumstances rarely allow for that mentality so cheaper wins more often than not. And it's a shame really because I still think MD is a better media storage platform than CD.
Sony pushed people to mod the psp and vita just so we can use standard micro sd cards instead of their proprietary memory🤠
compared to other alternatives it really was not expensive!
Have you heard of BluRay discs?
I have never use or buy a Mini disc to play music in my life, and this video still made me sad, specially when Mini disc gotten replaced by the iPod even after trying so hard against it's previous competitors to hold it's ground on the market. I know it's just a disk, but I felt a bit sad for it :(
I loved the tactile nature of it. You could have a few in the pockets.
As a kid in the 90’s....I had a mini-disc and thought it was the most awesome thing. It sounded much better than cassettes and didn’t skip like “disc-man” CD players. RIP mini-disc
I lived that era. It always intrigued me but could never afford them. Remembered all those formats & the record companies messing it all up.
Am I the only one that never had any mini discs outside of Gamecube games?
No need to be sad, Sony made quadrillion dollars with Blu-ray and gaming software + selling parts to basically the biggest tech companies in the world^^. They have 200B in assets alone. Sony also won the fight vs HD DVD soo yeah
MiniDisk was huge part of my childhood and it was everywhere in Japan back then. It’s surprising to me that it was that expensive in the US. I just don’t remember them being that expensive as pretty much everyone in town had them. Cars audio adapted as well. I kept using them until I moved to the US in 2007 only to find that the world outside Japan was stuck with CD.
everyone in that town musta been a drug dealer. yea, no one had them here. a cheap CD player was all it took to get laid in the 7th grade. also CD sounded sooo much better.
I love my MD player, still use it to record masterclasses. The audio quality is incredible!
Whatever the media is, Even a radio station still relies on the M.O disk and needed software.
My favorite feature is the long recording times you get when you put it in mono mode. I used to record a lot of lectures and mono is ideal for them.
it's ridiculous how this wasn't far more successful, I had a mini disk player but sadly I had to part with it, I needed money at the time :( but in my view the mini disk turned out to be even better than the CD and tapes, so sad it didn't really take a hold that long
@@Robert08010 thx for tips !
You got that right. AMAZING!
I had one of these. I created my own music discs, and would edit on the go as well. It’s all been replaced by my phone, but I thought this was the greatest invention ever.
I still have my Aiwa MD Recorder/Player with all the accoutrements and I love it. It's a great portable player/recorder for all kinds of things. Thanks for putting out this history of the MD that I had no idea about. I got into the MD in the early 2000's so I was kinda late but it has served me well for 20yrs although not as much when the iPod's came out. It was my main recording gear until the phones got good enough to take it's place.
Thank you for this excellent review. I owned so much of this gear! I was just starting my career in music and remember how exciting these years were. This review does a marvelous job at reminding us how transitory tech can be and how blind the music industry has been to disruption. Your point about “cassettes being good enough,” really foreshadows the rise of mp3. I just subscribed and can’t wait to see what you talk about next!
Every gig and concert I went to back in the day I had my MD and stereo mic up my sleeve. I remember leaving concerts and listening to them on the way home. They were also great for multitrack recording before computers made it possible at home. I used to use a minidisc and stereo VCR with metal tape running through my old 8 track mixing desk to layer tracks one at a time. Years of fun and creativity.
Imagine a crossover episode with Techmoan, LGR, 8bit Guy, Modern Classic, This Does Not Compute, Mr Carlson Lab, VWestlife and Technology Connections
TC will find a way to bring the topic back to latent heat
Thank you for some new names.
The Tech-vengers?
Don't forget Marche Minidisc! It's a new channel but very promising.
@@gluttonousmaximus9048 you're right. I would also include tech tangents.
I once had a player and some discs. For me, still the best audio format up to today. I used it so much
I had a walkman type Minidics recorder late 90s or so. I loved it. But once writable CDs came along, never looked back. Blank MDs were expensive if I recall. Maybe my first time watching this channel, excellent piece.
"Track Mark" was a great feature of the mini disc. This allowed you to split an audio file with the click of one button. I listened to a lot of DJ mixes and this allowed you to split the mix up into separate tracks. This was an amazing feature in a time where the only way to navigate long mixes was to literally hold down forwards or backward until you got to your desired location.
@Sister Mary Clements maybe it was a feature only on certain models but mine which was a sony it was located on the front panel and titled (T. Mark)
MD was a very useful format. You could also remove Track marks to combine tracks. Once I literally track marked a song and lifted the second chorus and moved it to the end of the 1st verse. Incredibly bulletproof format as well. I work as a live sound engineer and this was vastly more flexible than DAT and way more reliable than MP3. Great to record on live too. I never a once had a glitched recording on MD.
I used that feature too on my minidisc recordings! It was a great feature. I still have all my discs and players.
I've been looking for a similar feature to this with .mp3 - is there a software put there that does this WITHOUT an audible? I've got stuff that will split mp3s into tracks, but every player program I put it into has an audible bump or slight pause switching between tracks.
@@Nehesi You'd probably need some kind of software which allows you to set the fade in and fade out amount. If you split audio without a fade in and fade out amount, you will get an audible click or pop where you have cut the audio. The solution is to add a small fade in and out point, I'm talking like milliseconds or less, this will remove the pop and the listener won't be able to pick up on the fades as they are too quick to be audible.
MiniDisc was the format that actually made recording and listening _fun_! Unlike cassettes it sounded good, and unlike mp3 players it felt like I was being part of the process. Well-researched and well-made, it was a pleasure to watch!
Fun? Did you ever use Sonicstage? It was a chore. It was slow and buggy and transferring music to Minidisc took forever. I regretted buying my Minidisc player because of Sonicstage.
@@mikelovesbacon I actually never had a NetMD, so I recorded all my discs much like you would record a cassette tape. I however used Sonic Stage for making Atrac3-CD:s, and it worked fine for me (but it might have been a different program than the NetMD one).
Sonicstage is fine, of course it was a bit slower to copy than an MP3 player but still faster compared to recording from analog. Although I guess conversion times that are minimal now might have been a bit longer on a celeron back then... BTW with HiMD the transfer is a LOT faster.
Great little article, very informative, as an owner of various minidisc player/recorders, it clarified pretty much everything I needed to know about the format and its use and usable lifespan.
Excellent video that can easily compete or even surpass a professional documentary. Great source of info, clear narration, objective approach.
I was living in Japan when the MD came out and I still have some along with a portable player. I had a MD player in my car that you could load 3 MD's in and a unit in my home to record with. Great format and was very useful at the time.
The size and enclosed format always seemed like a natural for a dash unit but I never saw one in California.
A buddy of mine got one for free. His uncle what's a car dealership and a Pro snowboarder return to lease vehicle with a bunch of aftermarket stereo equipment in it
MDs, not MD's.
I Was Stationed In Korea When These MD Players Came Out - Recorded Some Good Music In 1999/2000 - Good Memories
Same i was there too. Huge amount of choice for car stereo and portable. I used to be fascinated in Japan by the phones then too as it was years ahead of everywhere really. I remember seeing the first Bluray players in Akihabara and Sato Musen and Bic Camera. Not the same now though over there it's pretty much as anywhere now if not behind what you see in Shenzhen or Seoul sad to say.
I just remembered: one of my band mates at that time actually had a device that allowed you to record 4 single audio tracks on MD in parallel, making it a portable 4 track mini studio!
I had a yamaha 8 track home studio that used MD. Good times.
I used to use my mini disc to bounce down tracks from my yamaha cassette 4 track. There was little loss of quality and it actually added a desirable compression to the sound. It required careful mixing from the cassette 4 track but you could keep bouncing to mini disc and then back to two tracks RL on the 4 track leaving two more tracks for overdubs. Keep repeating the process and you had cheap Beatles style recording.
@@slimsantilli4476 That is even better!, I remember us having to mix Drums and Bass to have 3 tracks left for 2 guitars and vocals
@@mancuniancandidatem cool and very inventive!
I totally dug my portable MD recorder/player! I ALWAYS recorded band practice. It was an incredible tool! I was sad when my unit died, so many fond memories
I revisit this video often. Not just for the content but the presentation and thought behind it is outstanding!
As a live and studio engineer in the 2000's, I used MD HEAVILY! I loved it for all of the reasons mentioned in the video, but mostly for its stability. Virtually no crashes. I even owned a Yamaha MD8. MD deck and cart style players were common place in fixed install theaters. I would take two on the road with me when i would tour, a primary and a back up, running simultaneously. Good days.
Used to use these in the studio as well
They still are used...the world moves towards flac and wav, but players still have problems - bitrates, versions, card formats, drive file systems, you never know if it will work if you don't have your own equipment...with other formats it's even worse.
Observations and Notes: 1. I really thought Minidiscs were the future, and my friends and I agreed that eventually they would hold films and music videos. 2. I loved all the different colours they came in. 3. I have always refused to get rid of my player, discs and blank disks, although I often scratch my head as to what use I can put them to now. 4. Yes, Format Wars are so boring and jade the pallet of the consumer. 5. I must congratulate this channel on it's excellent, well produced content. ❤❤
Parabéns a vocês, por te feito parte deste tempo bom.
Eventually they did, in the form of sony's psp game system. The disks were the same size. I bought allot of movies on that format.
you and your friends musta been rich cats. ain't no one could afford that knarly sht back then. and it was a bad CD, with its weird lossy quality. it was literally OG mp3. and people paid a ton of money for it?? naw. (read in Rick Ro$$ voice) you and friends done tripped up.
I still use 2 mini-disc home decks and a portable mini-disc recorder. I record concerts with a mini stereo mike and my Sony Recording Walkman. I use the home decks to listen to my recordings and pre-recorded discs, and if my friends get CDs and have one that they particularly like, I borrow it and dub it to mini-disc, not usually to keep, but to see if I like it, and if I CAN find it on CD,( I have large CD and vinyl record collections and if I like music, I collect physical copies because one day streaming services might go broke or start doing large scale withdrawal of your favorite music from their services. Look at the fine print in your streaming service agreement and they do retain that right, EVEN if you have paid for the music.) and if not, then to either keep on MD or to record over if I dont care for it. Basically, I use it like I used my Nakamichi cassette recorder to record record albums(vinyl and later, CDS) for use in the car and when walking around in my Walkman, and evaluation of records recommended to me by friends. Those needs have not dissipated over the years as I am kind of a music freak. If you ever do decide to get rid of your equipment and discs, let me know.
I copy CDs to mini disk, including vinyl records, I source from my Library and friends! I have had CDs which have failed in the past and vinyl records which have been scratched. My mini disk player, and disks after 30 years still plays perfectly!
Thank you for your contribution by summarizing the life time of this fanantastic media carrier.! Was enjoying your overview and views about the format over time. Ive adopted the MD sinds 1992, bought the second recorder developed by Sony the R2, and since then recorded many many discs. To be used portable, at home and in car. Several devices are trashed due to plastics and mechanics getting old, but I still having at least 10 working decks including the MDS-JA333ES and the MDS-JA30ES, MDX-D3 and many other portable devices at home, and appr. 1000 MDs, Im still a fan for and the format but also about Sony to keep the format alive as long as possible. Note in all these years, I've only had one defective disc. The format is reliable beyond limits.
I've been a music consumer for 55+ years in the US and have never heard of a few of those formats like DCC. Excellent production!
I am from the UK and when I was at High School around 2000 everyone in my year got minidisk players. The optical output on the PS2 was a big driving factor. Even now when we reminisce about our school days my friends and I always talk fondly of the minidisk.
I moved to Japan in 1998, got one of these, and absolutely loved being able to share music without the increase in tape hiss. I do recall that asking to share an album was more of an ask than if it were cassette, because you were asking to get exactly what your friend may have paid for, rather than a slightly degraded copy.
Yeah, Japan only needed them
This video is so well produced. The quality of the content, narrative, research, footage... is UNMATCHED! New subscriber. Congrats.
Ooh, I remember the MD. I had an MD player in my car with a hi Fi system that costs over $10,000, a recorder/player and many MDs. Made my own music and loved how it sounded back then. I still have the player’s pouch and charger but can’t find the player or any discs now. It was quite rare back then here in Singapore.
Long ago when I worked in radio, MD was the format of choice, especially for on-location recording (interviews, etc) due to the combination of portability and incredible audio fidelity. I love MDs, editing audio from them was a breeze and the resulting audio was always top notch.
Use to use them for voice over work and on-hold music for client phone systems, but radio and broadcast was where they shined (and some are probably still chugging away).
I watched a 40 minute documentary on a topic i never really cared about and liked it. Interesting
Because it's a good documentary, just not in the content it's of (for you)
36 minutes ago I was laughing at you 🤣
This was such a great format in most respects. I used it to record music I was creating on my friends PC back in 1998 or so. We used it to record CDs as well, since CD burners were still kind of rare for most of us. The sound quality was great and the ability to mark chapters and so on was just coolness.
I still use it today to mix my own music, as I did back in the 90s. Still a fun toy to me.
I used a MiniDisc to play backing tracks for a performing group I was in. It was awesome, precise cueing, flexible and easy to use.
The A/B erase function in mini disc format was PRICELESS I spent loads of time editing live band rehearsals easily Even turning long jams into comprehensive songs
Live entertainment was the place that this format really shown. I worked for multiple modern dance and theatre companies in the late 90s and early 2000's when CDR was unpredictable and cassette to inflexible and imprecise. MD was the only format that made my job remotely feasible.
I have to get a Full size Md Deck
@@mattheweggleton493 I have 50 unused , and a bunch burned that i have to go thru from a band i had left in 2003 Then a band i was with around 2013 The earlier band , we used 4 mics on the rehearsal room , into a mixer , then thru an EQ and a BBE sonic maxamizer It really worked well The latter was a portable with the Sony Stereo mic Not tooooo shabby at all Cheers
@@matthewotremba9230 I still have my MD deck and Net MD Walkman
@@chay3003 i have 2 mini recorders And one mini player Went thru 3 or 4 decks They were problematic
I still have my mini disk receiver/recorder, 8 mini disks, and the original mini disk player. Also still rerecording on the disks to this day. Such an awesome piece of hardware that was really ahead of it's time.
a future that never came, lol
Me too. Still got the original Sony MDR-G52 headphones that I purchased with it. Still sounds great.
Excellent documentary! Very carefully researched and with a nice commentary. I'm still using full size MD player/recorders for things like pre-show music and sound effects in my audio engineering business. I have them rack mounted and they are in constant use, well over 20 years on. The format was of such good audio quality and practically bulletproof, that it was widely used in the European professional music industry and was frequently the desired format for backing tracks at live events. I also had a few of the pocket sized versions, but these succumbed to over-use as the years went by. I remember coming to the US in the mid 90's and people were fascinated to see this format which we were using for backing tracks and recording our live performances. Later, my American wife ended up being the coolest among her circle of friends because of her MD Walkman! I have never give up on the possibility that the format may resurface some day, especially among music industry professionals. Again, thank you for a great documentary.
I loved minidisc. I had portable players and an Aiwa cd/minidisc boombox. When I was a college radio DJ we would use minidisc to use in the studio for recording and playback purposes.
Thanks for the history lesson! This led me to digging out my old portable MD recorder. In it was a disc with 20 year old recordings of me jamming with a friend. I remember recording it with a cheap mono microphone or even headphones plugged into the mic port at times. Great memories. I couldn't have done this with CD and I doubt it would have lasted so long on MC.
I lucked out, found five or six blanks and one that’s crammed with tunes from middle school, quality is great and the build quality of the damn thing is still impressive.
I dug out my old MD recorder last year, just in time to hear the recording I made of the Brood X 17-year cicadas in the Eastern US last time they were around (2004), right before they returned in 2021.
That was me and my friends as well! Still have dozens of MD’s with us jamming on them. I still remember buying the recorder package from Guitar Center, it came with a stereo mic that you plugged into the recorder.
Was so useful doing recordings. Couldnt believe it when it ended. Then I had loads of recordings in their locked format.
I use to record the music from late night Pages From Ceefax onto minidisc years ago. I had so much fun with the format, and would carry my MD player with me everywhere.
Watching this gave me so much nostalgia of my years with MiniDisc!
What a great video. I remember when Sony was KING of COOL electronics from the 1970’s into the mid/late 1990’s. There stuff used to be of very high quality as well. Metal construction with actual screw. I sure wished that they still made all of the small portable high end products like they used to. Sony used to have a really cool magazine call “In Style - Sony Style” or something like that from the late 1980’s, maybe early 1990’s to the late 90’s as I recall. They even had articles of possible future high end electronics. Man, I miss Sony, especially my old Trinitron’s. :^)
Great video. Brings back some great memories of a great format. But tech is tech we naturally move to the next best thing. Those anticipated trips to Tottenham Court Road, the London tech street of the time. Sorely missed.
I'd argue that minidisc was no failure, it just had a rather short period when it was the right thing.
It failed spectacularly in the west. Sony spent hundreds of millions of dollars marketing Minidisc in the US and Europe, and sold virtually no units there. They never recouped even half what they spent on launching it.
Solid state memory storage was advancing rapidly during that time frame which ultimately became the future and current format. It was the best format available for digital record and playback at the time.
Short? They were on the market for almost 30 years!!
As a Composer and Musician, obtaining one of these recorders and 10 discs in the early 2000's changed my life completely. The quality of the recordings is astounding. My previous recording machine was a Teac 4-track tape-recorder...no comparison in quality, ease of operation, portability, etc. Getting new discs became a problem so I stopped using it. EDIT:. .I went to Google recently and discovered that discs are abundantly available, new and used. Apparently Japan really used this format.
Both formats failed to become the dominant format.
@@markvarley2962 I could, but the question really is "would" I and the answer is "Why would I?" Since completing 5 years of college as a Music Composer major I've spent the last 50 years doing my best to forget everything I was taught about composing. I don't like rigid form, formula music.
I wasn't able to afford one of these let alone find one in the US until around the time the format had basically died. The portables were really cool though!
@@Enonymouse_ I was lucky...I found mine and 10 discs when clearing out the apartment of a deceased friend whose family wanted me to put all his belongings in a dumpster.
If only quality virgin 1/4”, 1/2”, and 2” tape was as abundantly available. Sadly, vacuum tubes are becoming as difficult to find. I’m even hearing stories of people gutting classic tube amps solely to part them out for the tubes.
I had a blue netmd player in college and loved it. It was a amazing device back then. It even had a optical input. My favorite thing about it was the sound the little door made when you closed it. Also it seemed to run forever on 1 AA battery. Great video!
Man I absolutely love these videos. So well produced! I was born in the 1990s. I have no memory of MDs. I remember tapes, floppys, zip disks, CDs, flash drives. I remember trying to mow the lawn with a CD player in my pocket and the tracks skipping. My first iPod was the shuffle because it was cheap. I was and still am a nerd. But I have absolutely no memories of the MD format. Tape->CD->HDD iPod->flash iPod->iPod Touch/smart phones and now streaming is how I remember the evolution of portable and at home music.
Wow, this is a really well-researched, well-produced piece! I learned waaaaay more than I expected to. Definitely going to see what else this channel has to offer.
I totally agree and I Subscribed Straight away because of the Research and info👍
This was wonderful! I still have my minidisc player and about 40 minidiscs laying around. I’m happy to be apart of history. You did a great job!