On the MiniDisc's lost potential

I think this will be my last piece on the whole portable audio thingy, at least for a while. I just needed to give a nod to probably my favorite media format, the MiniDisc... something that makes me weep at the lost potential due largely, IMO, to business decisions. A buddy who works at Sony helped me get my first one in Akihabara, one of the more amazing areas of Japan. I loved it and began recording stuff onto it while I was still there. It was smartly designed and became my preferred portable for a good long while. I even got a second one with the higher capacity some years later that was even smaller and cooler. And now I may never use them again. Accent on the may. I'm fairly confident that they'll stay in production for a good while yet and they make nice recorders.

In some ways though, I'm kind of surprised that MDs are still around and that you can buy them still. I remember when they first came out as a replacement for cassettes back in the late 1980's/early 1990s. They were kind of a technological curiosity back then but pretty slick. Sadly, the competing technology of digital cassettes came out about the same time creating consumer confusion and probably a bunch of angry customers that bought some only to see it vanish. I was kind of boggled by the DCCs introduction since DAT tapes were around too. The MD had the advantage though due to random access ability. It was also a slick package and a good counterpart to the CD which had become the standard distribution method. It was small and robust and held a reasonable amount of data, something like 100MB back then and about 1GB now.

But jeez, here we have a nice, slick, good, and robust digital medium and they loaded it with artificial restrictions. First, and most tragically, they intentionally prevented it from being used in conjunction with a computer (well, until relatively recently). So instead we were stuck with these Zip Disks which stored about as much but were a whole lot bigger. MDs would have been the perfect replacement to the 3.5" floppy which we were also stuck with for much longer than we needed. A disc that could be used both for data and in portable music players could have taken the world by storm at that time. But here we have some bigshots thinking that they could prevent piracy by not allowing it to be used with computers.

So eventually with the coming of other players that you could connect to your computer, they had to bow to pressure and finally produce players that you could upload music to via USB. Of course, they had to put in even more artificial restrictions to piss people off:

• Firstly (referring to the NetMD that I got) they only allowed one way recording. You could not record something, say, live onto an MD and download it to your computer.
• Then you could only transfer music in their proprietary format over, and no data. There goes any possibility of a portable drive.
• As for the music, you had to use their substandard and buggy program to do the transferring and it had these limitations like only being able to transfer a song to 3 discs at a time. There were workarounds of course.
  

Some of these restrictions went away with the releasing of the Hi-MD, where they I guess sorta admitted that people weren't happy with the restrictions. Too little too late. I do think it could have been a huge thing if they hadn't cow-towed to the music/recording industry. Well they were in a bind since Sony, the developer, has its own media arm which gets in their technology arms way. So unfortunate. They were well positioned to have an item that just about anyone would have used: a portable drive, a portable player, a floppy replacement... all basically predating widespread use of USB flash drives and solid state portable players. It still has a strong and devoted following and with good reason. But they never got it right. What a pity.

So MDs did (and do?) thrive a bit more in Japan. I'm convinced that part of the reason is that they also used the MDs for more things. Over there you could get video cameras that recorded to it. Related Magneto-Optical storage for computers was also fairly widely used there unlike here. But now there are as-cool or cooler and more useful things available. And now, for me, I think it's just past the point of my willingness to upgrade to the latest Hi-MD. I sorely wanted one at one point but I waited just a hair too long and they stopped making the ones that took standard alkaline batteries. One AA would last me a good 24 hours or more of continuous play. The rechargeable ones didn't. Still, I was close. But I think I was abused as a consumer just once too often to trust them. Yes, the Hi-MD does have the fewest restrictions so far but there are still annoying ones there. Most pertinently, it won't let me transfer recorded music on my older MDs back to my computer digitally. Artificial restrictions. Fooey.

So... sorry Scregman. I know I was your partner in crime for these things. I'm still a fan. But I'm out. And I'm sure you can understand.