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Music Media

Quarter-sized CD's? 384

Posted by michael from the little-disc-big-restrictions dept.
Anonymous Coward writes: "The Denver Post is running an interesting story about Dataplay, Inc. This Boulder, Colorado based company aims to supplant the 20-year-old CD with a quarter-sized (1.5" x 1.25") optical disc that can hold 500 Mb of data. Players and media (already supported by 4 major record labels) are scheduled to launched 'the latter part of first quarter 2002'." They're cute, but considering that Sony's minidiscs never took off and this format is heavily restricted, my guess is that this will fail.
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Quarter-sized CD's? More

Quarter-sized CD's?

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  • Gotta love the picture caption (Score:5, Funny)

    by morcheeba ( 260908 ) on Sunday October 21, 2001 @01:54PM (#2456667) Journal
    Steve Volk founded DataPlay in November 1998 out of his frustration with the multiple storage formats used in consumer electronics.

    So his solution? Invent another storage format!
  • Make them smaller so they are easier to lose.

    And somehow I just can't justify paying 20$ for something that is the size of a quarter.

  • Not true about MD not taking off... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kaneda ( 3744 ) on Sunday October 21, 2001 @01:54PM (#2456670) Homepage
    For some reason, MD didn't take off in a big way in the US, but in Japan and Europe, they are a huge success. In the UK you can buy pre-recorded minidiscs in the music stores, like CD's or vinyl.
    Almost every 2nd person on the public transport in London is listening to a MD player. They have totally replaced tapes and the walkman over here.
    Just because the US seems to have ignored them for the last 5 years does not make them a failure...
    • Interesting. I don't think I've ever seen a pre-recorded minidisc in any U.S. store. So yes, I'm going by my experience... In the U.S. at least, if you got someone a minidisc player as a present, most of them would wonder what it was.
      • Actually, I saw prerecorded Minidiscs here in the States (Over in the local Best Buy in fact). The selection was about 1/20th of the CD selection in the same store, but it was most certainly there. You could also find blank media pretty easily, and about every store I went into had at least one or two minidisc models on display.
      • Actually, the SONY Metrion in San Francisco sells pre-recorded minidiscs. ;-)

        I think more people are aware of minidisc than you think, but see no need for it. Where minidisc is great is portable, fairly high fidelity (no, I am not an audiophile) recording. Great for concerts, "taping" of lectures, etc. Unfortunately most people don't have a regular use for this. On top of that, the real win for mp3 versus minidisc, is minidiscs only record real time. To transfer an hour of music from your mp3 collection to a minidisc player takes an hour of recording time. Why buy an MD player when I can get 2 hours of music in a couple of minutes from my PC to my mp3 player? This could change with the Net-MD [sony.co.jp], but I think they have some weird limited-number-of-check-in-and-out thing on it to prevent from biting the SONY-music hand that feeds it, but that too may be a stumbling block for MD's success.

        psxndc

    • I have 300+ CDs, I'm hardly likely to change formats just because a spiffy new one came out.

      I still have 100+ LPs and a few 45s, and a rather nice turntable, because some stuff didn't move well to CD, some stuff didn't come out on CD and some stuff lost tracks when it was re-thought and moved to CD (i.e. ELO Out of the Blue)

      I'm probably getting a DVD player in the next month, but deciding factor isn't so much that it's better or more convenient, it's actually that my NEC VCR is dying (after 16 years. Hey, it was and still is a great model, I hope I can get it fixed.), but I'll still need a VCR to play the prerecorded tapes I have (many, too many...)

    • Hmm.. I've never seen anybody use them in Sweden, and most consumer electronics stores seem to carry only one or two token models. I think their success is somewhat spotty in Europe as well.

      /Janne

    • My understanding is that MiniDiscs never sold well in the US because The Powers That Be (i.e., R.I.A.A.) were strongly opposed against a recordable/rewritable medium that offered near-CD-quality sound (the compression is lossy on these), which, according to them, would undermine CD sales. They seem to have been well received by audio pros and radio stations, however.

      I have seen prerecorded MDs on sale at record stores before, BTW. They had a thick coat of dust over them.

      • And what amazes me about this.. really.. is that
        a) MD follows SCMS, so what's the big deal
        and
        b) Unless you have a deck that actually copies raw MD data from disk to disk (not as common, I think)... digital copies using a digital cable between minidisc players are re-encoded... what comes out on the digital audio cable is like SPDIF or something...

        Minidisc is definately big in europe.
      • Sony is a member of the RIAA and no one was pushing the MD players in the US harder than they were. I think its pretty simple, people just (more or less) switched over and didn't want to rebuild their collections, buy a new stereo, car stereo etc because Sony says so. This isn't Microsoft.

        Every audio report I've seen on the MD has been negative. Huge lossy problems and some copyright tomfoolery ruin it.
      • Almost every 2nd person on the public transport in London is listening to a MD player

      Mmm, to balance this view, I see a mix of CD/MD/MP3 players, a smaller selection of MD in shops and online (only the current chart), and my friends who use MD only listen to compilations copied from CD to blank media.

      It's true that MD is popular in the UK, but it's still second fiddle to CD. Sure, it's better than CD, but anyone who upgraded to MD is probably going to go to MP3 players (as my MD using chums have already done) unless they've got a monster MD collection.

    • how is the take-up of portable MP3 players? MDs arent nearly as successfull here (N.A.) as MP3 players..

    • I think two things have conspired against the success of MiniDiscs in the USA besides the RIAA copyright issues:

      1. Disc skipping on portable CD players is not as critical issue as it used to be. Once shock memory reached over 20 seconds on portable players unless you really jostle the player very hard disk skipping was pretty much alleviated. That meant you could jog with the player running and chances were pretty good you wouldn't hear skipping.

      2. The proliferation of CD-R and CD-RW drives from 1996 on meant you could pretty much create your own CD's. And they're usually discs that could be played on most CD players out there. This is especially even more true given that CD-R blank discs are so dirt cheap nowadays.
      • 1. Disc skipping on portable CD players is not as critical issue as it used to be. Once shock memory reached over 20 seconds on portable players unless you really jostle the player very hard disk skipping was pretty much alleviated. That meant you could jog with the player running and chances were pretty good you wouldn't hear skipping.


        From personal experience, that isn't likely. All the good a 40-second buffer does you is that you can jostle a player for 40 seconds before it starts to skip. When jogging, you are continually jostling the player. That means you can jog for 40 seconds without incurring a skip, but after that, it's over. You can definitely walk around with them, but running is out of the question.


        The roads out near my house are packed dirt which is heavily prone to washboarding. While most car and portable CD players have decent skip protection, I haven't seen one that could handle being driven over these roads for more than a minute.

    • MD is not very popular in (at least) Switzerland, Germany and Holland.

      They got some market share, but compete with (more widespread) portable CD-players and now the MP3 players (solid state, HDD-based and CD-based) are taking over fast.

      In one or two years, MD shall be gone (rightly so).
    • Kaneda: but in Japan and Europe, they are a huge success. In the UK you can buy pre-recorded minidiscs in the music stores, like CD's or vinyl.

      I can walk to both major UK record chain stores here in Cheltenham, UK and prove you wrong, if you like.

      MD was popular for about three hours on Wednesday tea-time a few years back. Almost all stores have stopped selling pre-recorded MDs now. You can still get MD blanks everywhere, mind.

      Some of the bigger stores like Tower Records in major cities such as London and Birmingham sell pre-recorded MDs, but if your concept is that you can just pop into any high street record store in an average UK town, you're wrong.

  • The reason minidisks never tookoff is because Sony refused to sell licenses. Same reason Beta lost to VHS. Sounds like this technology is too restricted to become a standard, but when will companies learn?

    • Re:sell licenses (Score:2, Informative)

      by Kaneda ( 3744 )
      Huh? what do you mean not sell licenses?
      Sony learnt their lesson from the Betamax debacle - I can buy a MD player from any number of audio equipment manufacturers including Kenwood, Pioneer, JVC, Denon, Sony, Sharp and a bunch of others, and MD recordable disks from TDK, Victor, Maxell or a bunch of others.
      How would they do this if the tech was not licensed?
      Sony is NOT the only company making MD machines and recordables...

    • Re:sell licenses (Score:5, Informative)

      by maggard ( 5579 ) <michael@michaelmaggard.com> on Sunday October 21, 2001 @02:02PM (#2456711) Homepage Journal
      The reason minidisks never tookoff is because Sony refused to sell licenses. Same reason Beta lost to VHS.

      Beta lost to VHS for a number of reasons, over-simplifying it to licensing is so innacurate as to be incorrect.

      • Beta VCRs cost more to produce
      • Beta tapes cost more to produce
      • VHS was able to record longer programs
      • VHS was able to record longer programs (this was really important)
      • Actual quality wasn't all that different for most folks

      Licensing and single-sourcing was just one more problem.

      • Re:sell licenses (Score:2, Interesting)

        by baronben ( 322394 )
        Don't forget that Porn makers decided to produce VHS exlusivly. Don't laugh, this was a major reson. Imagin that in 85 there were 2 internets of comparable quality and qunaity and price. One had porn, the other didn't. Which one would the early adapters (the same people who would buy VCRs when they came out) use?
      • over-simplifying it to licensing is so innacurate as to be incorrect.

        Actually I likened it to VHS being first out of the door. BetaMax was superior quality, I had all of my tapes in Beta, no problem. The price difference wasn't that much at all, however VHS beat Beta to the punch by getting out to market a good 6 months or so in advance, and since it was "good enough" for most people, the Beta didn't stand much of a chance.
    • While it's true that blank cassettes cost the same as blank MDs, and the MDs provide better quality in a smallest package, answer me this: where can I get an MD recorder for $30 brand-new?

      The day cassettes die for recording is the day when MD recording equipment is cheap enough. CD players cost $30-40 brand-new for inexpensive models, so they have long since passed cassettes for playback. $200 for an MD recorder is simply too much for the vast majority of (non-gadget-freak) Americans.
  • Damn. If they remove the restrictions, there's a *TON* of applications they can use. You can even make a drive out of a PCMCIA Type III card. If you can shove one drive natively in a system, all you need to do is slap part of the Linux distro on it and free up half a gig of HD space! That's a whole HD for me on my laptop!
    • Damn. If they remove the restrictions,...

      Never happen. Beware of this quote from the article suggesting where they got their funding: "The company has raised $119 million in funding from a number of powerhouses, such as music giant Universal Music Group..."

      They have whored themselves and now have satan's baby.
    • There will only be restrictions on the pre-recorded content released by record companies. For other applications like digital cameras, one will be able to use the device in any way he chooses.

      Despite what the slashdot write-up implied, it seems music distribution is only a small part of the company's business plan. Their aim isn't to supplant CD's, which Sony tried to do with their MiniDisc; it's to replace the storage formats that are currently in portable devices. Nothing about the restrictions they're incorporating into the product will prevent the applications that you talked about.
      • Nothing about the restrictions they're incorporating into the product will prevent the applications that you talked about.

        I hope this is true, but only time will tell. If they allow these disks to be available for recording on a computer, unrestricted (as CD-R is currently), the record companies would surely complain.

  • Damn alien technology (Score:5, Funny)

    by rsteele19 ( 150541 ) on Sunday October 21, 2001 @01:56PM (#2456679) Homepage
    I guess this means I'm gonna have to buy the White Album again...
  • We'll need coin purses for our music. Wonder if you could buy a Coke with 'em? ...
  • Sony MiniDiscs didn't take off because they had shit fidelity. You might recall that it was the high end of the audio market which paved the way for the current CD market, i.e. I paid $650 for my first CD player, equal of which today costs ~$100. MP3, though popular is still far from mainstream, probably because the cost is too high for personal MP3 players (when you consider what it costs to buy a cheap portable cassette or CD player), besides, MP3 has low res. audio, too. CDs aren't necessarily here to stay, but they still work very well. (Of course, quality is also heavily determined by who issues the recording and how good a production job they did.)

  • Minidiscs never took off? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by chrysalis ( 50680 ) on Sunday October 21, 2001 @01:58PM (#2456693) Homepage
    I disagree. Minidiscs took off. It took a long time, but nowadays, many people own a minidisc. Pre-recorded MD never took off. Ok. Probably because they were as expensive as CDs, and because record dealers didn't want to have every record on a new support. But blank MDs are nice. Excellent quality, all features of a CD (direct access to tracks), plus song and disk titles. Plus they are small. The only bad thing about MD is that recorders are still a bit expensive. But I only use MDs to record music I want to hear while traveling. I don't want of CDs and MP3/OGG gadgets that need a computer to be recorded.
  • DataPlay - Flash Killer or Copy-Control Nightmare? [slashdot.org] [slashdot.org] (From Feb 21/01)

    NZ
  • I know lots of people who already have trouble keeping track of all of their CDs. I can only imagine what troubles they'll have if the media is only the size of a quarter.

    The only big wins I see with this technology are
    1. Portable players. Imagine a matchbox sized unit that holds a full album worth of music. Portable CD players long ago reached the point where the size of the CD is the limiting factor in how small they can be made.
    2. Massive storage units. If you could put these CDs in "rolls" or some other method, you can store a whole lot of them in a standard sized consumer audio unit, as opposed to the 5 or 10 CD changers that are common now.
    And that's about it. For just about everything else a regular CD is just better. The consumer-hostile content control is just the icing on the cake IMHO.

  • cost of discs (Score:2, Insightful)

    by fossa ( 212602 )
    For example, a record company could place five albums on a disc but keep four of them locked. Users may sample the additional material before buying it, at which point they would receive a key either through the phone or the Internet to unlock the albums. The cost would be much lower than a typical purchase because the albums would be on the same disc.

    And we all know the cost of the media is what keeps CD prices at $17.99

    • We all know there are lots of things that add to the cost of the disk, but that got me thinking...

      The breakdown of a $15 CD is [ithaca.edu]:
      $5 to the store
      $5 record company
      $3 artist
      $2 manufacturers and distributors

      Who does this type of key purchase leave out? The store (since the samples do their own promotion), the manufacuturers and distributors (since these people have already gotten the physical product to you).

      So, basically, record companies just have to pay artist $3 and get to keep the rest. If they pay themselves the same amount as a CD, the key should cost $8. Any bets on if they get greedy?
      • $3 to the artist? Is that really true?

        I've been under the impression that the artists see S.F.A. on each sale; well under a half-buck per sale.

        Am I wrong?

      • What I found more interesting was later in the same report, where it [ithaca.edu] listed the major record companies and their market share and labels. To save effort, I've excerpted (fair use) this information below:

        Concentration of Ownership

        Today, many recording artists and studios earn a great deal of money, pushing industry sales to about $40 billion. Nevertheless, sales of all recordings have leveled off, except for a few superstars.

        As in other media, a few corporations dominate the recording industry. It is interesting to note that only one, AOL Time Warner, has its corporate headquarters in the United States. In the 1990s, here's how the major labels stacked up.

        WEA, which is owned by AOL Time Warner, controlled more than 25 percent of the market through Atlantic, Elektra, Giant, Reprise, Rhino, Sire, and Warner Brothers. Sony held about 14 percent of the market share through Columbia and Epic.

        Polygram, which is owned by Philips Electronics, captured just over 13 percent of the market with A&M, Def Jam, Deutsche Gramophone, Island, Motown, and Polydor. BMG, which is owned by Bertelsman, held just over 12 percent through Arista, BMG Classics, Private Music, RCA, Windham Hill, and Zoo.

        Other major companies, which control about 10 percent of the market, include CEMA through its labels Capitol, Chrysalis, EMI, IRS, Liberty, and SBK; and French-owned Vivendi through Geffen, GRP, MCA Records, and Uptown.

    • CD-R's now cost $15 for a stack of 25 from TDK. That's 60 cents per CD! I doubt commercial CD blanks are more than that.



      A burner will do a significant hit, but is neglible over the burn's lifetime. The electricty required is what, a few cents/min max?



      CD caddies (slim) cost about 10 cents per caddie at CompUSA for a count of 40 last time I checked. We'll double that.



      Color prints are roughly 20 cents/page on stock glossy paper at Kinkos. I doubt you'll use more than one sheet of legal sized paper.



      That's about a buck for a CD! If it's a Dr. Demento CD, you'll have 22-odd songs on it (roughly a nickel per song).



      The US Postal Service can ship a CD, Media rate, 7-15 days, starting at $1.33 depending on where you send it. I doubt it'll be more than $4 from DC to Redmond, WA. So that's $5 to create and ship.



      For a $18 CD at Sam Goodies, that's a $13 profit that's shared by the store, a middleman distributor, the CD creator, and the artist!!! Who gets what is set by a series of contracts and markups. All in all, the artist gets majorly screwed when most of the profits get sucked up by the stores, middlemen, and CD makers.



      No wonders why Scott McCloud says that only a quarter to the artist directly to grab an MP3 of one song would fix all these problems. The musicians and comic artists are in the same boat!!!

  • ...aims to supplant the 20-year-old CD with a quarter-sized (1.5" x 1.25") optical disc...

    Quarter sized? Whose quarters are they using? Mine are about 0.94". I might believe silver dollar-sized. :)

  • about Son'y minidiscs (Score:5, Informative)

    by unformed ( 225214 ) on Sunday October 21, 2001 @02:03PM (#2456712)
    Sony's minidiscs never took off

    Wrong. Sony's minidiscs never took off for the intended audience.

    Minidiscs are the defacto standard medium for amateur bootleggers (for concerts, etc), since they're cheap, small, and have good quality. The best are DAT recorders, but they're expensive and big.

    Just some FYI.

  • It'll die (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dolly_Llama ( 267016 ) on Sunday October 21, 2001 @02:07PM (#2456731) Homepage
    Please forgive the marketroid speak but,

    Any new format, to succeed needs to add value to the user to overcome the cost of changing over. With CDs, there was a marked increase of quality over vinyl. Some might argue it was a decrease, but Joe Sixpack is still glad his CDs dont pop and scratch. Further, the CD allowed instant track access at the push of a button. It was these two features which pushed the changeover to CDs, along with the gradually decreasing price of players and concurrent larger selection of CDs in stores.

    That said, where are the additional values of this medium over CDs? It's small. neat. But if I have to give up my CD burner, small dont mean much.

    The next medium is most likely to be some flavor of mp3 or ogg device, be it solid state or magnetic disc based. Give me the ability to carry all the music I've bought over the last 15 years in my pocket, and the ability to navigate easily among all the songs, and I'll be all over it.

    • Precedent (Score:4, Interesting)

      by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Sunday October 21, 2001 @03:24PM (#2457005) Homepage Journal
      "Add value" is more than marketroidspeak. It's something you have to think about whenever you introduce a new technology. Examples:
      • 8mm video cassettes. Small, better video quality. But not good enough to make anybody switch from VHS.
      • Every PDA ever invented, from the ancient WorkSlate [geocities.com] to the latest "smart" phones. The idea isn't bad in itself, and there have even been a few successes. But there still isn't enough "added value" to make most people switch from paper-inscription technology.
      • Spreadsheet software. The vendors have changed, but everybody still uses the klunky old macro language designed two decades ago for VisiCalc. Not even Microsoft could get people to accept a more elegant spreadsheet language.
      • Desktop software. Yeah, I'd rather be using KDE or GNOME or even JavaStation [linuxdoc.org]. Anything but MS bloatware. But how to convince everybody to give up their Word/Excel/Powerpoint skill base?
      • QWERTY keyboards. Yes, they're inefficient. (Although the inefficiency didn't actually come from a deliberate attempt to slow the machine down [earthlink.net].) But who's going to learn typing from scratch?

    • But what if?... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by GRH ( 16141 )
      Agreed. As you pointed out, there is no driving reason for consumers to move to this new format (we've already got random access, etc.). What if the RIAA members "pushed" this format change because it helped them instead?

      Consumers already have CDs and are happy with them (and the fact that they are easy to rip helps too). But, the RIAA is probably kicking themselves now for ever supporting such a "loose" format. Don't you think the RIAA would love to be able to take back all CDs ever sold and promote this format (or another with limited copying for Joe Sixpaxk)?

      What if the RIAA offered a deal where they will exchange your "old" CDs and vinyl for "new" DataPlay discs? In this way they have dropped the cost of switching to the new format for consumers and they (the RIAA) gets what they want, no more CDs. This might sound expensive (and thus counter RIAA), but consider that the production cost is the lowest chunk of $ in the cost of a CD. A dollar hit on all CDs ever sold might be worth ridding themselves of CDs forever, and thus staving off their (the RIAA) obsolecence in light of digital file swapping.

      There has to be a reason why the RIAA members would pour money into YAMF (yet another music format)...

      GRH

    • Re:It'll die (Score:2, Insightful)

      by zzyzx ( 15139 )
      I wrote a column [jambands.com][jambands.com] on jambands.com expressing that mp3 players are liable to be the next medium if they're not destroyed by Congress. A 100 gig notebook size hard drive would give the ability to have 700+ hours of music at 256k. That people would be interested in.
  • From the article :

    "...can hold...five complete pre-recorded albums of CD-quality music..."
    (emphasis mine)

    That is just wrong...if this disc is 250MB per side, 500MB total, then it's smaller than a actual CD. It might hold 5 albums of MP3s, but a CD will hold more!

    And also:

    "Recording and data transfer 10 times faster than a CD."

    I seriously doubt it. CDs are recordable now at 12x and higher, and readable at over 50x; I think they mean theirs is recordable at 10x, not 120x. I'd be real suprised if it was readable at 500x (I think 500x is about 10MB/sec?). But since they're already talking about compressed data/music, maybe they include the compression into their data transfer rate? Whatever.

  • Build a better mousetrap, and someone will build a better mouse

    Even thought there are heavy restrictions, and built in encryption, etc. on this disc, people will still find a way to circumvent it somehow.

    The difference between this and mini-disc is that mini-disc was never meant to take on cd's, but instead was supposed to replace the cassette tape market. Personally, I kinda thought that mini-disc was a pretty good technology. Small form factor, high compression, etc. You could fit four cd's worth of music on one mini-disc with some recorders. It's just a technology that didn't make it.
    I have to wonder how many songs they will put on these little '500 mb' discs though. I don't know how many minutes of audio 500 transfers too (although it could be anything I know with new technology and everything)...
    One thing about a smaller form factor though... Even though it's easier to carry, it's easier to misplace and lose too...

  • Bad Medium (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Is DataPlay the next big thing, or something to avoid?

    Something to avoid, due to the SDMI restrictions at file system level and 500 MB being 150 to 300 MB less data than a 1980's technology CD-ROM can hold. This is 2001. A breakthrough is having a regular size CD hold 10x the data of a DVD, or a 3-inch CD hold 4x a DVD. Quarter size means losing them regularly. Mini CD size is about as small as you want to go.
  • They're cute, but considering that Sony's minidiscs never took off and this format is heavily restricted, my guess is that this will fail.

    Sony's minidisc failed because Sony wanted royalties from everyone for the technology. This technology will probably be subsidized by the RIAA in order to get people to migrate. For the average Joe Consumer, this would be an ideal technology so I would expect this to take off if executed properly. However, I would not expect the protection mechanisms to last very long.

  • God bless DataPlay! (Score:4, Funny)

    by DeadMeat (TM) ( 233768 ) on Sunday October 21, 2001 @02:13PM (#2456753) Homepage
    I was just reading the "Big Breakthrough" infographic, and this thing sure looks impressive. At long last, thanks to modern technology, I can finally have inexpensive, universal, portable optical media that stores 500 MB of any kind of data I want and can be written 10 times faster than a 1X CD burner!

  • Minidiscs popular in UK (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MullerMn ( 526350 ) <andy@@@andrewarbon...co...uk> on Sunday October 21, 2001 @02:13PM (#2456756) Homepage
    I've had minidisc players for over a year and I see people carrying them everywhere. Over here they seem to be going from strength to strength.
    There's still not much selection available prerecorded, but I don't think most people want to use them to replace CDs, just for replacing tapes and replacing CDs for on-the-move purposes.
    • They are popular enough in Finland aswell. I've had one for oh.. 2-3 years and I like it alot. Everyone that carries somekinda player usually carries an MD over here. Not that its supercommon but I dont see it as a total flop atleast. Its easy enough to record on with digital connectors to CD-player. I listen to my CD's at home and on them with my MD. I'll buy a MP3 player when its as easy to carry around as the MD and holds as much music as I carry in MDiscs when travelling (5-10).

  • Instead of trying to ban CD-R/CD-RW RIAA should support new technologies like this. I bet CD-RW drives are full incompatible with this kind of quater-CD, it would solve their problem (I agree that CD-RW drives are a problem for RIAA) without being intrusive like they are trying to do.

    They could also increase music quality, increasing frequency range (in a way vinyl lovers would accept use these quater-CDs) so mp3 would never be as good as a original quarter-CD.

    There are so many productive ways to avoid piracy, they might consider to adapt to the new reality (just like everybody else does), instead of fight agains it.

    I hope this is the light that shows RIAA the right way.

  • "I like the technology, but it's just not a slam dunk," Levitas said. "The copyright protection that they've been able to embed is wonderful."

    It's not just a slam dunk, it's a smack down. It's not "wonderful", and any embedded hardware to enforce copy protection is reason enough to never accept this format. Thankfully, record companies are having at least some trouble as it is to copy protect audio compact discs. To give them a 1-up with technology like this would be disasterous. Of course, there's always the possibility of ripping the data, wiping the disc, then re-writing it as whatever format you choose... but that's just plain absurd.

    Why do these damn corporations incist on selling products to the consumers under lock to which we do not have the key? We have to stop supporting this. Even though this format looks like it has incredible promise, we should never buy into it. It should never be accepted so long as copy protection is built in. I will make the choice whether or not I want to obey copyright law.
  • Early adopters for a new audio format would be primarily

    1) Audiophiles
    2) Techtoy-loving geeks (thats us)
    3) Music freaks

    Group 1 is *never* going to embrace a technology that uses lossy compression - and there's no way a 500MB disk is going to hold even a single album without it. Group #1 is looking for 96/24 and increased fidelity and longevity, size be damned.

    Group 2 is going to run away at high speed from anything that incorporates rights management to such a crazy degree.

    Group 3 is just fine with CDs and CDRs - why pay $10 for a 500MB blank when that same $10 gets you 20 or 30 blank 650MB CDRs that work in every CD player you have, with your choice of lossy (MP3) or lossless (traditional redbook CD audio) formats, and no rights management?

    How can this possibly succeed? I don't get it.
  • I have seen Dataplay prototypes and played with an actual disk. It's cute. The actual disk is encapsulated in a sleeve that looks like a 3-inch floppy, only a bit smaller. Critical in its favor is the metal shutter door. You do not scratch these on the tabletop or in the car. They're proteted. That's good. That's what's wrong with CDs -- even after error correction, they can easily fail, because they're so exposed. Stinkin' jewel cases are far more cumbersome than the cardboard sleeves that old LPs came in, but DataPlay solves this with a hard shuttered enclosure. (Anybody remember CD caddies?) And it still fits into a shirt pocket or Walk-creature-sized machine.

    Now the DRM is an option that, of course, all of the prerecorded music companies will invoke. And I can't comment on its crackability. But if you take a drive by itself, and some blanks, then you can ignore the DRM, because it's your own drive. And it fits into a laptop, or a desktop, and can replace a floppy, while being a whole lot nicer than Zip or LS-120.

    It's a tiny bit smaller in capacity than CD-RW, and I wonder if that's its weakness. Just a tiny bit more diameter on the disk would give it a lot more area, and it could have been 1-2 GB and still smaller than a floppy.

    It'll be interesting to see how they spin this, and how the public responds.
    • Okay... it's rougly the size of a 3.5 inch floppy? A bit smaller? Sounds like the size of a minidisc.

      And.. are they marketing it towards computers? Computer drives? Minidisc would have been cool if Sony hadn't scrapped that as well.
      • It's a little smaller than the floppy, but looks similar. The disk itself sits towards one end, so it's rectangular, not square, and thus narrower than a floppy.

        I got the impression that they were marketing the technology to all comers, including computers. But of course it's within their power to blow it. I've often seen good technology get mismarketed. Indeed that's probably the usual fate....
  • Why would consumers want to replace the cd technology to begin with. It offers very high quality sound on consumer systems, is easy to maintain, has no restrictions on its use in its current specification and is practically universal now.

    The only think I see replacing CDs would be some sort of DVD. Ultimately I don't think consumers will latch on to any replacement technology unless it offers the same flexibility that they've come to expect from cds.
  • As hinted at before, if the capacity is 500M total, then imagine a dual function device that reads cd and these disks.

    For instance ad DVD-RAM uses 2 lasers (I know, I took one apart to clean them) on for the DVD-RAM the other for the CD's. Remember those adapters for the 3 and 1/2 inch cd's?

    It's be neat to put in a cd sized adapter for a "5 disk changer" kind of setup. Granted unless a really good engineer devises the "holder" it will be another PITA to use/implement.

    But storage will be a breeze, just use a left over toilet/hand wipe paper tube, especially if they are light/heat sensitive like most cd/dvd's are.

    Maybe I am being overly optimistic/pessimistic but I think the success or failure of this will be based on how well it can be put into a multifunction device that can read/burn/shift whatever data is put on it in addition to all the other specs of DVD/CD -r -rw +r +rw etc.

    Like "mini-disc" a single function device is ok, but I'd want more capability, personally.

    YOMV (your opinion may vary)
  • This will turn into nothing more than another way for RIAA to squeeze even higher profits from us, without having to pay the artists more. Here's an example. The article says:

    For example, a record company could place five albums on a disc but keep four of them locked. Users may sample the additional material before buying it, at which point they would receive a key either through the phone or the Internet to unlock the albums.

    This is a great idea, but in practice it doesn't work well. Take all those CDs that came out in the mid 90's using the TestDrive technology, such as the Quake shareware CD. It had the shareware version of Quake on it, and if you liked it, you could call a toll free number, give them a code number it generated, they'd give you a complimentary code number, and the CD would unlock Quake for you, and copy it to your HD. You could also choose to purchase many older id games like Wolf3D, several Doom packages, Hexen, etc. But, it was a very short time later that a tiny little program was widely available that would allow you to generate complimentary keys to the Test Drive program's code. This will happen with records on this disc, and the RIAA will keep prices artificially higher than they should be to "counteract" the "losses" via people cracking the disc.

    Further, the paragraph goes on to say this:

    The cost would be much lower than a typical purchase because the albums would be on the same disc.

    But we have proof that record companies do not pass on saving in material costs to the comsumer. A cassette tape is much more costly to produce than a compact disc, yet you can buy new cassettes for about $10 while the same album on CD costs about $15. The CD is the much more popular format, so they charge more for it, and make a killing. If they can afford to sell cassettes at $10, then they should be able to sell the CD for $9 and make the same profit, but they do not. And they won't, unless we PRESSURE them to. They backed off the crap they tried to pull piggybacking their ideas on anti-terror bills because of public pressure.

  • Guess I'll have to buy the White album again.
  • If we're going to move towards a format that's supposedly going to dethrone the CD, size and 50 more megs will not cut it. I'd rather have all my music on one CD-sized 10 gig disc than a bunch of little quarters. Preferably a disc that's sheathed like a floppy disk. No more scratches.

  • Two points:

    The guy says "We're in discussions with everybody" and their target market is 'everything'. That's a really, really bad sign. The reason you haven't seen ANY of these yet, is because they're still waiting to hear the technical specifications from refrigerator manufacturers before finalizing the design ;)

    Secondly- so he thinks he has the support of most of the record labels? I'd looooove to see those contracts ;) plenty of musicians think the same thing and stay confused for a long time why they're not getting paid. I'm picturing a situation in which the record companies 'found him a lawyer' to help understand the agreements they themselves drew up. He may have no idea what kind of sharks he was dealing with, or who his lawyer was REALLY working for. I have a hard time picturing this guy as sharp and paranoid enough to conduct negotiations with record companies without being utterly screwed.

    So, don't even worry about this supplanting CDs with copy-prevented media.

    The record companies have a huge amount of infrastructure in replicating houses etc. and even the ability to pressure replicators not to work with indies such as Negativland. They're going to move ahead with CD, non-Red-Book-compliant CD, DVD-A and SACD.

    This is about taking this technology off the market so that it never becomes a 'piracy-friendly' techology, like a CD-R that's more easily transported. That's what this is about and why we won't ever see it come out.

  • This has implications well beyond music. A tiny disc like this with a decent capacity can fit into the little devices we've all come to know and love: PDAs, digital stillcams, those little voice recorders for saving interviews and lectures for later transcription or transfer to parent Big Iron (and whoever thought that a PC would one day represent "Big Iron" in our portable lives?) and on and on and on.

    So let's set aside "dethroning the CD" for a bit and talk about dethroning the other storage technologies: Compact Flash, Memory Stick, Smart Media, MicroDrive, and whatever else is floating around out there. For now, I own a couple of iPaqs with CF jackets, a stillcam with CF, and a camcorder which can save stills onto MemStick were I so inclined (I'm not). To integrate DataPlay's technology into _that_ aspect of my digital life would require the purchase of replacement technology or of adapters that add bulk and subtract convenience. Why change from my effective standardization on CF?

    These disks have moving parts. That's Bad for mobile devices -- just the kind of thing where a small, high-data-density gizmo is most valuable. At the moment, DataPlay's storage capacity is reported to be 500MB for $10. I took a quick look at B&H's website and found a 512 MB CF for $800. Definitely a price win for DataPlay even given that a little time with a search engine would undoubtedly turn up a lower price. Same place, 128 MB of Smart Media can be had for $100. 128MB MemStick is $120. So the current market leaders in solid-state are not price competitive with DataPlay right now. The key differences are that they are here, now, in the market and that as with all computer-y doodads, their price is plunging.

    We'll see if DataPlay ever releases an actual product or just manages to use press releases to get newspaper stories written. If they _do_ get something out there, we'll see if it costs what they claim it will, whether it's easy to come by, and whether the medium comes so crippled with hardware-level DRM that pictures I take in a digital camera can only be dumped to a single computer using a special program (a la the Media Manager that MS uses to get music from CD-in-PC onto an iPaq). If it's easy-to-use and recognizes that I the buyer am to be the determiner of what is done with the stored content, if it can be written on a bajillion times before giving out, if it has a price-per-convenience that undercuts the other folks then it could be a winning tech despite the moving parts. If, on the other hand, they focus so hard on uncopyable recorded music that it loses its usefulness in other technologies then it'll likely die and good riddance. (Of course, with built-in DRM it could be the first medium approved by Sen. Hollings (D-Disney).)
  • As a music medium, these will fail. Music CDs are becoming a read-once-or-twice before storing as a compressed, more convenient data format. Size does not matter when you just stick the CDs in your closet or put on display in your living room. When you can put your music collection into an unscratchable format that be copied from car to house to portable, there is no reason for a permanent physical medium except for backup.

    As a computer format these will fail. For archival and distribution you need lots of data space. DVD tech will supplant CDs for this, possibly at a smaller size, but still capable of gigabytes of storage. For temporary storage and transportation, flash technology works fine, is more reliable, and is getting cheaper and larger capacities over time, and is poised to replace floppies permanently.

    So I think the trends are against this medium, but time will tell.

  • Soon after we got CD-R, we got mini CD-R, small disks that can be read and written in most normal CD-R drives. I would expect the same to happen with DVD-R and DVD-RW. That would probably give you similar storage capacities to DataPlay in a similar format.
  • oh yeah... like I want to go out and replace THOSE in the near future...

    records I can understand, large, bulky, easy to ruin

    tapes I can understand, tape hiss, eventually wear out, tape deack eat them

    cds? perfect audio, rugged, wont wear out... ummm, no thanks
  • Ya know, I thought this looked familiar [slashdot.org]. Like damn near a year old familiar. It wasn't a good idea- and barely newsworthy- then, and isn't any better now.

    With stuff that isn't news (crap), and stuff that isn't news (old), I'd say today's a slow news day on slashdot. If there ever were a day that it wasn't, anyway.

    And that cheap shot at minidiscs is just inexcusable.

  • 11? (Score:2)

    by PapaZit ( 33585 )
    The article claims that the disks hold 500MB, or enough for 11 CD-quality albums.

    Uh, right.

    A CD-quality album is 600MB. Compressing it down to fit in 45MB results in casette-tape quality music: good enough for portable devices or computer speakers, but lousy for a good stereo system. For that, you need significantly more storage space.
  • Such short memories people have ...

    DataPlay - Flash Killer or Copy-Control Nightmare? [slashdot.org]
    Posted 21 Feb 2001.

  • Smaller != Better (Score:2, Insightful)

    by onetruedabe ( 116148 )
    I don't agree with changing the form factor -- yeah, being able to fit "about" the same amount of data as a CD onto something one-twenty-fifth the
    size is cool and all, but can you imagine having to sort through a pile of these while you're driving?

    I think the CD's size has become a pretty de facto form factor -- I'm convinced that part of DVD's success has been because people feel comfortable picking up a 5" disc (certainly laserdiscs were too bulky to become popular) *AND*, you can build players that accept both media without having to hack any additional logic into it.

    I say keep trying to pack more and more information into the same size. It'll sell better because people have already accepted that size, whether they even realize it or not.

  • Caddies = Bad News (Score:2, Interesting)

    by wackybrit ( 321117 )
    I'd say this is doomed to failure, primarily because they've wrapped it up in a silly plastic 'caddy'.

    There are certain instances where caddies are a necessity (i.e. tape applications - reel to reel doesn't count!!) but for optical media, what is the point of the caddy? It does nothing except increase the media cost significantly.

    I daresay part of the wonderful things about CD is the fact that it doesn't have caddies. Remember in the early 90s when many CD-ROM drives required you to put your CDs in expensive caddies? Where are those caddies now? In the trash. We learned how to handle discs directly.

    A far better idea would be for them to make some double sided mini CDs that aren't in caddies.. that way they'd still play in regular CD players and CDROM drives.. and they could make a mint from patenting the idea for double-sided mini CDs.
  • Sony's minidiscs never took off

    Well Gee, how many decades did it take for CDs to get popular? MiniDisc is a great format (and a PC MiniDisc-Drive would be nice) but it hasn't been around long enough to see if it will eventually take a serious hold. After all, right now very few companies are producing MiniDisc systems, which is keeping the price fairly high.

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