Sony To Make Its Last MiniDisc System Next Month 263
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."
Killed by DRM and licensing (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember looking at these in the early 90's. They seemed interesting, but the inability to easily make copies due to idiotic DRM made it uninteresting to me. And I'm sure that Sony was asking absurd licensing fees for others to make players (like the home Betamax days).
And rather than Sony learn any lessons, they have doubled down. For two decades. Is it any wonder their stock and their corporate goodwill are both in the shitter?
Re:Killed by DRM and licensing (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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great hardware, terrible software. this is how sony roll.
That's what they like.
Unfortunately, they haven't made great hardware approximately since the Minidisc era. And Sony has never been able to make an optical drive with a decent lifetime. You're looking at the world through Sony-colored glasses. I bet you think the PS3 was probably too cheap.
Re:Killed by DRM and licensing (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
Sony's use of "MagicGate" DRM on the computer-to-MiniDisc link was inexcusable, as was their removal of line inputs from later MiniDisc "recorders" (so that you had to go through the DRMed computer-to-MiniDisc path). Their decision to separate MD-Åudio from MD-Data wasn't too great, and their slowness in releasing a high-density MiniDisc format (for a long time, they just pushed higher compression rates - LP2 and LP4) didn't help MiniDisc's cause.
They probably could and should have lobbied against the copy protection / DRM, recorder tax, and media tax provisions of the AHRA. Especially given that they bought out the Columbia/CBS studios and record company around the time of the DAT fight. (Hope I'm getting my timeline straight here.)
However, ATRAC in and of itself was not an evil thing. MP3 _players_ came out around - what - 1999? MiniDisc _recorders_ came out in 1992, and they had to be able to compress audio in real-time, not just to decompress it. ATRAC was no doubt designed to allow for real-time compression with the sort of embedded computing power that was available at the time.
Re:Killed by DRM and licensing (Score:4, Insightful)
I wouldn't be surprised if the media arm foisted this insanity on to the consumer electronics arm but it's all Sony as far as the end user is concerned. About the only ray of sanity in Sony was the PSP and PS3 which were pretty standards friendly and still are but even there it's not hard to see signs of interference. e.g. the PS3 has for the last 18 months or so enforced Cinavia audio watermarks which appear in some DVD and Blu Ray discs. Will it stop people ripping discs into media files? Of course not. Instead they'll just buy non-Sony kit to play it on. It's self defeating.
Re:Killed by DRM and licensing (Score:5, Insightful)
The underlying technology of even the original MiniDiscs had the potential to be *way* more flexible and powerful than it was ever allowed to be. By the standards of the early-1990s it had masses of storage and random access, leading to the possibility of file-like transfer of music tracks. Granted, back then- years before MP3s rose to prominence- people didn't consume music as "files" nor have computers powerful enough to do anything with them anyway, and veering too far from the familiar paradigm probably would have confused and scared Joe Public.
However, the potential to handle and transfer tracks in a file-like way *would* have been something people would have liked- if marketed correctly- even then. Instead, they forced people to dub things in real-time and restricted digital copying.
And they could still have marketed it as a data format once established and provided they kept things clear. Had they done that, it may well have replaced the 1.44MB floppy. To be honest, Sony had the *technology* (and storage space) to do some of what MP3 players did almost a decade later, but they forced it into being little more than a digital audio cassette with random access.
Even when they did improve the format and allow some data use, they forced users to play silly buggers with their crappy software and restrictions.
And let's not get into how, when MP3 *did* come along, their self-interest, NIH and arrogance led them to drag their heels to such an extent that a personal computer company (which is what Apple had been up until that point) steal the market for portable audio from the company that had invented the Walkman and led it for 20 years. It's easy to forget how ludicrous that would have sounded in the mid-to-late-90s, but the market was Sony's to lose- they had the technology and the name- but they totally squandered it. They lost that market, and it was no-one's fault but their own.
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> Squandering the potential of MiniDisc through over-zealous DRM, self-interest (and conflict of interest) as well as Sony's general arrogance seems to be its story in a nutshell.
You've hit the nail right on the head! Sony's arrogance will be their down fall. They still haven't gotten over their Apple envy -- here Sony invents one of the most popular music devices -- the Walkman -- and completely fumbles the ball with digital music by allowing Apple to disrupt them! Due to greed one division of Sony wa
Re:Killed by DRM and licensing (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
This is a good description of why Apple was successful with the ipod.
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I knew some people who worked in the industry (as recording technicians, not as artists), and there was a huge depression over everyone. They were worried that music-downloading was going to destroy their jobs, and music, etc. They were basically desperate when Apple came to them and told them how to make money off this new market (remember all they had was Real at the time). It was like Apple had cleared away the clouds and bright sun was sh
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NetMD (Score:3)
Sounds like a NetMD player. Terrible idea. At a time when I was looking at replacing my trusty old MD player which was the staple of my childhood music collection (DRM free mind you since it was of the manually record / playback variety like a tapedeck) the obvious contender was some kind of MP3 player. Then Sony shows up with the abortion that was NetMD. All songs required conversion, it didn't work on any software other than windows, and it was far larger than the competition physically.
Not sure what your
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I'd have probably taken them to Goodwill. In most places, when they get things that nobody wants, they turn around and sell them on eBay or Amazon, and the revenue goes to fund their continuing operations. Plus if you're itemizing anyway, it's a tax write-off.
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You need to balance the time spent vs the reward vs the opportunity cost. The delta of adding item #2 (or #30) to an existing sale is very low, so find someone who's a seller, and trade them say $10 for them. You get a free lunch at the labor expense of perhaps 5 minutes, which is a decent rate of pay, or at least a free drink or two, and they get $20 for an extra 10 minutes labor.
I will say if you're not a seller, the fixed costs of being a seller are a killer. My local post office is at least an hour r
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eBay selling is plenty profitable if you know what you're selling. You can't just sell any shit. Unloading someone's wad of Wii games won't bring shit but you can still get good money for Metroid Fusion, see?
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Every hen has an 'egg tooth' at birth, so not really that rare. (Not easy to prove it's not from a rooster though, and not strictly a tooth.)
Chicken nipples on the other hand...
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The DRM certainly didn't help, but what really killed the minidisc was the introduction of the iPod and other MP3 players. Instead of constantly swapping out discs (each minidisc held 1 CD worth of music) you could just load up your MP3 player with dozens, or hundreds, of CDs. Once MP3 players came along, the minidisc went the way of the cassette Walkman.
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And unlike a lot of the MP3 players, most MD devices could record from analog sources (line input or microphone). Sound quality was pretty good and Hi-MD devices could record uncompressed audio (the downside was that a regular MD could only hold ~20 minutes of PCM recording, Hi-MD discs could hold more).
I still use MD to listen to digital audio when I'm not at home (for analog I use a cassette walkman). I also use it when someone asks me to makea digital copy of ananalog source (cassette, record etc) - I re
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not cheaper than free. if it aint broke dont fix it. if they already own it it makes sense
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The recorders were actually stellar. Problem was just to get out again what you recorded unless you wanted to use the analogue hole. Which, coincidentally, was crappy enough that you could as well just record to a cassette tape.
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One feature I particularly liked (again, ca. 92-93, not a decade later like some are referring to) was the incredible resiliency to skipping. Portable CD players of the time were dreadful for skipping. This by itself may have convinced me to pick up a player if it weren't for the problems I mentioned above.
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DAT decks didn't skip, either, but they DID do digital 'buzzsaw'. mostly due to tensioning issues and using the thin (90 meter and longer) tapes vs the industry standard 60 meter (2 hour) tapes. or if you didn't have a CLA on your deck, you'd get buzzsaw sooner or later.
I'm remembering the sony car DAT deck. what a thing, in its day! it even had remote 10 disc cd changer that you could put in the trunk. the sony car dat was pretty unique and expensive. imagine a spinning vcr-like head in a car system.
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imagine a spinning vcr-like head in a car system. its almost funny now that I think of it.
They'll be saying that about CDs in 20 years.
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You can engineer spinning head type things for bumpy environments. I have a Sony Digital-8 video recorder. It has been strapped to a racing sidecar outfit (with virtually no suspension travel), an extreme vibration environment if there ever was one. The recording didn't miss a beat. (These days I use solid state recorders).
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The DRM certainly didn't help, but what really killed the minidisc was the introduction of the iPod and other MP3 players. Instead of constantly swapping out discs (each minidisc held 1 CD worth of music) you could just load up your MP3 player with dozens, or hundreds, of CDs. Once MP3 players came along, the minidisc went the way of the cassette Walkman.
I know that's what it says in the article and on Wikipedia. But by the time MP3 players came along, MD was already dead. The cassette Walkman went away. Except in Japan, MD never arrived.
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Re:Killed by DRM and licensing (Score:5, Informative)
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This is normal for low quality RW optical media. RW disks are photosensitive media, and exposure to light slowly "kills" them.
Generally, these disks are not meant to last years. Some high quality ones are, but they cost far more then cheap ones that crapped themselves in barely a year or so.
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CD-RW and DVD+/-RW discs are not "photosensitive" in any regard. They are written to by heating spots on the disc with a laser - heat, not light. The material in a rewritable disc is a metallic alloy which has two stable states - amorphous and crystalline. By heating and cooling the material in different ways (slow or fast) the material changes state.
I will agree that CD-RW and generally all RW forms of DVD media are not long-term storage. It is unclear exactly what is happening in the disc but what it
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|| Every time a MiniDisc article gets posted on slashdot, I pull out my collection of players and recordings I made back in the 90s
Wow - every time an MD-related article gets on the front page of Slashdot, I go and buy another MZ-RH1 off of eBay.
Soon the BBC, ITV, et al will come begging for decent recording equipment, when the only stuff available is disgusting, shoddy, yet "good enough for all you idiots" MP3 format. More fool the lot of you. I'd rather work around dirty and awkward DRM, but with a CD-qua
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Correction - for pedants - WMA hasn't deprecated anything. Microsoft has deprecated WMA lossless.
There, fixed that for myself.
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You're silly. These days it'd be way cheaper to have an engineering intern get a development kit of some sort, and turn it into a portable recorder/player. There are plenty of CPU development kits with decent audio A/D and D/A on board or pluggable via USB. Plenty also have SD card slots. You could probably make a decent player/recorder using a beaglebone with a USB audio I/O device, a couple buttons, a small display, and a battery pack. Probably $300 for the whole thing, plus intern's time. It really makes
Re:Killed by DRM and licensing (Score:4, Insightful)
The Canadian software was a lot more lenient on copying mp3s over (converting to AAC). IIRC you could copy an mp3 to devices 3 times before syncing it back as deleted off a device. Stupid limitation when with comparable devices you could make as many MP3 cds as you wanted or copy to mass storage type devices with no limitations. Other huge down side was not being able to get digital copies back off the device via the USB cable. You could use the optical out and record from that, but no drag and drop. It was a great device to plug into a mixer when doing a jam or even a show (high quality recording), but you couldn't easily get the digital file off. You should have been able to just grab it via USB like a comparable device, but that would encourage copyright infringement or something. Normal Sony behavior.
I loved the format. I could have a few different mixes, throw them in my backpack and not worry. Carry an extra battery for when it finally got low and I was good to go. No skipping, pretty small (for the era) and reliable as could be. I really think the DRM and not licensing it were the reasons it never took off. That and not being able to use it as mass storage. In university as a computer science student having that as storage would have been extremely useful. Oh well. One more dead format to add to the pile.
Sony shares are great. (Score:2)
Is it any wonder their stock and their corporate goodwill are both in the shitter?
I suspect any Goodwill is more down to the growth of competing technology form Apple/Microsoft/Samsung as for their shares currently at a third in just months...ironically the same that Apple has fallen in *six*
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Yea, you couldn't extract audio digitally off a MD, definitely not easily, all the consumer level gear wouldn't allow it. So once it was on a MD, you could only record it to something else via analogue.
I didn't use hi md, so im not sure what that was like, but md was a really great replacement for a cassette player, on the basis that you used it in the same ways, ie copied music onto it, made recordings which were better quality, but didn't need to copy over to something else. Once flash started to get chea
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I've got a Sony MD/CD player that will 'high speed' copy from the CD to the MiniDisc. It didn't have optical out to get the audio off my old MDs (mostly copies of my old Vinyl), so I hard-hacked it to add one. I never had one of the NetMD versions. Don't think I would have gotten one of the MDs at all due to the DRM if they started with that crap. One of these days I'll finish copying the MD's to my laptop and eBay the MD/CD box (and the portable MD player/recorder). They were nice tech for the time, b
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drm? you mean scms?
we solved that with DAT using scms-strippers. I was never into MD but I think they did have spdif inputs and outputs, on some models.
but that's not the point. the point is that they used lossy compression and DAT was literal (lossless). so even spdif->scms-stripper->spdif, you still get a less than perfect copy with MD and DCC. with DAT, it was always perfect if scms=00 (the 2 bits that 'stick' once set and let copies go on forever, even using consumer decks).
ah, the DAT tape m
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Re:Killed by DRM and licensing (Score:5, Insightful)
"And rather than Sony learn any lessons, they have doubled down. For two decades. Is it any wonder their stock and their corporate goodwill are both in the shitter?"
Jesus, doesn't anybody here remember any history? Come on, folks, this is so far off as to be just plain BS.
The reason MiniDiscs had DRM in the U.S. (but not Japan) wasn't Sony, it was Congress! The music industry panicked over MiniDisc because it was a "perfect" copy. That meant that unlike cassettes, you could copy endlessly and it wouldn't degrade in quality, like cassette tapes did.
Hrm, that calls for some more history. MiniDisc came out -- in Japan -- before recordable CDs. The recording industry had fought both cassettes and CDs, unsuccessfully. But when faced with MiniDisc they lobbied Congress HARD, and the outcome was that Congress banned the importing or making of MiniDisc players until they implemented a DRM system that limited copying.
SONY at the time was NOT known for DRM. Remember, Sony had, not too long before, fought in court on the other side of the battle, to make sure videotapes were legal.
So it was Congress that is at fault here. Manufacturers wanted nothing to do with creating a DRM system in hardware. And consumers in the U.S., by and large, were uninterested in a DRM-laden system. The result was that it took a good 10 years before MiniDisc was widely available here. You could get them; a few were made with DRM. But they were rare and expensive. And the entire 10 years, Japan used them DRM-free.
So stop blaming Sony. You're pointing your fingers in the wrong direction. It was the recording industry -- and a compliant Congress -- who were entirely at fault.
Citation needed (Score:4, Interesting)
The reason MiniDiscs had DRM in the U.S. (but not Japan) wasn't Sony, it was Congress!
Citation needed. I can find no evidence [wikipedia.org] to support this claim.
Let's examine the timeline shall we?
* In 1987 Sony purchased CBS Records which is renamed Sony Music Entertainment in 1991
* In 1992 Sony introduces the MiniDisc.
So shortly after Sony enters the music business as a content producer suddenly their latest offerings for playing music are loaded with DRM. Almost none of the competing technologies were loaded with similar DRM. The companies that made competing products were not in the content creation business and thus had no internal conflict of interest. When MP3 players came along Sony continued to try to push DRM on their music players despite most competitors lacking similar restrictions. All these were internal decisions to the company that cannot be blamed on anyone but Sony themselves.
And somehow you think this is the fault of Congress?
Re:Citation needed (Score:5, Informative)
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]
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CD-R dates back to 1990 while the MiniDisc was first introduced in 1992 (unless Wikipedia is wrong, that is). It was also apparently released in Japan 1 month before the US release, which points to your story being bullshit or at least wildly inaccurate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-R [wikipedia.org]
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What DRM? My Minidisc recorders all accepted and sent plain ordinary SP/DIF and had a menu option to ignore SCMS which is about the only thing close to DRM. These weren't the high-end ones intended for broadcast and theatre, they were just a plain ordinary MD walkman and MD hifi separate.
It was incredibly easy to copy to and from MD from DAT or from a PC with a soundcard that supported SP/DIF. At the time I was using an SB Live! Value which didn't have all its codecs populated - but the unpopulated ones
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Well, blu-ray was the superior technology in that race... Not great but the better one...
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Yep. I remember not buying one of their tv's due to this 'feature'.
Actually pretty decent (Score:2)
These seemed to be marketed to people who wanted to make mini-disc mix tapes, which seemed weirdly specific and obviously didn't catch on. But they were really good for recording live music and sucking it into a computer. Flash is obviously much better, but MD was around for eons before flash got cheap...
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I remember reading somewhere, long ago, that the minidisc was originally envisioned as a higher capacity replacement for the floppy disc and storage for digital cameras (I once had a Sony camera that stored the pictures on a floppy disk)..
Poor bootleggers will remember mini-disc fondly (Score:2)
There were many of us who couldn't afford the Sony DATs like the M1(MSRP $1,000, sold anywhere between 500-900 used). We loved music and we loved "archiving" it. The mini-disc was a very reliable way to do this and get a reasonably good quality. It was not quite DAT or CD, but it was much better than tape. It was far easier to sneak in that a DAT or tape recorder as well.
This was a pre-smartphone where concert security as at a high. We had to duct/masking tape our mini-discs to the inside of our thigh
Re:Poor bootleggers will remember mini-disc fondly (Score:5, Funny)
logged in ... could edit
Wait, what?
EDIT: Never realised I could do this.
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You can edit? For the longest time, you couldn't.
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Can we edit? I'm just posting this as a test.
Re:Poor bootleggers will remember mini-disc fondly (Score:5, Informative)
No.
Re:Poor bootleggers will remember mini-disc fondly (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Good enough for Neo. (Score:3)
Re:Good enough for Neo. (Score:5, Funny)
The most recognition I ever saw for this was that Neo used them.
popular in a dystopian parallel universe. This makes sense.
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at the time, digital audio for consumers was 3 choices: MD, DCC and DAT. DAT was finicky and expensive. DCC and MD came later and battled it out. DCC tried to get the cassette form factor guys to accept them. no one I knew (I was into digital audio in the 80's and 90's) had DCC. MD was more reliable than DAT, though, in many ways. it was lossy, but it didn't mistrack like DAT did.
for live music tapers (I used to) you could pick MD or DAT. again, most people wanted lossless recording, so we never saw
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...Sony at the time (as usual) was hoping to replace the open CD format with their closed format. It wasn't just about portability. They wanted to sell pre-recorded discs and kill the CD.
I'm amazed it has taken them this long to stop making them... I hope they lost money on it...
Remember that Sony is one of the powers behind the RIAA; the limitations of the MD would have been the result of a deliberate corporate decision to hobble the format. Being able to copy content digitally, accurately, would have been utter anathema to Sony.
And if you don't get the problem with Sony, they have a long, long history of egregiously bad corporate citizenship. This is extensively documented in Groklaw. It's horrible. They love to litigate, and being a customer is no guarantee they'll treat yo
Pity (Score:2)
MOD media (the mini-disk technology) keep data and music reliable for more than half a century. Data on the crappy SSD technology gets shaky after a few years.
Yet another reminder (Score:2)
ATRAC = Pain in the ass (Score:2)
over ten years after the first iPod (Score:3)
over ten years after the first iPod
Statements like this aggrivate me - mainly coming from Apple Fanboys and ignorant masses. Apple's iPod was nothing new or revolutionary. The iPod is 12 years old - but the portable MP3 player is 16 years old. Apple did not even introduce the first MP3 player with a harddrive, it was NOT the largest capacity when it came out, did not work with Windows, and there was no iTunes when it came out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3_player#History [wikipedia.org]
In fact, the iPod did not really even sell that well until around 2005 - roughly 8 years after the first MP3 player came out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Total_ipod_sales.svg [wikipedia.org]
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but it was the first one that did not SUCK. I had a Diamond RIO and it's UI and operation utterly sucked. most everything after that continued to suck in durability and usability until the ipod came out.
Re-write History Much (Score:3)
but it was the first one that did not SUCK. I had a Diamond RIO and it's UI and operation utterly sucked. most everything after that continued to suck in durability and usability until the ipod came out.
I'm always astonished how Apple users feel the need to rewrite history...especially considering the irony. Apple lifted the UI wholesale from Creative. It got know as the 'ZEN' patent, Apple got Creative to go away with $100Million Dollars and the chance to make third party accessories.
http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/05/6838-2/ [arstechnica.com]
It was incredibly popular..... (Score:3)
in the Bootleg scene. Sony Minidisc units were the favorite as they would RECORD. you went into the bar with the binaurial mics in your lapel or headphones and your minidisc recorder. The bouncer searches you and only finds a minidisc player and lets you in. You then record the concert better than the guy at the mixing board.
they were a LOT cheaper to get than a pocket DAT and would get past security a lot easier.
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The bouncer searches you and only finds a minidisc player and lets you in. You then record the concert better than the guy at the mixing board.
I've heard a lot of concert recordings, and I've never heard one that sounds better than a soundboard. That includes Grateful Dead shows recorded on professional mics on a 15' stand going straight to DAT.
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Hey kid, I'd left school behind before Hi-MD existed. Back in the '90s I worked in radio and we used MiniDisc for jingles, station IDs, ads, etc. Far more convenient than the old way of doing it on 30-second 8-track carts. You could have all the samples you needed for a day on two MiniDiscs. The ATRAC compression used on MiniDisc sounded pretty good if you started with a good source, but for some reason re-compressing something that had previously been compressed with MP3 sounded awful. Something about
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I think I retired in the 1990's
I don't exactly remember...
I have poopheimer's. That's where you forget shit.
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We still use a fax machine at my office here in Canada.
I hate that thing, I'd rather just email a PDF, but suppliers still have a fetish for them for product orders.
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We get faxes through a virtual fax number. The service converts them to PDF and emails them to us. Saves a hell of a lot of paper, because most of what we get is spam.
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only Japan has a management culture weird enough to keep pumping money into half-baked products like MiniDisc without anyone batting an eyelid
That's not true. The MiniDisc was a great product, I owned and used one for a long time. In Japan it got a pretty decent success, a MD player was usually embedded in hifi systems, and it was also used to exchange data. One problem if any was the DRM (for MDs having music like CDs).
The main problem that was not mentioned here yet, was the Western protectionism. Western countries wanted to slow down the electronics invasion coming from Japan. MD was not "revolutionary" enough to create a need in Western c
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Minidisk never got a foot hold in the western world because of its DRM nothing else.
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The main problem that was not mentioned here yet, was the Western protectionism.
What? That has to be one of the bizarrest claims I've heard about minidisc.
Minidisc had some decent advantages: smaller than tapes, random access and didn't chew up the tapes. But it was quite expensive. Back when I was at school the quality of ones portable music (i.e. tape) player was a big thing. Almost noone had MD since they were more expensive and the battery life was worse.
The thing is that most people carried around a
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I've even spent the last 6 months borrowing my local library's CDs and ripping them to Mp3.
Something I've noticed with library disks is you really get to see how the seething masses really treat optical media, and it isn't pretty. I have cds that are over 20 years old and still looking good (no aluminum bit rot, thankfully) but the library disks are apparently used by people with sandpaper fingertips. Even my kids can't savage disks like library patrons.
I'm sure its very annoying to have a skip in one musical song, but its infuriating when the last 30 minutes of a DVD is unwatchable or you can
Does this describe Sony? (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't worry, Sony will just create another "god damn fucking piece of shit oh god i hate you sony please die in a ditch" proprietary format.
This describes Apple and Microsoft, Sony by comparison follows standards...Compare and ebook readers; phones; consoles to the competition and you will find standard connectors; standard components; standard formats.
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They are in the recording industry.
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You are funny. I see higher failure rates on Sony products. (Integrator so I see thousands a year) and sorry, but BluRay is not a "very good media" HDDVD was, BluRay is more expensive and chock full of DRM, making it an inferior media.
Are we still talking about this. (Score:2)
sony root kit
sony root kit
Sony got kicked over this 8 years ago, and they deserved to, but today it looks very stupid when every Application on your smartphone not only looks at your music...but looks at everything about you. In fact increasingly we are *forced* to give away your rights...you installed Windows 8 recently.
Reread my post. (Score:2)
"Everyone else does it too" is not a good excuse.
No the point is then *nobody* did it then and Sonys behaviour looked over reaching and abusive; it paid the price. Today any Application on an Apple smartphone does *worse* [including Apples own] and it get a free pass. Quite the reverse is true its not "everybody else does it too" its more "Apple does it not Sony"
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I made the stupid mistake of buying a Sony Cyber-Shot point & shoot camera (that used SONY's own crappy memory format). Worst piece of junk I ever owned.
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Sadly, I'm not sure if this was satire or meant to be a real post.
Android Phone best MP3 Player (Score:2)
It pains me. To see that the mini-disk atrocity, is still being manufactured to date. The Zune, will always be the best media player out there!!
Its kind of odd seeing you odd off-topic post. I do partially sympathise, as I personally found the Salsa Clip the greatest MP3 player of its type, before I got a smartphone.
Here is the thing though the Zune was not very good. It got a free pass by the media, but essentially it was a poor iPod clone [built on Apples model] , late to party, after Microsoft had thrown its *preferred partners* under the bus when Microsoft wanted a bigger (read Apple profits) piece of the pie, with a more mature offering design