MiniDisc: 1992-2007

Well, it’s been a good fifteen years.Sony has officially cut off support for SonicStage. It’s been over a year since the introduction of their flagship (and evidently, last) unit, the MZ-RH1. They’ve also abandoned the ATRAC format in their newer flash units.

Over the last year, most brick-and-mortar retailers have stopped carrying blank media for the format, and companies like TDK and Maxell have stopped making them altogether.

Lower the flags to half-mast, gang: this really is it.

Of course, it’s been awhile coming. The format was subject to a stupendously inept introduction in North America back in 1994. Audiophiles and folks in the music industry picked up on its advantages for field recording and sound reproduction, and it developed a small but quite loyal following. In Japan, it was very popular until recently.

Over the last two years, Sony made significant strides with the introduction of the Hi-MD format, the most important of which was the ability to perform bidirectional transfers between the units and computers.

The only real problem was that, to transfer files, you had to go through a terrible piece of bloatware known as SonicStage. It only works in Windows, it’s quite resource intensive, and the interface is the sort of nightmarish programming that gives guys like me heart palpitations.

Hateful as it was, SonicStage was the fastest and most convenient way to transfer MD recordings to and from computers. There were some real compatibility problems with Vista, and although a fix was issued, several satellite features were dropped, including the WAV conversion tool.

SonicStage still works just fine on computers running XP and previous versions (v4.3 is still here). Real-time recordings are, of course, unaffected. As such, the format’s still viable as useful. It just doesn’t have a future on the market.

Sony could have done alot of things to make MiniDisc succeed. Instead, they marketed it poorly, when they chose to do so at all. They kept the ATRAC format closed. They failed to add mp3 compatibility until it was too late to complete with flash players, and they made it a monumental chore to interface the units with computers. They chose to push the (also proprietary) UMD format over ATRAC for video.

I still prefer the format. Sound quality is unparalleled, especially compared to mp3, and it’s still the easiest and most versatile digital field recording medium out there. Of course, I’m ending up like those weirdos who hoard vinyl records and avoid sunlight, but I guess that’s okay. Sometimes it’s not bad to be an anachronism.