So long MiniDisc; don't slam the door on the way out - Engadget

way, judging from the recent activity at the MiniDisc Community Forums. Though not exactly a hotbed of anti-MiniDisc activity, one member points out that at Sony's recent corporate strategy meeting there was no mention of the format, and it was also a no-show in the company's annual report, other than as an example of a dying format: "..

.consumer 10,000 jobs, it doesn't seem like such a stretch to imagine that the MiniDisc division will fall to his ax. Let's just did kill , after all.

That's sad, but understandable. I have 3 different MiniDisc players/recorders in my home, that we've had for years. Unfortunately, Sony wasn't smart enough to expand on the idea.

They could have made them natively MP3-compatible early on. I would have loved to be able to buy cheap MD media and save MP3's on them. But oh well.

Sony is losing is edge anyway. Samsung is/has replaced them.

Noooooo!

Squirrely! SQUIRRELY! Talk to me squirrely!

I still use my Sony MD recorder for portable recording. It's great. It runs at least 12 hours on one AA battery.

Plus it powers my stereo mic when it records.

I've said it before in other public forums, Panasonic - but especially Sony - are becoming dinosaurs in many sectors of the consumer electronics and broadcast industry. It is the smaller companies that are perceived as innovative.

Sony has persisted with its own in-house standards like ATRAC audio compression, when the outside world was screaming MP3. I'm keeping their fall 2005 European catalogue as an example of how NOT to get concepts over to the public..

..every "new" technology feature is given its own brand name.

People do not write this down and then go to the store with a list of techno brand names. In the broadcast world, Sony has been a very traditional production company concentrating on television. They are very poor at integrating their solutions with other platforms - like new media and radio.

They are much too expensive for what they deliver. I would argue their only contribution to radio production was the Sony Pro cassette recorder and a great pair of closed headphones. Sony Minidisc has been a great example of a fragile consumer technology misused by freelancers to try and work to professional standards.

If you have Minidiscs, make sure you copy off the contents to another media (e.g. hard-disk) as soon as possible.

Ten years from now you are not going to find a minidisc player to play this stuff back. Remember 5 1/4 inch floppy discs? By stating that the new Walkman Phones will not support ATRAC music formats, Sony effectively killed the Minidisc in March of this year.

I too am curious to see what Sir Howard Stringer will do to put them back on the map - like no other.

Sony has had it's head stuck in it's collective a** for way too long. Did Sony really think that by ignorning the market for devices like CD burners and mp3 players without DRM that consumers wouldn't buy them?

Instead other companies produced those devices and cashed in where Sony should have. Now Sony is rightly considered an also-ran in the technology world.

Did the MD technology evolve into the UMDs?

I remember in 1994 when a store called Title Wave(long out of business) had a Minidisc section. I saw before me entire albums in the MiniDisc format. I never saw it again after Title Wave closed down.

I'm not surprised by this news. MiniDisc was one of those cool ideas on paper that never quite succeeded in the marketplace. When MP3 was introduced, it pretty much killed the need for MiniDisc or any disc for that matter.

Sony was slow to acknowledge this, and instead only complicated matters by introducing their own digital format that never gained acceptance. It's funny, Sony has historically created new formats that achieve some support but ultimately fail. Like even now.

.. did we really need UMD?

What about the upcoming Blu-Ray? I think discs in general are going to be antiquated at some point, as flash memory catches on in higher capacities at lower costs. Think about it-- no moving parts.

Small size. The only reason discs are so popular right now is because they are inexpensive. Some day, that COULD change.

Next, kill the memory stick. I beg you, Howard.

Minidisc is superior to both flash and hard drive based solutions.

Yes you heard me. 1 Gig of infinitely rewriteable media for $2 a pop. Even better the theoretical limit on storage density for MD was 5Gb/Disk.

Anyone who disagrees is quite frankly an uninformed imbecile.

Anyone else would have supported mp3 and pcm recording, and anyone else would have supported the generic USB storage device standard. If Sony decides to sell their Hi-MD technology to someone with no resident music-publishing overlords to appease, earth could still see a marketable MD product.

Sell/spin off the movie, music and television production divisions. The consumer electronics and media divisions are not creating any 'synergy' for eachother. Each would do better on their own.

But keep gaming division part of the consumer electronics division. Support CF/SD, support MP3/WMA/ACC/MPEG4-AVC, and other POPULAR standards. Sony has become to big to be competitive.

They need to shed off dead weight to become an agile player in the consumer electronics market. Only then will Sony see a resurgence.

no if only sony would outright buy InPhase license and figure out hwo to make those 1.

6tb discs reqwriteable and wed have an unstopable media for at least 2 yrs, i have a great idea for a portable player outside of HDD that suck the life outta portable units not to mention of the HDD goes bad or the unit goes bad you have an entire library to replace instead of just a single disc. i dont think following the iPod is smart you need to branch off and give consumers a reason to jump ship on _THE_ icon of portable music now. Sony InPhase MD players in '06 c'mon Sir Stringer.

What I know of MD is what I hear through concert recordings. I'm a big Pearl Jam fan and they have a very devoted fan base that records as many shows as possible. Many of the mid 90's shows were only recorded on MD.

Listen to a MD concert and it generally is torture. Same concert recorded with a DAT and you're golden. (big variables include your mic's, location to sound source, wind, crowd noise, etc.

) I'm not saying it's fair to compare the 2, but it is very clear that MD isn't capable of providing the quality sound that I want to hear.

Minidisc wasn't 1GB when the format was first introduced..

. it was closer to 140MB, and there was no way to use it as a 140MB floppy disk with your computer, anyway. As for "1GB of infinitely rewritable media for $2", I'll stick with "4.

7GB of almost infinitely rewritable media for 80 cents", in the form of DVD+/-RW. If I want the Minidisc form factor, storage capacity and (over)price, I'll buy 3" DVD's. It was a nice idea, and the first viable read/write random access format big enough to store audio on, but Sony blew it not only with DRM but with preventing me from buying one stack of media and using it for audio, video and computer backup as I did with CD's.

And it looks to me like they're going to blow it with UMD as well, exactly the same way. While MD has had a cult following trying to be a cheap medium between DAT and Cassette. (With Dat being great and expensive and Cassette being terrible and cheap) It was never picked up as everyone I had ever spoken to thought it was made to replace the compact disc, rather than to replace the cassette tape.

Sony missed the pirate media boat, since they are technically a Record label as well. So they could never trust that the MP3 you have on HDD is of legitimate source or not. With the advent of the new HiMD generation, "mp3 Compatible" was the equivalent of saying "I left my homework at home".

It's technically at home, but it doesn't mean it was completed. Same with mp3 on HiMD. Sure it's there, but it is highly crippled.

Still, had Sony let HiMD flourish (a.k.a no DRM), at 7 dollars per gig of removeable media, I think HDD's would have a bit of competition.

(forgetting slow write speeds and crippled software). Anyways, I had a real good time with MD. Recording off the radio, my gameboy and whatever else I wanted to put on my mixes, and I will probably use the MD technology circa 1999 for awhile to come.

I almost forgot that MD existed still. The last I saw of them were a bunch of the discs in a bargain bin selling for 50 cents and no one grabbing and my mom going "Hey! Can you use these in your CD burner?

" I'm happy I never got on the bandwagon. It's a cool idea, but it's just not very practical in a world where everybody has a CD player and, chances are, no one has an MD player. Sony's really killing me with all these Sony-only storage mediums!

UMD will follow the MD in a few short years.
Bought in 1995. Barely used.

Original owner. Make me an offer. im @ matte dot com Minidisc would have been successful, if, starting with NetMD, the devices showed up as mass storage devices and played any MP3 you dragged and dropped to them with no DRM BS.

But Sony didn't want people putting pirated music on them. Well, you won Sony. People won't.

Because no one will buy them.

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