What the fuck was the point of this piece of shit format?

humiliation ritual

>>106112567 (OP)
Didn't the psp use this?

>>106112567 (OP)
small size was the norm back then, everything was SMALL

>>106112599
IT'S SMALL

>>106112596
PSP used the UMD, completely different format.

>>106112613
Oh, what even used this format? I don't remember every seeing one of these things, except in Men in Black.

>>106112567 (OP)
To make mp3 fags seethe

>>106112567 (OP)
every few years sony would invent a new digital format and every time they got heat from the recording industry about "piracy".
>piece of shit format
it was the poor man's substitute for DAT and ADAT but it was never shit. it was pretty awesome at the time. only downside was the shitty compression and it took twice as long to write data as it took to read it.

>>106112596
nah. the minidisc was magneto-optical, the psp used UMD - 100% optical, similar to dvd.

>>106112621
They had a walkman that used them I think it was called the diskman or something like that

>>106112621
UMD format was popular for about 5 minutes after PSP was released and sales fell off a cliff. the PSP was the only device i know of that supported UMD - yet another digital format invented by sony that was thrown on to the bonfire.

>>106112621
They sold quite a few decks, portables, and car stereos for them circa like 93-03. I think it never really took off in America, it was really expensive and came in between tape and cheap recordable CDs so nobody really bothered with it. I still have my dad's old JB930 and he says it was like ~$900 when CD players were becoming much more affordable

Ability to record (relatively) high quality digital audio on a portable device.

>>106112567 (OP)
looked cool

>>106112644
>it took twice as long to write data as it took to read it
Really? I thought they could encode from PCM or an analog line in real time. Or at least the later Type R models.

>>106112649
Nah, we had discmans before this, they just used regular cds

>>106112567 (OP)
I have no idea. I always thought they looked super cool but never had any. As I understand, the main point was that it was a recordable digital format?

>>106112621
Pretty sure it was quite popular in some regions, they made a lot of portable players / recorders and even some hi-fi style components I believe.

>>106112567 (OP)
Royalty fees

Using less plastic that will fucking rot and shed and leave everyone with 7g of microplastic in their brains.

>>106112724
magneto optical is a two pass process, involves writing to the disc first with a 0 bit and then writing the data bit.

>>106113083
I thought it worked the same way as a tape deck. In record mode, the erase magnet is turned on ahead of the write head meaning you don't have to run the tape twice to erase then record. MD use a similar process, no? Laser heats and erases disc, magnet records data on the same pass?

>>106112567 (OP)
to replace cassette tapes. stop being retarded

>>106113283
Did it really though?

>>106113338
>easily fits in your pocke...ACK
yes they did, stop being retarded

>>106113361
You must be european. Filtered

>>106112567 (OP)
you find some techno dj guy, for some reason they worship this

>>106112642
kek

Hi everybody. I have autism. The real deal. I obsess about shit like this. So allow me to go on an autistic tangent about the entire history of portable music playback. You can't tell the story of Minidisc without getting to the bottom of where it fits in with everything else. Don't worry I won't waste too much time on the less relevant parts.

The key word here is compromise. Every fucking thing we used in different periods of time had to compromise something in order to make portability possible and practical. Let's start with tapes. Obviously a pocket sized tape deck isn't going to compare with some Nakamichi deck. Those things were made to be cheap and mass marketed. It got the job done. But I have memories of what was so bad about it. "Never put me in your box if your shit eats tapes" What a painful lesson to learn. Your $10 original tape of the Space Jam soundtrack unspooled by your shitty Jensen walkman clone so badly that just a pencil is not going to be enough to get all the tape back into the shell. Pain.

Portable CD players exist at this time, of course. But they skip like a motherfucker. You just look at the son of a bitch wrong and it fucking skips. This technology improves with each passing year but it has a dirty secret:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE-yWfkWv_A

To make this possible on later models the audio was converted to a lossy format in real time then buffered into RAM. Once again a compromise for convenience and practicality. This guy who made the video is a dumb iToddler and he has a hilarious iToddler moment in the video but it's well researched and the math checks out so it's worth a watch. Don't blame me if you click on it and your YouTube algo starts recommending you a thousand videos of him fangirling about shitty old Apple products that flopped.

Will follow this up with my thoughts on Minidisc.

>>106112567 (OP)
I only know about it because of Resident Evil type games. There was always some disk like object you had to get. Even then,for a long time I thought it was just something they made up for the games.

>>106113375
MD had the biggest popularity in Japan.

>>106113454
Now Minidisc. It's a very Japanese format. Made for the nips. It worked in their favor but was relegated to niche uses outside of Japan. Allow me to explain why this is. In Japan going to the store and buying a new CD would cost you $30. They fucking raped them on that shit. But since the 80s they had record rental shops, which later rented out CDs. Just like a video rental shop. You see where this is going? The Japanese recording industry hated this and tried as hard as they could to shut it down. They failed. As another poster mentioned earlier Sony kept making formats like this that pissed off the record industry. It's funny because they also are a major part of the record industry. As the video I linked mentioned correctly the company is very compartmentalized. The different divisions of Sony were basically rivals. They did not cooperate. They saw each other as competition.

So imagine what this means as a nip. You go to the store and buy a nice CD player that has toslink or whatever and can link up with a minidisc deck. You can copy your rented CD over to the minidisc. Then you return it to the shop. Massive cost savings. If you watch Techmoan's videos where he bought massive lots of used minidisc players from Japan you can see the results of this. People's personal minidiscs were sometimes in the players. But it also highlights something else obvious. In Japan there were minidisc players made by different brands. It was a huge market segment. Outside of Japan they are just sold by Sony. This is because people who wanted to make digital recordings of their live performances, like musicians or, as >>106113417 gets at DJs would find this portability very useful.

>>106113361
I have hands, I live in a secure country where I don't need both hands free in case some nigger tries to rob me.

>>106113417
The amount of recording, playback, and editing functionality they put into some of the late-model decks still baffles me. Super easy to delete tracks, rearrange them, edit them. I think mine has a PS/2 port so you can plug in a keyboard to name tracks without fumbling with the remote. It's an ideal DJ format.

>>106113338
People only started making their own CDs once home computers and widespread internet access became common. Minidisc still held an advantage for people who wanted a reasonably priced device that could make recordings. Sony's attempts to turn it into an mp3 player competitor mostly fell flat though. It was hampered by both their shitty software, which is still hated by people who need to use it for the purposes of archiving MDs, and the fact that you would download mp3s from the internet then they get converted to ATRAC. So think of it like this, Sony was very early to this market with a futuristic idea of how portable audio would be consumed yet slow to catch up to what was actually demanded by the market when it became more than just a niche.

>recordable with your Walkman, unlike a CD
>random access, unlike tape
>better quality than tape, arguably at CD parity for normies
>long play (lossy compression) fit 4x of a CD on one disc
>different disc designs/colors

The downsides were that recording was always real-time, and the connections were analog. But the units were small, interviewers, researchers, journos could interview people in the field with great audio quality.

This was in the 99-00 era where storage was barely measured in GB, especially on portable devices. The format was quite widespread in Europe and Asia.

Amerisharts still had to pay to receive SMS on their mobile phones at that time, I believe, so your tech adoption curves looked radically different due to your "free economy". I'm not surprised you missed out on this.

>>106112567 (OP)
>could be moved around and handled without damaging the disc

Only thing I can think of why they would make this.

>>106113599
It was available in the US. I saw ads for it on TV. I saw it in electronics catalogs. I totally wanted one as a child but there was no way I was going to talk my parents into buying me one. Few people bought one.

Data storage

>>106113454
>>106113502
based effortpost

>>106113599
>your tech adoption curves looked radically different due to your "free economy". I'm not surprised you missed out on this.
Americans went straight from tape to CDs because there's virtually no reason an intermediary format had to exist. Sorry you were so busy sucking Sony's cock.

>>106113642
There were some good reasons. I didn't state this in my long ass post. The iToddler kinda implied this with his video but didn't state it either. Skip protection on a portable player that relies on optical media requires RAM to buffer into. In the 90s at the point when Minidisc was introduced the technology was getting better on CD players, but think about it, by introducing a lossy codec with more compression than those chips in CD players could achieve the amount of audio that is able to be buffered in the same amount of RAM at the same cost is higher. Therefore Minidisc achieves superiority.

>>106112567 (OP)
This is a stopgap technology, between portable cd players and mp3 players.
Superseded by microdrives (hdd) and flash memory and they are much faster than writing on minidiscs. And noname mp3 players were easier to use since big brands wanted to open their own music stores and had to gatekeep by implementing proprietary (crappy) transfer software.

>>106113766
I owned lots of portable CD players and mp3 players. I didn't say too much about the mp3 players because I don't think it's as relevant. Minidisc was as good as dead by the time the iPod became popular but CD players were still widely used in that age. My personal opinion is that redbook CD audio (16 bit 44.1 khz) is perfect. Every regression from it was a practical technical concession to deal with both bandwidth and storage limitations. These limitations are rapidly disappearing. I still encode lossy files for my phone but I predict in 2-3 years that will seem pointless to me.

>>106112567 (OP)
to look really fucking cool. This should make a comeback. I want hotswappable disks like this so I don't have to open my case anytime I want to increase storage or replace a dead drive. 2tb disks in this form factor will dominate the market overnight.

>>106113882
So like a USB flash drive? Or an SD card?

>>106113135
> Laser heats and erases disc,
basically:
> heat disc with laser
> this creates 0 bits
> heat disc with laser again
> use electromagnet to reverse polarity to write shit
> write 1 bits
which gives you your two passes.

>>106113898
yes, but in disk/floppy disk format.

I almost got caught stealing this from Target like 15 years ago. Never even used it since the minidiscs remained rare. I thought i was stealing the next big thing

Maybe it was 20 years ago idk

>>106114014
>I thought i was stealing the next big thing
you were, but the music industry absolutely hated it. my old friend spent $1k on a brand new (at the time) minidisc recorder for his studio but the discs cost too much money. i did warn him and recommend the adat recorder that used svhs or something and had multiple tracks. oh well.

>>106113594
At my school, MD had some popularity for a few years while it replaced the bigger portable CD players, before it got replaced by MP3 players.

>>106112567 (OP)
More compact and better sound quality than cassettes.

>>106114014
>I thought i was stealing the next big thing
It was the next big thing 30 years ago.

>>106112567 (OP)
I'm so thankful my parents were early adopters of CD in the 80s.

>>106113454
>i am autistic
>nigger-tier raget about apple completely out of nowhere
Like peaches and cream.

>>106114180
If you are offended by basic jabs at iToddlers this isn't the board for you.

everything has been inferior since the wax cylinder

>>106114148
mine too. my father was obsessed with audio tech and would get new stuff every few years. he stopped giving a shit when we got to affordable hard disk recording and said nothing is going to beat that. that was 25-30 years ago. he was right. we're still recording onto hard disks at amazing quality.

>>106112567 (OP)
It was more convenient than CDs to make portable players and car headunits that used single din. That's pretty much it but it worked well for those applications.

>>106112567 (OP)
t. zoomer

>>106113599
>and the connections were analog
Akshually...

>>106113454
> audio was converted to a lossy format in real time then buffered into RAM
the cd audio is lossless and was not compressed in the buffer. the data is raw cd audio, enough for a few seconds using a 1mb or more of ram, depending how much of a buffer they want. are you high?

>>106114550
Watch that video and learn. Early portable CD players had a shorter buffer but later cheap chips to convert the audio to ADPCM in real time were available to all manufacturers. It was widely used in portable CD players because it allowed them to buffer more audio providing better skip protection while still keeping the products cost effective.

>>106114496
My family was the first in our town with a CD player for the car. Made the poors seethe.

>>106112567 (OP)
They were like MP3 players but in 1992. Pretty damn neat, higher quality than walkmans, smaller in size, you could skip tracks instantly like on CDs, etc. They predated both the MP3 format and the availability of CD burners, so if you wanted portable music better than a compact cassette, this was the only way to do so in the 90s.

>>106113599
>and the connections were analog
No, you could use SPDIF from your CD player, it also automatically read track info from it, so you could just start recording, start up the CD, and make a 1:1 copy of it. Unfortunately it was still real time, but you could listen to it while it was playing. That's how we used to record stuff to it.
So again, a mid point between tape and CD/MP3 playback.

>This was in the 99-00 era where storage was barely measured in GB, especially on portable devices.
At that time portable devices measured in megabytes. I think I got a 256MB USB drive at around 2002 and it was the most expensive one. I don't remember what my first MP3 player was at the same time but it was either 64 or 128MB only. And that was in 2002, in 2000 you'd get a fraction of that.

>>106112655
>UMD format was popular for about 5 minutes after PSP was released and sales fell off a cliff
Literley nothing used it except the PSP, It's not like Sony make a portable Music player or an UMD player for your tv. Not that they would ever make the last one since they were also shilling Blu Rays at the time.

>>106113969
I think you're confusing minidisc with something else.

>>106115419
This was my first mp3 player. I wasn't fucking around.

minidisc is objectively the coolest looking music format
the coolest minidisc is cooler than the coolest vinyl record.
i wish someone made a physical player and format inspired by minidiscs and open sourced the schematics. i would unironically buy new physical media in a format like this even if it was just a flash memory cartridge with some sort of mechanical flap.

>>106112567 (OP)
looks cool and futuristic
I wanted a minidisc player back in the day
even tho I had no real usecase

>>106112567 (OP)
Mainly another example of Sony attempting to control a market through a standard like IBM , Apple and M$. Also, you could handle them whereas most optical media scratched if you looked at it hard because they made the disks out of mylar and hope.

Sony develops groundbreaking new tech that is smaller and more capable than anything else on the market.
Then they tie it to the most absolute dog water memory media that they control the prices of and the device fails. Then they release a gimped version that works with the more popular, cheaper storage options and make some money back. They've done this countless times and would continue to do it if cheap flash memory didn't take off and basically kill the memory wars.

>>106114180
fuck off iToddler

Optical media but small and durable
Then flash media got cheaper and these were phased out
The media sharing aspects were despised by US record labels.
And then they got fucked by limewire anyway lmao

>>106112567 (OP)
>piece of shit format
Was actually a great format, but short lived due to flash coming down in price.
The biggest point against it IMO is that it usually used ATRAC, but I guess it didn't really matter just for listening and was optional on later ones anyway.

>>106112567 (OP)
Companies saw that the CD was overtaking vinyl sales, and they thought they needed a successor to cassette tape as well. They didn't envision people just buying CDs and a portable CD player. Same story with DAT.

>>106115577
No he's not, recordable minidiscs are magneto-optical. The ones you buy with albums on them (kek who the fuck did that?) are just optical though.

>>106115839
Agreed. When I traveled to new places I'd buy blank minidiscs from there. I have a shirt on if different colors.

Sony also released hyper-thin players which could only play, not record. They were barely thicker than a minidisc case. Expensive of course. But really cool.

>>106116336
Yeah didn't they develop some fucking memory stick format for music and stuff? Shit, I had forgotten about that.

>>106113502
quality post

>>106112621
MiniDisc was huge in Japan and the portable music format of choice right up until MP3 players became decent. It never really took off in the West, which preferred CDs, despite them being inferior in most ways (and especially for portable usage).

>>106113642
>intermediary format
CDs predate MiniDisc by an entire decade, you retarded zoomer.

>>106113766
>This is a stopgap technology, between portable cd players and mp3 players
MiniDisc had a longer period of uncontested superiority than dedicated MP3 players did before people switched to their phones, dumbass. It wasn't until the mid-00s that MP3 players were practical in terms of storage size and affordable to most people. MiniDisc released in 1992. That's a long fucking stopgap. It's just ignorant Western pigdogs once again not knowing just how far ahead of them Japan was in the 90s. They spent a decade not having to deal with bulky and annoying portable CD players before smoothly transitioning to the digital music era.

>piece of shit format
It wasn't. Minidisc was a replacement for cassettes, perfect for portable players and car stereos.

But then something called mp3 got popular.

>>106116888
>huge in Japan
>never really took off in the West
Japan is part of the West.

>>106116888
>It never really took off in the West
It was fairly popular in Europe though.

>>106112567 (OP)
It had worse sound than type II cassettes with Dolby B.

Looks cool
unlike modern tech

>>106112567 (OP)
>Best form-factor overall of any CD type
>Durability of a cartridge, storage capacity of a CD (At the time)
>Peak aesthetics

They should bring these back, but make them last longer and have similar storage capacity of the "Very Big Disc" to compete with tape drives.

>>106118116
UMD is better, much more storage on the same sized disc. Shutter is part of the spec and all UMD drives can handle discs with shutters even though they were never mass produced lol.

>>106113338
CD-Rs are a write-once medium. MiniDiscs were a read/write medium like floppy disks. Even CD-RWs can only be rewritten by erasing the entire disk first.

>>106118232
You could have multiple sessions on the same CD-R though. I used to use a Sony portable CD player that supported mp3 files burned onto data CD-Rs. I knew it could read multi session discs so I would update my CD-Rs with new mp3 files as I downloaded them.

>>106112621
I had a minidisc player. It was more compact than the portable CD player I'd had before, and the discs could hold more music, but Sony's proprietary software that you needed to copy music to it was annoying.
The discs also showed up in The Matrix. I think Sony was probably using a lot of money on advertising them. Kind of a weird thing to focus on, when there was basically no way to use them for general data storage. If there was such a thing as a general-purpose minidisc drive for a PC, they sure as fuck weren't advertising those.

>>106118327
There was such a thing but it was a very obscure product.

>>106114014
I got a lot of use out of that thing. I used to use it with a stereo mic for field recording. It was fucking great actually.

>>106116888
>CDs predate MiniDisc by an entire decade, you retarded zoomer.
As a recordable medium, you dumb nigger. Most people didn't start using CD-R until the late 90s because they were so expensive.

Peak jap tech chic, needs no good reason it's just 90s cool.

>>106112567 (OP)
Cool movie prop from The Matrix.

So my mum could record her oncologist appointments.

>>106112567 (OP)
Aesthetic as fuck. Blade Runner like. Matrix like.

>>106116888
Wrong. It was pretty big in Europe too. Everyone I knew had them. I guess you're American.

>>106120196
I hope your mom is OK now.

Someone near me is selling a JE510 for $40. Probably needs work though. I want a JB930 or JB940 but all the ones the past few months have been pretty expensive. Anything I should look out for on the JE510?