Sony Announces End For MiniDisc Walkman 191
Beloved of concert tapers for their small size, shock resistance, and long battery life, MiniDisc recorders never much caught on with the general public. I remember playing with one in the early '90s — before high-quality solid state stereo recorders were affordable — and looking forward to the day that I would have one of my own. Playback-only decks were available, but understandably (in retrospect) never became big sellers; when MiniDisc was introduced, CDs were still a recent comer, and 8-track was fresh in the mind. Music fans were probably tired of replacing their vinyl and cassettes with the Next Big Thing. Still, with its cheap media and decent portable recorders, MiniDisc struck a chord for some uses, and stuck around better than the Digital Compact Cassette. Now, 19 years after the introduction of the MiniDisc format, Sony has announced that it will stop shipping its MiniDisc Walkman products in September, though it will continue to produce blank media.
media / reader (Score:5, Interesting)
Since floppy discs have died I have missed having a medium which I could copy to then give away and which could be reused as easily.
Re:Minidisks (Score:5, Interesting)
Still exist?
Exactly! Who knew? When they were released, they came out with their proprietary and incompatible ATRAC compression scheme, and some kind of copy-bit DRM, so I knew there was never any chance of me accidentally buying one. I figured they just faded into the mists of history as another example of Sony sh!tting on their customers. Apparently it was a much longer walk into the mists than I thought.
Re:Minidisks (Score:3, Interesting)
Rip them to SACD [wikipedia.org] Or MS PlayForSure
Nobody have been burned trusting their music to Sony or MS, ever!
Re:Too bad (Score:4, Interesting)
Same here. I remember reading about MD-Data when it was first released. A 140MB removable drive, with cheap disks (a fraction of the price of ZIP disks, only 2-3 times more expensive than floppy disks), smaller than floppy disks and much smaller than CDs. When they were released, my computer had a 60MB hard disk, MD-Data sounded amazing but I never actually saw one.
If Sony had pushed MD-Data a bit more, they'd have owned the floppy-replacement market. MD Data was much more suited to laptop use than recordable CDs and took less space than a floppy disk drive. They would probably have held that market until flash drives became cheap. With the 1GB disks, it would probably have lasted until quite recently.
I don't think Sony even made a laptop with one, which was a huge shame. They should have made MD-Data the only built-in removable storage device on their laptops, made floppy drives optional on their desktops, and licensed the drives to a second source for other manufacturers. People would have complained for a bit, then wondered how they managed with the bulky 3.5" disks that only had 1% the capacity of a MiniDisc. Using them just for music was a huge waste.