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While rumours have suggested it in the past, it’s now official: after years of complete and utter redundancy, Sony is finally killing off the MiniDisc.
Sony has announced that it will ship its last MiniDisc player in March of 2013. The biggest question it raises, of course, is: who the hell is still buying these things? Assuming they’re not being piled up in a warehouse for eternity, presumably some poor guy is buying a shiny MiniDisc player, right now, as if it’s the Next Big Thing.
Which, just over twenty years ago, it was. Launched all the way back in 1992, the optical format squeezed music into what was then a tiny — and secure — little package. A shame, then, that they were cripplingly expensive — and that barely anyone released music using the format. Despite such trouble, and the dawn of MP3 and iPod, MiniDisc carved out an amazing 21-year life for itself. Rest in peace, MiniDisc. [Ashai via Engadget]
Image by TomPageNet under Creative Commons license
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I remeber my old player with the external battery pack…. this thing was the future man!
I loved it dearly.
MiniDiscs were great. I didn’t buy pre-recorded albums but I did copy CDs onto them. They were ideal for making ‘mix tapes’ and recording my own DJ mixes for listening back to then deleting if they were crap. There were also good for moving tracks around, naming tracks and editing bits out.
I used to do exactly the same thing. I would hook up my unit to my decks and record a mix onto them, and listen travelling to uni, or at the gym. They were great!
RIP.
I loved my mini disc player. It was reassuringly heavy and the satisfaction of sliding in the discs and closing the case was awesome.
It was almost a revival of the casette in a way. Same sort of charm and style that was missing from the CD and will definitely never exist in MP3 land.
It did make a lovely reassuring mechanical noise when you used one. They were simpler times.
Agree with you both on the noise of slotting the disc in and clicking it shut. Still have my NetMD and even twenty blank discs I got in a Comet sale about six years ago. RIP MD.
Ironically my biggest problem was that you couldn’t ‘rip’ from a mini disc
I really like mine, it was the ipod before the ipod for me and a lot of other people. You didn’t buy music for it any differently than you did with any of the early mp3 players, you ripped CDs and put them on the disks. It was small, had removable storage and replaceable batteries.
Really it was bad marketing on the part of sony because it was a killer technology with all the features most people look for in an music player.
Thank Christ. MiniDiscs were the bane of my life when I was a theatre tech.
Boooooooooo
God, the comments in this place are going downhill. In my day, we used to actually argue with people, rather than unsophisticated boooooooing. Ah well. Times change and all that.
Haha! If only I could have thrown virtual rotten fruit!
I think i’m all out of arguing energry this week, and admittedly couldn’t argue with a subjective post like that.
I just disagree emotionally and a good old fashioned ‘Boooooooo’, felt like a good outlet!
As Fred Macaulay once said on Mock The Week sometimes a boo just isn’t enough – then you need “fu*king booo!”
Shut your Jibba Jabba if booing and jeering is good enough for MP’s it’s good enough for me
Here Here
HAHAHA
I genuinely thought that was a theatre based disagreeing reply, maybe I’m confusing theatre and panto though…
oh no, you’re not
I once used a Sony MiniDisc MZ-N10 and a simple omni-directional Philips microphone from Argos to record a drum ‘guide track’ for a song that eventually got to #53 in the UK Charts.
True Story.
Link to song please!
I also think you should have ended that with ‘Which was nice…’.
I still have mine in mint condition with sealed pack of blank mini discs. I still have box and everything for it. Cost £200! Probably worth about £2 now
I’ll give you £3.
£4!
BASTARD!
Same, I used em at uni and on the student radio station for sound beds and stings and now I’m stuck with a load of blank mini discs.
Any suggestions?
Retro coasters?
I like that idea! good work Longfellow.
Your welcome
Minidiscs absolutely ruled. I too still have my minidisc player somewhere (which I mercilessly bugged my parents to buy my for my birthday – one of the few times I was an utter brat asking for something) along with a big stack of discs. It was such a revelation in the ease of recording, editing and naming tracks compared to CDs at the time.
I’m going to crack my MD player out tonight and remember the good times we shared together. Before all the arguments and petty squabling.
My dad still uses MiniDiscs from time to time, purely because they’re easy to split tracks on.
“just over twenty years ago, it was. Launched all the way back in 1992″
Christ I feel old
and me
Ditto. My player is still in mint condition, in a box, in my attic. Don’t know how long it’s been there. I miss it.
SERIOUSLY?!!! I thought these had been killed off in the early 2000s!
I remember my shiny blue on from like 98 or whenever it was. It was genius and still probably one of favourite electronic gizmos ever. Ive only DVD/Blu Rays had been made the size and format of mini disc it woud have been great. No scratched, no fingerprints causing it to skips, minidisks were ace.
They something close with the PSP UMD discs for movies. Storage was only 1.8gb though
I got mine when i was 16 and working in a call centre after school. I was minted before all this mortgage and paying bills like an adult crap. Walked into dixons and bought my mini disc player then went a few shops down the road and got my nokia 5110. 14 years ago – shit the bed. Bought a jamiroquai mini-disc from tower records… £17 or something like that. No wonder it went tits up.
The recorder in the title image is a blue Sony MZ-R55. That was the first thing I bought with the money from my first job at the age of 16, and in that colour too. It was also the driving force behind why I chose to get a job in the first place. I only recently left that company (same company, better job), so you could say that this Minidisc player changed my life…
I imported it from Japan via the Internet. That was a pretty unusual thing to do back then, but the ’55 didn’t come to our shores for another year.
Incidentally, the MD naysayers can go take a running jump off a cliff. Back when tape Walkmans were the norm, this thing was a digital revolution.
I still have my minidisc recorder and some spare discs. Might dig them out.
You know what? I think I might do the same. I loved the whole MD thing.
Time to do a nostalgia-wallow.
Did anyone else have one of the portable players that slotted into a docking station to both recharge and become part of a home MD player?
Was quite possibly the most amazing piece of tech I’d ever seen when I was younger – the concept was a piece of mindblowing genius. Just undock from your hi-fi and go.
I still have my minidisc separate, a Sony car stereo, a Sony 6 minidisc changer for the car and 3 portable minidisc Walkmans. This list include my very first one a walkman that i bought when working in Norway and cost me well over £1000 – i actually tried it just now after reading this post and it still works!!! Kids nowadays do not understand how revolutionary it was being able to move and name tracks.
I don’t think I’ve even seen one since 2001 when I dropped mine into the pool
To answer to the question about who the hell is buying them. They are still popular with a number of Theatres because of the ease of cuing them and (particularly with Sony je decks) the ease of editing with thwem.