[HN Gopher] The MiniDisc deck you hoped to never see [video]
___________________________________________________________________
The MiniDisc deck you hoped to never see [video]
Author : hggh
Score : 103 points
Date : 2022-07-17 11:52 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| fleddr wrote:
| Interesting how so many people comment on the aesthetic but not
| on the unique capability of MiniDisc: the TOC.
|
| You can delete and reorder tracks and this new state is written
| back to the disc. There's nothing else that does this.
|
| You can't delete a song from a cassette. You can overwrite it
| with noise but that's not the same thing as skipping it. It's not
| random access.
|
| You can't delete a track from a CD either, as they were not
| writable back then. Even today with a re-writable you can't
| easily delete a track, you'd need to rewrite the entire disc.
|
| You can't reorder a song on a cassette, obviously. You can't
| really do this with a CD either, other than rewriting it fully
| with the new order. You can program a CD player to play songs in
| a particular order but this is not persisted across players.
|
| MiniDisc can do all of the above and will do it instantly. This
| allows a music buff to constantly tweak and optimize their
| playlist. You can quite compare it to your current Spotify
| playlist, but now physical. No other physical media allows you to
| manage a playlist like a MiniDisc can.
|
| The reason I know this is my dad's 30 year (and ongoing) denial
| in this not being a more widespread standard. He has this cute
| little box with 8 MiniDiscs in it. Each crafted to perfection in
| personal meaning, genre, order of songs. He plays it every day.
|
| I look at it with admiration. Because it works. It worked when I
| was a teenager and now that I'm middle-aged, it still does. It
| didn't get outdated, get 17 trillion UI updates, require a
| password or have ever-changing terms and conditions. It just
| plays. For 25+ years in a row.
|
| Long may it keep playing.
| aquova wrote:
| > You can delete and reorder tracks and this new state is
| written back to the disc. There's nothing else that does this.
|
| This may be a naive question, but did they suffer from
| fragmentation? Reordering tracks via the TOC is a simple
| operation, but after adding and removing and re-adding songs, I
| would imagine the writer would need to eventually re-write the
| entire disc to fragmentation issues, or else have a very
| complex set of metadata.
| fleddr wrote:
| I can't really say, at that age I had no idea what
| fragmentation means so any issues with it would not register.
|
| Statistically though, I imagine reordering to be the most
| frequent operation. Deletion should be rare since it's a
| purposeful decision to put the song on the disc in the first
| place. You might rarely delete one when you get tired of it.
| TheNewAndy wrote:
| From memory, you could end up fragmenting things, and I think
| this would typically result in losing some of the capacity of
| a disk.
|
| I think people would do a disk to disk dub in these
| situations as a form of "defrag" operation.
|
| You could also get an 80 minute disk, put it in a recorder
| and get it to read it, then sneakily swap it with a 74 minute
| disk without letting the recorder's eject switch trip, then
| force a TOC write, and you would be able to upgrade a 74
| minute disk to an 80 minute version.
| [deleted]
| mdmdmd wrote:
| There are a few comments comparing Minidiscs to CDs, I think
| that's the wrong way to look at the format.
|
| My mental model for Minidiscs is much more similar to tape, it
| was so easy to use them to record. As a teenager this was the
| most exciting thing about them -- you could record ~CD quality
| audio from CDs (I had so many MD mixtapes!) or the radio. On top
| of that, you could make your copy feel polished by adding track
| markers and names, giving you information about the track playing
| when listening and letting you skip back and forth between songs.
|
| This was a huge upgrade from cassettes and an upgrade from CDs
| because you didn't need to go through the rigamarole of burning.
|
| Of course, this doesn't even touch upon industrial design of the
| units which has already been well covered in this thread. If
| you'd like to browse through some old units and get a sense of
| that, I recommend minidisc.org.
| dpitkin wrote:
| There is a link to the service manual on minidisc.org
| https://www.minidisc.org/part_Sony_MDCC-2000.html
| aphroz wrote:
| I am very happy to see MD on the first page of HN, I can feel
| it's making a comeback! There's even new pre-recorded MD coming
| out. But don't look into it or you will end doing like me. I
| recently bought 3 different players and it's a bit absurd to pay
| that much for a lower quality of sound, but it does look cool.
| autoexec wrote:
| I hope it does make a comeback, because I'd love to see some
| cheap players become available. I've got boxes of minidiscs
| sitting around, but all my old players have stop working.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| We gave up a lot when we traded physical media for mp3s. I wish
| it would make a comeback.
| technofiend wrote:
| Minidisc proved very useful for dubbing an audio copy off the
| front of house mixing board. Sure you could run it to CD but that
| usually requires a much larger device that takes AC. The minidisc
| recorder was far smaller, more discreet and able to run from
| battery. I heard anecdotally it was the bootlegger's device of
| choice for a while.
| metadat wrote:
| I wish this was available as a normal text/image written article
| instead of a video. The content looks cool but the format doesn't
| work for me; 30 minutes is wayyy too long for this one!
| RedShift1 wrote:
| He talks relatively slow, set the speed to 1.5x
| physhster wrote:
| It's near impossible to monetize an article these days,
| unfortunately. This is a pretty heavy production so it's only
| fair.
| ansgri wrote:
| How are videos better?
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| I always thought the reason was because a lot of people do
| not like to read. But your explanation makes more sense.
| layer8 wrote:
| In general I also prefer a written article with pictures, but
| you can skip-fast-forward through the video in ~5 minutes and
| still get most of the gist of it.
| dylan604 wrote:
| haha, if you can skip in 5 minute chunks and still get the
| gist, then something tells me that there's a lot of
| unnecessary cruft in that video.
| layer8 wrote:
| No, not skipping 5 minutes at a time, more like 10 seconds
| at a time (YouTube double-tap), reducing the total runtime
| to ~5 minutes. That way you still get most of the talking
| points and can listen in to the couple more interesting
| parts.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| I often use the auto transcript feature.
| RajT88 wrote:
| That is how I feel about a lot of youtube videos.
|
| Perhaps some clever person will write something to transcribe
| and screenshot videos automatically.
| [deleted]
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Minidisc is really a cool format. Another format which was
| consider too cool for consumers was DAT. Basically the notion
| that you could make CD quality digital recordings on a simple
| mini tape was terrifying to the recording industry.
| layer8 wrote:
| I just love that kind of design with dedicated physical buttons
| and connectors for all the important (and less important) use
| cases. I would love to live in a world where such devices were
| ubiquitous, instead of everything just being a touch screen with
| inconsistent and half-baked UI.
| retox wrote:
| Is there any technical reason that the MD format cannot be used
| to store arbitrary data and not just audio?
| layer8 wrote:
| MD Data exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc#MD_Data
| RedShift1 wrote:
| I'm kind of sad that MD didn't get more broadly adopted. Had MD
| data been more of a thing and allow for more flexibility (no
| dedicated audio and data discs), MD would probably have been
| everywhere.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| As other comments have said, it was almost uniquely rejected in
| the USA, and enjoyed a healthy long lifespan in almost every
| other country. They are still, in fact, making blank MDs. Those
| in the USA can type "mdw80t" into eBay if they'd like some.
|
| MiniDisc is my favorite example of "History is written by the
| USA" - younger people in many countries believe it was a
| failure, even though it was successful _in their own country_ ,
| just because it failed in the USA, and it's mostly the USA who
| write blogs, make YouTube videos, post to social media.
| gizajob wrote:
| I was listening to my minidisc player on a train in Italy in
| the early 2000s and got chatting to an American girl, and she
| had absolutely no idea what I had in my hand. I was like
| "see, there's these little discs, and you record your music
| onto them" and she couldn't even compute what I was showing
| her. I was pretty stunned too, because all my friends in the
| UK (I'm British) knew what they were and lots of us had them.
| It was like we were in two completely different worlds,
| somehow.
|
| Also, the main advantage not well discussed following the
| rise of the iPod and smartphones, was that virtually all
| minidisc players were RECORDERS. We really lost something,
| culturally and creatively, when audio devices lost their
| record-ins. I used to love plugging my headphones into the
| stereo-in on my minidisc, and walking around capturing the
| sounds around me. Later playing back through those same
| headphones would transport you directly to wherever you were
| at the time. Amazing for field recording and dumping mixes
| and tracks onto them. Technology progresses, but it seems
| like the past few decades it hasn't necessary improved a
| great deal as it does, and much gets lost.
| Melatonic wrote:
| How good was that recording though? I mean I am sure if you
| plugged in a decent microphone it would be good. But
| through the headphones?
|
| These days most phones are awesome recorders so I am not
| sure we really lost that much - I totally get what you are
| saying for that brief period where ipods were the norm
| (before phones).
| layer8 wrote:
| Most MiniDisc recorders had digital inputs, which means
| you could record your CDs or output from a PC sound card
| losslessly (before ATRAC encoding, which of course is
| lossy). While you could also do microphone recordings (I
| think), that wasn't the primary use case of the recording
| feature, at least in my experience. There were various
| MiniDisc-based dictation machines targeted at business
| users though (simpler ones than in TFA).
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Also, the main advantage not well discussed following the
| rise of the iPod and smartphones, was that virtually all
| minidisc players were RECORDERS. I used to love plugging my
| headphones into the stereo-in on my minidisc, and walking
| around capturing the sounds around me.
|
| I agree that technological change as resulted in a
| regrettable loss of common-man recording capability (e.g.
| streaming and disc-players vs VCRs), but did that actually
| happen for your use case? Smartphones all have mics, and
| you can certainly download a recording app even if your
| phone doesn't ship with one.
|
| I know you can kind of abuse headphones into a microphone
| (I used to do it all the time as a kid), but would they
| actually work well with good quality? Did you have some
| special headphones for this use case? I knew a guy who said
| he had some special earbuds designed for recording
| concerts: they had a microphone pointing outward from each
| ear, and he'd plug them into his MiniDisc recorder.
| gizajob wrote:
| The minidisc I had, and there were lots like them, had a
| stereo-in that automatically switched between line-level
| and mic-level. Really amazing considering how small those
| devices were, because the unit wasn't much bigger than
| the minidisc itself. The cheap units from Sony and
| Panasonic (etc) virtually always did this, even though
| lower budget ones without the recording facility were
| available. Really a genius move to put a stereo
| microphone preamplifier into such a tiny unit. The
| line/mic in was also an optical in at the same time.
|
| "Abusing" headphones isn't really the right word to use -
| headphones and dynamic microphones are almost identical
| technology. One way, signals go in an drive the diaphragm
| into producing sound, the other way, audio hits the
| diaphragm and can then be amplified by a preamplifier,
| making a microphone. Hence it's really easy to put the
| earbuds into your ear and walk around recording, and when
| you play back it's like a perfect binaural recording of
| what your ears were hearing at the time. I've heard of
| those earbuds with microphones on the outside, that's a
| bit more pro.
|
| Yes you're correct, smartphones can record really easily,
| there was just something really aesthetically pleasing
| about how the minidisc was a device just built to record
| and playback really well. It was a beautiful way of
| having a recording device, without the need for dongles
| or doodads like you need to do it well on a smartphone. I
| should have also made the point that a piece of
| technology being limited also encourages one to find ways
| of transcending the limitation and doing new things with
| it (see the Gescom album 'Minidisc' that was designed to
| be played on shuffle). Having a portable field recorder
| that was affordable to be a birthday or Christmas present
| endowed one with something more valuable than a mere
| smartphone with a recording app, for some reason.
|
| P.s. try and record something at high volume, like a band
| playing, on your smartphone with the built-in microphone.
| You'll basically get a square-wave with interludes. The
| variable level of the mic preamp on the minidisc made it
| so you could make decent quality recordings of
| anything...
| acchow wrote:
| > younger people in many countries believe it was a failure,
| even though it was successful in their own country
|
| I guess it depends on how you measure it. iPod felt like a
| true success - it was a rebirth for Apple, proliferated
| iTunes across millions of computers, built up sensational
| excitement for an iPod phone, which ultimately became the
| iPhone which is still a success today.
| giantrobot wrote:
| MiniDisc _was_ a failure compared to its contemporary
| competition, namely CDs. I doubt you could find any country
| where MiniDisc sold even half as well as CD /CD-related
| products. IIRC in its total lifetime only a few tens of
| millions of units were sold. That's not an abject failure but
| those are rookie numbers compared to CD players and CDs.
|
| They were rare in the US in part because they were very
| expensive. A portable MD player was hundreds of dollars where
| a portable cassette player with an AM/FM radio built in was
| $20-30. They stayed expensive even as CDs and CD players
| (including portables) got less and less expensive. Very few
| albums were released on MD in the US so even if you invested
| all the money in the format you were paying $30-50 for
| "import" discs.
| jagermo wrote:
| direct mp3 to minidisc would have been a killer application.
| mostly for sony's music business which got pummeld back then by
| napster, audiogalaxy, etc
| aphroz wrote:
| Actually MD was everywhere, except in the US. There was a Vaio
| computer with integrated MD drive and you could store data and
| audio on it.
| dwringer wrote:
| There was a small window between heyday of Tascam 4-track
| cassette recorders and the emergence of modern digital
| recorders/PC interfaces when Yamaha's 4- and 8-track Minidisc
| recording consoles were a great and relatively affordable
| home/amateur recording option, fairly popular in the US.
| Sadly there is no digital out(!) so when I recently
| transferred my old tracks to digital I had to send each
| channel with a separate unbalanced(!) analog line. It's also
| prohibitively expensive to track down new MD Data discs (the
| MD audio discs which were far more common would only support
| 2-track recording instead of the full 8).
| gizajob wrote:
| I thought those minidisc 4 tracks were great, but the
| compression on them could be a bit nasty
| zoomablemind wrote:
| > ...Sadly there is no digital out(!) so when I recently
| transferred my old tracks to digital I had to send each
| channel with a separate unbalanced(!) analog line.
|
| MD audio was compressed with proprietary ATRAC, so sending
| it out would only make sense if the other end supported it.
| On the other hand the analog audio would clearly be more
| compatible.
|
| However, those MD decks supported TOS link for input, but
| had some bits flipped to disallow CD digital recopy.
| awiesenhofer wrote:
| Ah yes, the mysterious Sony Vaio PCV-MX2 - I still want one
| of these even though it would probably be completely useless
| nowadays.
|
| LGR has a nice video about it:
|
| https://youtu.be/UQSKWOw-sZc
|
| There was also a Vaio laptop that had an MD drive, it didnt
| support data though:
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/product/sony-vaio-pcg-nv109m/
| atourgates wrote:
| I can't explain why I thought MiniDisc was such a cool format.
| Maybe it was just its appearance in the Matrix. Maybe it was the
| Japanese "strangeness" of the format, and the difficulty of
| getting one in the United States.
|
| I was finally able to afford one near the end of the format's
| life, around the time that MP3 players were becoming endemic. I
| honestly couldn't make any case for why it was better, and it was
| significantly less convenient. But I still loved using it.
|
| I need to dig through my "big attic box of outdated electronics"
| and see if I can still dig it up and see if it works.
|
| I recently imported a Japanese Kei (mini) Truck. A minidisc
| stereo would be a great theme-appropriate fit for it, if I can
| find one at a reasonable price.
| rsync wrote:
| I feel exactly the same way about PCMCIA.
|
| It is my all-time favorite form factor.
| Melatonic wrote:
| The card format connector?
|
| It was cool in a few laptops to be able to add stuff on but
| I'm not sure it was anything all that special?
| acchow wrote:
| I remember loving the infinite storage capability on a cheap
| medium.
| Wistar wrote:
| I have perhaps the only 110V Sony LISSA stereo system that
| exists. Sony modified it to 110V for me for a special project.
| I have all of the components, including the CDP-LSA1 CD player,
| MDS-LSA1 MiniDisc recorder/player, STR-LSA1 receiver, and Sony
| speakers but not the new-age modern-looking 2.1 speakers that
| some later sets shipped with. All of the components
| interconnect with 1394 (Sony's i.Link), except for the speakers
| which are conventional analog connections. In about 2002, I
| used it for a single demo for a few days and, since then, it
| has sat, unused in my storage shelves. I need to send it to a
| museum or something.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Lissa
|
| (edit: fix date. 2002, not 1982.)
| gonesilent wrote:
| you should take a picture for the wiki link.
| Wistar wrote:
| Good idea.
| tqi wrote:
| Man i loved my MD player, i remember thinking in-line remote
| with the shirt clip was so cool.
|
| Looking back, it was pretty hilarious that transferring songs
| to the disc was real time (ie 70 minutes to transfer 70 minutes
| of audio). I really had nothing better to do...
| joecool1029 wrote:
| They fixed it in later hardware revisions with NetMD allowing
| faster than realtime digital downloading, but the software
| was terrible. There's amazingly been an opensource project
| slowly iterating and adding functionality to do so in the
| current age: https://wiki.physik.fu-berlin.de/linux-minidisc/
| flir wrote:
| It's the affordances, in my opinion. Whoever designed the
| physical hardware was an unsung genius.
| eastbound wrote:
| The killer for me was that it had a direct USB CD-to-MiniDisc
| cable to transfer CDs, with original quality, proper tracks and
| all. I would have loved to use it!
|
| Unfortunately once opened, the user manual said something along
| the lines of "Press he record button, plug the USB-to-jack
| wire, and in 45 minutes, done! It will recognize the tracks by
| noticing the silence between them, hopefully you don't have
| silences in the music, right? Also don't fuss too much about
| the white noise due to impedance, it's a high-quality transfer
| we pinky-swear."
|
| I swore never to buy anything from Sony since 1999. I relapsed
| in 2016 for ONE purchase. And swore again:
|
| Never - buy - SONY.
|
| EVER.
| gernb wrote:
| Mini-disc players had up to 240hrs of play time on a single
| charge. No MP3 player has ever had more than about 30hrs of
| play. Not that I want to go back to mini-disc but it's always
| been surprising to me that a device with moving parts would
| perform better than one without.
| [deleted]
| layer8 wrote:
| The moving parts of a MiniDisc are extremely lightweight, and
| I'm pretty sure the whole electronics of portable MD players
| were optimized end-to-end to consume as little power as
| possible. The ATRAC codec was also designed to be implemented
| directly in silicon and to use minimal energy. MP3 hardware
| was likely significantly less power-efficient.
| dafelst wrote:
| Interestingly Sony hardware and software to this day (even
| the PS5) still support ATRAC decoding.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| I still have a beautiful MD player from Panasonic not much
| bigger than a Minidisc in any dimension. I think the iPod
| really killed Minidisc, because the user experience was simply
| that much better than other MP3 players, which were generally
| janky designs from unknown brands.
| giantrobot wrote:
| MiniDisc's killer was none other than Sony itself. Sony's own
| competing divisions hobbled, crippled, then killed the
| MiniDisc.
|
| The first issue was cost of the media. MiniDiscs we're just
| never going to be as cheap to manufacture as CDs. So record
| companies would have far tighter margins on MiniDiscs than
| they would for the same album pressed on CD. Unsurprisingly
| not a lot of record companies bothered producing pre-recorded
| MiniDiscs outside Japan.
|
| Without pre-recorded albums readily available the only way to
| get music onto a disc was to record it yourself. So you had
| your MD player that cost hundreds of dollars you had to plug
| into _some other audio player_ to record music to take with
| you. There was no high speed dubbing unless you had an
| expensive console recorder so your hour long CD took an hour
| to copy to the MiniDisc.
|
| As the 90s went on Sony also refused to allow MDs to connect
| to a PC. So you couldn't rip music off a CD (which Sony
| considered unforgivable piracy) to your PC and then digitally
| load onto your MiniDisc. That is until they relented and
| released the NetMD players. But those were crippled in that
| they would only encode low resolution files but padded them
| so you only got 80 minutes of play time on a disc (despite
| the low resolution allowing 160 minutes). Sony also didn't
| allow their MD data drives to write audio MDs. But no one
| even had those drives because they were stupid expensive.
|
| All of this inconvenience was happening in a time when
| portable CD players were dropping in price (and getting audio
| buffers for skip protection) and coming standard in cars.
| CD-R drives were also coming down significantly in price
| along with CD-R media itself. So if you did want to make mix
| _tapes_ or just make CDs from files you got from the budding
| MP3 scene you could do so cheaply. Sony was even themselves
| manufacturing these devices, the DiscMan was a really popular
| portable CD player!
|
| The MiniDisc was essentially dead by the time the first
| portable MP3 players came out. Even the iPod wasn't competing
| against MiniDisc so much as it was CD players which by then
| added MP3 playback. The iPod didn't really take off until the
| third generation one was released in 2003.
|
| I say all this loving the aesthetic of MiniDiscs. They look
| super cool and could have actually been an interesting
| technology. Unfortunately Sony _really_ likes their
| proprietary media formats.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Makes me want to buy the coolest looking minidisc player
| and rip out of the internals and replace with something
| else. You could probably embed a small NVME SSD or mSATA
| into the old mini disc itself or maybe even turn the
| minidiscs into removeable batteries.
| jagermo wrote:
| I remember searching for (and finding!) a winamp plugin*
| that added a few seconds of silence to my minidisc
| recording so that my player could index the song. It was
| such a cool hardware and felt really sci-fi. But it was
| annoying that you couldn't add title and artist while
| playing the song, at least on my panasonic player.
|
| *I think it was this one.
| https://winampheritage.com/plugin/minidisc-track-pauser-
| vers...
| flir wrote:
| Internally they had mp3-on-minidisc ready to go,
| apparently. Engineering wanted to release it, the dark
| forces you allude to did not.
| giantrobot wrote:
| One of the other boneheaded aspects of NetMD was music
| was "checked out". If you put a track on an MD it was
| "checked out" and after some limited number of checkouts
| (2 or 3 IIRC) you couldn't put that track on another MD.
|
| Sony seemed obsessed over anti-piracy measures to the
| detriment of MD's success. You couldn't encode SP quality
| tracks on a PC you only got that recording real-time on a
| player. The check out stupidity. And then not supporting
| MP3s on MD. Sony almost seemed to go out of the way to
| kill the format.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I thought only Sony could make MD players? Looking up the
| Panasonic now - in general I love Panasonic - never had
| anything from them that was not awesome.
| lttlrck wrote:
| You could make "mix tapes"!
| woodrowbarlow wrote:
| > _I recently imported a Japanese Kei (mini) Truck._
|
| the subaru sambar? i adore that thing. someone in my
| neighborhood has one and i get a big ol' grin every time i see
| it on the road.
| jonpurdy wrote:
| I would love to import a Honda Acty. A neighbour had one when
| living in Toronto but seems like they're really
| difficult/impossible to import to California.
| glial wrote:
| The primary alternative at the time was CDs. MiniDiscs were
| like cool CDs that wouldn't scratch if you threw them on the
| desk or in the glove compartment. Also the aesthetics of the
| players were great...
|
| Too bad the accompanying software was so terrible.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > the difficulty of getting one in the United States.
|
| I had never even HEARD of the minidisc before I worked abroad
| in england from 2004-2006. Then seeing it being both
| ubiquitous, common, and cheap (and nearing it's EOL) was
| stunning.
|
| It's just a fun little format. The discs were just the right
| size and could store a boatload of info for the time. It was
| back when a 64mb mp3 player was pretty expensive.
| TheCondor wrote:
| The smaller disc size than a CD. The built in protection for
| the disc (I had a shitty car at the time and I think discs got
| scratched up by the player itself, eventually they were all
| unplayable). Recording built in. It scratched all the itches of
| the early 1990s.
|
| The devices themselves were pretty sexy too, portable, full
| featured.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| _Was_? It _is_ cool. Magneto-optic storage for the masses. What
| 's not to like?
|
| Also, of course, wired remotes with displays.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I think in the end it was just another example of Sony's
| proprietary, slightly miniaturized media. Sony had done it over
| and over and it is not cool at all in that regard.
|
| But the aesthetic design of and the experience of handling it
| was superb. The discs were often transparent and had just the
| right amount of internal reflections. Loading mechanism was
| partially motorized and would make a nice intricate sequence of
| scratching sounds. A lot of MD devices also used a slightly
| higher tone than were typical of machine beeps. Everything was
| figuratively "mint flavored".
|
| And then the new goodness of white plastic and stainless steel,
| scented with purified industrial alcohols, came in and wiped
| them all off.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > it was just another example of Sony's proprietary
|
| This pattern predates MemoryStick and even BetaMax (yes, Sony
| created BetaMax). I have several dictation tape recorders
| from the early and mid 70s. Norelco, Philips, GE, and Sony.
| All of them use the same size mini cassettes except... Sony.
| brudgers wrote:
| It is older and not unique to Sony among Japanese
| manufacturers.
|
| Nikon, Canon, Minolta, Olympus, and Pentax camera
| lenses...and Mamiya and Bronica too now that I think about
| it.
|
| And Kodak color film might be the prototype of vendor lock
| in for consumer products.
|
| Black and white Kodak roll film formats, now that I think
| of it, are even older still.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > And Kodak color film might be the prototype of vendor
| lock
|
| How? Those film cartridges were standard. There were many
| companies selling 110 film cartridges, 35mm film, etc.
| brudgers wrote:
| In the early days of color film, the only way to get
| Kodak color film processed was by Kodak. Kodak as the
| only processing option goes all the way back to the Kodak
| No. 1 camera in the 19th century.
|
| Kodak produced a lot of roll film cameras that took
| unusual formats that practically speaking only Kodak
| sold.
|
| https://www.brownie-camera.com/film.shtml
|
| This continued into the 1970's with with the Kodamatic
| instant film formats.
|
| While there were technically speaking other manufacturers
| of disc film and disc cameras, practically speaking they
| were synonymous with Kodak brand. That near exclusive
| film format only ceased manufacture in 1999.
| roughly wrote:
| It was definitely the aesthetics of it. It was _incredibly_
| cyberpunk - this great combination of digital storage format,
| small-size tech-looking disk, the way the players looked and
| opened - the whole thing was straight out of an anime. It's
| this artifact from the last moment before tech swerved off that
| cyberpunk mixture of physical and digital to just straight
| digital - after that, everything became ephemeral bits, and
| increasingly the hardware "existed to not exist," as it were -
| the iPhone, iPad, etc. were all designed as "blank slates" for
| the software, which was where all the action was.
|
| I think that's why the original Motorola Droid is so loved -
| it's not just that the hardware was useful and interesting, but
| it "existed to exist" - it had an aesthetic and was trying to
| be something by itself, not just to disappear.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| >It's this artifact from the last moment before tech swerved
| off that cyberpunk mixture of physical and digital
|
| This perfectly fits with the best definition of cyberpunk
| I've ever heard: "the future, but the 80s never ended."
|
| (Incidentally, I've heard Japan described this way as well.)
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Incidentally, I've heard Japan described this way as well_
|
| While I won't pretend to know as much about Japan as
| someone who lives there full-time, I've visited 14 times,
| often for several weeks at a stretch, and in real life,
| modern Japan is very different from the cyberpunk fantasies
| spread around the internet by people who have never been,
| and never will.
|
| It's still my favorite country to visit, so I watch NHK
| World every day. But it's not the cartoon/tech/ninja cliche
| world promulgated online. It's actually much better.
| jonjon10002 wrote:
| I jumped to MD in 1997 because I was still using cassette for
| mobile music consumption. Because of the media size, there
| wasn't a pocketable portable CD player, and skipping was a
| problem (that got fixed later) so I never switched to CD for
| mobile use.
|
| Compared to tapes, MiniDisc was a godsend: no eaten tapes,
| random access playback, smaller size, better sound, song
| titles, and it was just so cool looking. I also used a MiniDisc
| a lot to record and transcribe meetings at work. The live audio
| recording was excellent.
|
| The main disadvantage I ran into was that even with an optical
| digital connection, recording a 60-minute album from CD to MD
| took 60 minutes. I seldom ran into recordable media or
| prerecorded titles in the wild, even in New York (although
| Tower carried them), but there were lots of good online stores
| back then to buy blanks and new players.
|
| I stuck with it until 2002, when the second-generation iPods
| showed up. It was easier to carry one thing, and not a player
| and a bunch of loose discs. I still have a giant anvil road
| case with a few hundred of them in storage, although who knows
| if they delaminate or turn into oil over the decades.
| foobarian wrote:
| I wonder if the analog side of it was also designed superbly.
| More modern players happened to succeed not because the
| creators worked harder, or designed better, but purely by
| stupid luck of riding the Moore's law curve. But the analog
| side of things was not subject to Moore's law, and since modern
| players are cheap, there is no budget for a careful analog
| design. Hence I would expect older products like MiniDisc to
| have excellent performance there.
|
| All this without having used one, just some fun armchair
| speculation.
| spinny wrote:
| I owned a mzr700 at the time cd/mp3 players started to come to
| the market. It looked like something from the future when
| compared with the cd/mp3 players at the time. audio quality was
| amazing and minidisks always worked, no skipping or disk
| damages, and longer battery life than the cd/mp3 readers
| asah wrote:
| wow, this device is incredibly well designed, with lots and lots
| of thoughtful design details. Masterclass in product design.
| ronancremin wrote:
| I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Web MiniDisc yet. This
| combines the best of web (WASM) and MiniDisc, allowing you to
| write content to discs from the comfort of your web browser and
| dispense with all of the awful Sony software.
|
| https://stefano.brilli.me/blog/web-minidisc/
| ronancremin wrote:
| I forgot to mention that it supports MP3, FLAC, or WAV files.
| starik36 wrote:
| I legit thought this was a parody.
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