Sony To Make Its Last MiniDisc System Next Month

An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports that Sony, the creators of the MiniDisc audio format, are to deliver their last MiniDisc stereo system in March. Launched over 20 years ago in late 1992 as a would-be successor to the original audio cassette, MiniDisc outlasted Philips' rival Digital Compact Cassette format, but never enjoyed major success outside Japan. Other manufacturers will continue making MiniDisc players, but this is a sign that — over ten years after the first iPod — the MiniDisc now belongs to a bygone era."

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[rudy_wayne]

I was going through a closet just today and threw out about 20 blank minidiscs that had never been used.

Several years ago I bought a portable minidisc player. Battery life was terrible. I literally had to carry a couple of AA batteries with me at all times. But even worse was getting music onto the player. There were only two choices -- a program made by Sony that was a complete piece of shit, or, a plugin for Realplayer.

And, for added amusement, transferring songs onto the player from my computer was very slow because they all had to be converted into Sony's propriietary, DRM infested ATRAC format.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[mug funky]

you could install the sony shit and use GraphEdit to wrangle it to your will, but generally it was never worth having to real-time play everything like the analog days.

great hardware, terrible software. this is how sony roll.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[Kenshin]

Battery life was fine on mine. It ran for ages off one AA battery.

Mine wasn't a "Net MD" player, so I got music into it by recording. I had a TOS Link cable out from my sound card, and just played a playlist while it recorded. Ya, it was a bit slow that way, but MP3 players at the time were expensive and very small capacity and CD players were chunky.

Re:Killed by DRM and licensing

[smegfault]

There are no early mp3-players "contemporary with the introduction of minidisc". I had an MD-deck in 1993. The first widely available unit was the Audible.com mobileplayer in 1997 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_media_player#Audible.com_MobilePlayer) which had a pathetic 2MB storage capacity. It took almost 10 years for the price of CD-RWs to fall enough to become a feasible alternative to MDs, especially if you erased and re-recorded a lot like me.

Re:Poor bootleggers will remember mini-disc fondly

[tbird81]

No.

Re:Poor bootleggers will remember mini-disc fondly

[serviscope_minor]

No.

No, of course not. This is not a bug in slashdot or a missing feature, it is a feature.

Much as people like to whine, the comment threads on slashdot are the reason to visit and despite the sometimes dubious quality are better than all but the most special interest forums and of course on a much broader range of topics.

An edit button is not a good match for robust discussions, since people can (and do) go back and change the pos when they get a reply that they don't like, making the replies look odd, and then they get strange replies based on the changed version of the GP's post.

Edit buttons work well for some kinds of forum, especially, the smaller less anonymous ones. On slashdot where people tend to read the posts and pay little attention to the name of the posters I think an edit button would be a bad idea.

There have been many "advanced feature" suggestions made to the slashdot staff over the years which they have not implemented and I'm sure that slashcode isn't the barrier. The reason is that the feature set of slashdot really seems to promote good, robust discussion.

And before anyone claims that the discussion on slashdot is not good: I won't take you seriously unless you can point me to somewhere which is consisently better.

Re:Citation needed

[RattFink]

The parent is right. Back then Sony had a lot of division between the Consumer Electronics divisions and the Entertainment divisions.

By the late 1980s, several manufacturers were prepared to introduce read/write digital audio formats to the United States. These new formats were a significant improvement over the newly introduced read-only digital format of the compact disc, allowing consumers to make perfect, multi-generation copies of digital audio recordings. Most prominent among these formats was Digital Audio Tape (DAT), followed in the early 1990s by Philips' Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) and Sony's Minidisc.

DAT was available as early as 1987 in Japan and Europe, but device manufacturers delayed introducing the format to the United States in the face of opposition from the recording industry. The recording industry, fearing that the ability to make perfect, multi-generation copies would spur widespread copyright infringement and lost sales, had two main points of leverage over device makers. First, consumer electronics manufacturers felt they needed the recording industry's cooperation to induce consumers – many of whom were in the process of replacing their cassettes and records with compact discs – to embrace a new music format. Second, device makers feared a lawsuit for contributory copyright infringement. [1]

Despite their strong playing hand, the recording industry failed to convince consumer electronics companies to voluntarily adopt copy restriction technology. The recording industry concurrently sought a legislative solution to the perceived threat posed by perfect multi-generation copies, introducing legislation mandating that device makers incorporate copy protection technology as early as 1987.[2] These efforts were defeated by the consumer electronics industry along with songwriters and music publishers, who rejected any solution that did not compensate copyright owners for lost sales due to home taping.[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act [wikipedia.org]