>>27596079because the format was popular? why else?
>>27596082>)BAD TO THE BONE
>>27596079For a long time they were a lot cheaper than buying CD's and mechanically they didn't skip so they were better for mobile applications like cars, boats and portables. There is still quite a niche for them from the musician crowd for some reason, the last car I imported from Japan had a pretty good Sony, single DIN mini-disk head unit which I didn't have much use for but a guy I worked with who was a professional jazz musician leapt on it for 'free' like it was made of gold or something.It's probably still on his 40ft offshore fishing vessel as best I know to this day doing tunes and tuna
>>27596099>because the format was popular? why else?But why only the UK and Japan? Why not the US or RoW?
>>27596298because they drive on wrong side
I'm guessing uk was a trial market also just because they were offered doesn't mean they're popular I've never seen one in a real car
>>27596298Mini disc didn't really come out in the US until just before the iPod did.
It never took off in the US because if you wanted to record your own music cassettes were good enough. 74 minutes per disc was the maximum for quite a while, so cassettes had the advantage in capacity and price. By the time NetMD came out which let you transfer music from a computer, CD-Rs were super common, and the ipod was on its way to dominate the portable music player market.
>>27596079Minidisc anon is my favorite occasional poster, kek.
>>27597083thisright technology at the wrong timeif they had netmd by say 1998/99, at the height of napster, they would have ate everybodys lunch. keep in mind you could ALWAYS record to MD, yamaha and others had 4- and 8-track mastering machines that could record to md at a higher quality than anything elsebut sony was so concerned about copying music that they intentionally held back this ability from the handheld players, only a couple rare pre-netmd md players have the ability to "rip" a cd all by themselves for example.also cassette tapes sound better. ATRAC encoding has an audible quality loss in compression, again because sony was concerned people would "pirate" music so they intentionally gimped the atrac algorithm for the portable units.
>>27597118If they didn't have the record label would they still have gimped it?
>>27597118>right technology at the wrong time>proceeds to describe how retarded copyright and vendor lock-in policies of the Sony Corporation destroyed another promising thing of theirsI mean it's not the time that was wrong, it's the same problem like with their MemorySticks, peripherals and so on. The keep the stuff to themselves until it's too late.
>>27597150the format is a direct upgrade to cd technology which sony also developedhad sony not been fucking gay and done their usual thing of being greedy fucks who underestimate their customers' and competitors' intelligence then it would have been absolutely groundbreaking stuff.
>>27597162>the format is a direct upgrade to cd technologyThat would be various types of DVDs. MD is a different technology, it's a magneto-optical disk, and there were several other types from different companies roughly at the time, I even remember using some of them. The disks were not cheap and required special drives (again, not cheap and not widespread) that weren't compatible with one another, I suppose that's the reason they eventually died out.
>>27597145it was really standard practice across the industry at the time to sabotage any ability for people to make copies of media because the riaa/mpaa were beginning to get obnoxiously litigious.the only reason you could ever record a show or song to VHS/cassette was because, in the executives' minds, the copy was of "lower quality" and so you could not then go and sell it. when digital recording came around music industry execs tried EVERYTHING to keep people from getting hold of the technology. PCM and the related ADAT/DAT recording methods allowed people to have CD-quality audio in their homes back in the mid '80s using just a standard VHS tape and player. Again developed by Sony and relegated to incredibly expensive professional equipment most people would never in their lives see. That simple little DAT player Shinji casually listens to in nearly every Evangelion episode unironically made American music industry execs piss and shit their pants and they effectively forced Sony to abandon the format for consumer use (overseas) because it was too good and could make perfect 1:1 recordings of anything released up to that point.
>>27596079Minidisc was pretty popular in Japan in general. I don't know about the UK.
>>27597177the music data is stored on the optical side, the magnetoelectronic side stores ToC and names. the important part is that the ME section can be infinitely rewritten which reduces the number of rewrites on the optical portion improving durability over cd-rw.the cds need the stupid little caddy because both sides of them are data layers.
>>27597177minidiscs made to sony's MD standard all fit in the same players. there are technically other "mini discs", even some made by sony, but they aren't used for music.
>>27597232picrel an earlier "mini disc" device, the 1st consumer sony mavica which used funky little micro-floppies to store still video frames as pictures.
>>27597177>>27597162>>27597150>>27597145>>27597118>>27597232>>27597247Speaking of Sony, when was the last time they were actually relevant? 2008?
>>27597251yeah i'd say about the time the ps3 came out they were permanently relegated to being the butt of jokes, because the height of their hubris was on full display>achieving backwards compatibility by including most of their old console inside the new console, but not in an efficient nintendo way where the old consoles cpu is the sound chip or something>immediately turned around and deleted that feature from future products because it was too expensive to make>initially sold with custom os support, backtracked when they found out that would technically let people play games they didnt pay for>pointless new media format just because >pack in movie instead of game>because basically no games at launchthen vita>drops memorystick for a exclusive, proprietary sd card that is 2x as expensive >goes OLED at first then drops it because its too expensive to make>ergonomics suck because of touch screen memes>NO FUCKING GAMESit's like they're great at developing this incredibly well made technology and then hobbling any attempt to actually use it as intended/advertised
>>27597251The PS2 era
hmm
>>27596079MDs were popular in general in those countries, because both had high rates of public transit usage, and the compact size of an MD player is a big advantage when you have to walk and ride trains everywhere and carry all your stuff with you. That popularity just carried over to cars.In the US, people were much more likely to do their music listening in a car or at home, where size wasn't an issue. Our bigger houses also had room for desktop PCs, which were quite cheap and pretty much always came with the ability to burn CDs on dirt cheap CD-Rs by the early '00s, which killed any advantage the later NetMDs would have had here like >>27597083 says. I was actually one of the few Americans who had an MD player and it was a cool device, but lost relevance quickly once I got out of high school and had my own car, and I never would have bought it in the first place if I weren't a tech nerd and a weeb at the time.
What real world advantages does MD have over CD?
>>27596104Dont you fuckin start that shit, ngga.
>>27597278Same with Sony E-readers. was the first e-ink device that had good resolution and didnt suck. but required ridiculous proprietary format to use, which made them lose ouy even with first mover advantage. once the firmware got jailbroken, and you could send any type of epub or pdf to it, it was amazing, but it was too late and not everyone knew how to do it.desu all of japanese tech is this way. look at felica/nfc-f. only works on iphones. and on androids but only if u bought the phone in japan OR root and fuck around with a pixel.japan comes out with some cool hardware but it's useless because they are retards and gimp their own shit.
>>27597251They started the PS3 era poorly but finished strong and ended the run outselling the 360.they were strong for ps4 generation too.ps5 has no games.
>>27599385>smaller>essentially infinitely rewritable>cd quality sound>disc in a protective enclosure >fuckin cool
>>27599856>smallerAdded bulk of the plastic case offsets that>infinitely rewritableLike a CD-R?>CD quality soundCD also has this>protective enclosureCD also has jewel cases>coolSubjective
>>27599928its a quarter the size of a normal cd
>>27596079Here's a better question that will answer your first question:Where was the minidisc format popular?
>>27600161>Where was the minidisc format popular?UK (in the late 90s and early 00s) and Japan
>>27599928>Added bulk of the plastic case offsets thatStill thinner than a CD jewel case and way smaller than the other common portable media at the time - compact cassette. >Like a CD-R?CD-R's are not rewriteable. CD-RW's are, but there was compatibility issues where some players wouldn't read them. Also, CD-RW's are worn out after being reused 1,000 times. Minidisc is rated for 1,000,000 reuses. >CD also has thisCD should have CD-quality sound. Compact cassette was smaller than CD and did not have CD-quality sound. Minidisc is much smaller than CD and has CD-quality sound, which was technologically challenging in its era. >CD also has jewel casesYou have to remove CD from the case to use it. Minidisc is always in its case and protected. >SubjectiveYes, and?
>>27601134>and has CD-quality soundWrong.>ATRAC reduces the 1.4 Mbit/s of a CD to a 292 kbit/s data stream,[14] roughly a 5:1 reduction. ATRAC was also used on nearly all flash memory Walkman devices until the 8 series.>The ATRAC codec differs from uncompressed PCM in that it is a psychoacoustic lossy audio data reduction scheme. Like other lossy audio compression formats, it is intended to be acoustically transparent, but some listeners claim to be able to hear audible artifacts.
>>27596149>mechanically they didn't skipAlso wrong. They skip less, and not "mechanically", but "electronically", because they were typically using a larger cache than the earlier CD players.
>>27601850>psychoacoustic>some listeners claim to be able to hearlike I'm going to believe a bunch of schizophrenicsThe plural form of "anecdotal" is not "facts".
>>27601859Compare it with other lossy codecs like MP3 or OGG then. Don't lie.
>>27601865Don't tell me what the fuck to do, bitch nigger.
>>27601874Cope, liar.
interesting
>>27597177>the format is a direct upgrade to cd technology which sony also developedThe fact that this statement is false is why minidisc was always pointless. It was not an upgrade, as the quality was worse than CDs and it had DRM built-in too.Worse than cassettes.
>>27599856>CD quality soundlolno, not even close
