Not many folks noticed Sony’s announcement earlier this year that they’d be phasing out the Minidisc format. In fact, most people were unaware that it was even still alive in the 21st century.
As it turns out, Sony was still churning out models in the new Hi-Md format, and they continue to do so.
In the era of high-capacity mp3 players, Minidisc seems something of a throwback. Originally designed as a replacement for CDs, the format was soundly rejected by a public already feeling burned by the forced obsolesence of vinyl. It gained a second life (and a fervent cult following) as a recording medium, and as a replacement for analog tape.
The discs were rugged and the units made pristine digital recordings with no audible artifacts. The format quietly improved to the point that the ATRAC3 recordings were virtually indistinguishable from CDs in terms of sound quality. Pre-recorded discs met with apathy in the American market, but in Japan they were plentiful and could even be purchased at convenience stores.
For a few years, the Minidisc had a good run in audiophile cirlces. The units were much smaller than portable CDs, they were virtually skip-proof, and they were easy to record on.
Then mp3 happened.
Anyone with good ears can tell you that Minidisc soundly trumps the Fraunhoefer codec in sound quality, but the success of the mp3 format had more to do with versatility and portability. Within a few months, mp3 spread like wildfire, largely due to the fact that the files were easily transported via computer and therefore easily downloaded over the internet.
Another area where Minidisc shines is gapless playback. If you don’t know what that is, listen to Dark Side of the Moon or any live album on which there’s no pause between tracks on the original recording. The mp3 format adds gaps between tracks (it has to do with rounding frames). It can get very annoying.
The mp3 codec was leaked to the public before it was ready, and it still has many shortcomings. Thing is, we’re stuck with it, since everyone jumped the bandwagon early, and now the “prototype” is the standard.
In spite of the advantages of Minidisc, it’s just easier (and faster) to rip a CD to mp3. The Minidisc units had no way to connect to a computer, and the only way to record music on them was in real time (like the analog cassettes they’d replaced). What’s more, Sony refused to support the mp3 format, so the only way to get mp3s onto Minidiscs was to feed them through the computer’s output to the minidisc player, again in real-time.
Sony compromised with the much-lamented NetMD, which provided a (largely crippled) computer interface, but required mp3 files to be converted to the ATRAC format, and once they were on the minidisc unit, they were stuck there through DRM. No thanks.
Sony kept their heads stuck in the sand, and the market for mp3 players took over the industry.
To some of us, Minidisc still had some real advantages. It’s still a wonderful medium for field- and live-recording, and the sound-quality is unmatched. (Of course, the main problem is, “once I’ve made the recording, how the heck do I get it on to my computer?”) There are several portable mp3 players with recording capabilities, but none of these can match the feature set of the simplest portable Minidisc units.
Unlike mp3 players, which are plastic units containing fragile hard-drives, minidisc units are usually aluminum and are quite rugged in comparison. If an mp3 player dies, it’s gone, along with all the data on it. Minidiscs use cheap and easily replaceable media.
Despite the advantages, Minidisc continued to dwindle and fade. Let’s face it, it’s alot easier to drag-and-drop files from your PC to an mp3 player than it is to stand around and wait 45 minutes for an album to record, and Americans are not patient people.
Some folks (myself included) argue that even if production halts completely (as it appears to on all fronts but one), the fomat will have life as long as blank media is available. Sharp, who made some of the best units, has ceased production, as have Toshiba and Panasonic. Only Sony’s still making them. However, blanks are still widely available, and given the durability of the units, it’s possible that I’ll still be using the format in ten years. Compare that to my Nomad Jukebox, which died after one.
As it turns out, Sony appears to have been listening to the furor about file restrictions, and they’re introducing a new Hi-MD model (Hi-MD is a new compression scheme that fits up to 1GB on the disc) that allows recordings to be uploaded to a computer without restrictions. About damn time.
It still requires software, which is annoying since these things should simply show up as removable drives, but of course, Sony still insists on some level of copy-protection. The software is available for Windows and Mac, and once the units hit market, it should only be a matter of time before it’s backported to other systems.
The new units are apparently capable of native mp3 playback as well as recording to standard PCM files, which is quite a big deal. Linear PCM is the best choice for field-recordings, and once uploaded to the PC, it’s the easiest to edit and manage.
The flagship unit is the Sony MZ-RH1 (also here), which isn’t available in Europe or the States yet. What’s interesting is that Sony appears to have thrown every feature possible into the player, perhaps anticipating it as their swan-song as the format. Among the new features are recording-level meters, on-the-fly recording level adjustment, digital pitch control and a digital amplifier–things that had previously only been available on Sharp’s superior models.