Finally… MiniDisc.
There’s a good reason why this video took me a few years to make…MiniDisc is a monster. I’ve ended up producing a 45 minute video that still only touches on a tiny part of the story.
I decided that rather than getting too technical (which I can’t, because I’m not) this one is based more around my personal MiniDisc story.
MiniDisc is the last in a long line of portable mechanical music players. We'll never see anything like this again. I saw MD launched and I saw it die. I’ll miss MiniDisc, but it had a good life..one much richer than history has recorded.
You can view this video here a few hours early on Patreon, but as it’s been over a week since I uploaded my last video, I’ll likely make this public sometime on Saturday so subscribers get a chance to watch it over the weekend.
This video has been a killer, I’d estimate about two years of prep, a week of shooting time, three solid days of editing and then two and a half days of voiceover work and tweaking.
I hope you enjoy it, and as soon as I recover, I’ll get on to making the next one.
By the way it's getting late here...so if you post any comments I'll probably only get to them in the morning...please don't think I'm ignoring them..even though I am, but it's only because I'm asleep.
Comments (62)
I expect you've seen this already, but for anyone else, it appears to be possible to take apart and rebuild a completely dead Sony LIP-4WM lithium battery pack (33:50 in the video), using modern lithium gumstick cells. Though it's not exactly an easy job, and finding the correct replacement cell size is difficult. Some replacement cells only fill 70% of the original case so your operation time will be reduced. But at least it can work, at all. Forum discussion with photos: <a href="http://forums.sonyinsider.com/topic/29187-lip-4wm-battery-rebuild/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://forums.sonyinsider.com/topic/29187-lip-4wm-battery-rebuild/</a>
still have a rack of minidics, none are originals and a sony netmd mdlp ( 505 i think) after a separates deck to go with the 300cd jukebox and technics tapedeck
Terrific review! You continue to do a great job with your "old tech" videos. I find it very interesting how the tech worked, its impact on the market, the available media, et al--you really do your homework. I personally never got into mini-discs, I think because they were so expensive. I Jumped from CDs to mp3s on CD to mp3 players (ultimately to Apple iPods, which I still use today with my iPod touch and nano). But I was always curious about them. So thanks for covering the topic!
This was pretty nostalgic for me. Really miss the style of (some of) Sony's products from the 90's and early 00's. Big thanks Mat, great effort with this video!
Bought my Sony MZ-R3 in Japan in 1996. Loved that little machine. Light, compact and blew away every other audio device in North America at the time. Pity they never really caught on. Japan was way ahead of us then!
I sold a portable Sony MD player/recorder a few years ago on eBay, someone did the "Buy it now" within a few minutes. I guess I didn't ask enough. I never really got into these, bought that one to use recording audio via microphones. It wasn't long afterwards I got a Creative Nomad Jukebox and it also did line in recording and used a hard drive instead of discs. The best thing about your videos is they can be 10 minutes or 2 hours...they keep me interested throughout the entire video. That's a skill, my friend. Keep it up!
Thank you! I really liked watching this. Myself I had the Sony MZ-N10, which i got before the iPod came out I think, but after I had already had an MP3 player. The problem with the MP3 player was the small amount of music you could fit on the then standard 16MB MMC cards. MiniDisc is a great format I think, with it's practicality and easy handling. It could probably have been a more widespread format than CD, under different circumstances. I ended up selling my device a year or two after I got a smartphone, and I seem to remember I got a surprisingly good price for it.
Never owned a MD player. In 1999 I bought a portable CD player to take with me for a year of backpacking. In 2003 a friend bought me a iPod 3rd gen from New York (much cheaper over there than in The Netherlands). For me, this was my best device ever... aside: I never gave it much thought, and it was only in the back of my mind, but apparently Atrac is not the same as 8-track. LOL.
I've watched this now. Really great, the 45 mins flew by (why are people put off by long videos?). I knew nothing about Hi-MD at all, I guess neither of my MD devices (Pioneer D707 & Kenwood DMC J7R) had it.
Yes Hi-MD was almost dead on arrival. I remember it being discounted very quickly after launch when the price of the iPod and similar devices fell sharply and took away its advantage. It's a shame really, they were probably working on it for years...but at the same time someone else has been working on miniaturised HDDs.
Dammit Mat, now I'm going to have to go and find my MD player (Sharp MS702 I think) and the prerecorded MDs that I had. I was one of the few people at university who had a minidisc player and there was always a fascination about it from other people. I remember being offered a 3.5" PC bay minidisc player but unfortunately I never bought it.
I found some pretty good music compilations on my discs that I'd forgotten about. More often than not I used to load them up with compilations so that it was mostly decent music with no fillers.
I always loved how colorful the blank discs are.
The multiple colour discs in the video thumbnail (something that I'm pretty happy with) - were bought just to put in a shadow box frame. I thought they'd make an interesting object. I haven't got any further with this idea yet, but I unwrapped them all for the first time on Friday to take the thumbnail pic.
I've actually been wanting to get into minidisc off and on for a while now, but feel like I can't really justify coughing up the ~$50 for an N707 (the life of a college student) and like you said, it's digital music which my phone does wonderfully. But then again your various videos on compact cassettes drove me to put a factory cassette deck back in my old Mercedes, so maybe I'll take the plunge soon.
I'd say, just stick with the cassettes. At least you can buy new music releases on them.
You're right, this was the first time I ever had a digital music player. I've never owned a portable Discman (I had a mains-bound Sony D-250). At first it was the MZ-R2 that you showed that I had taken from my dad, and later on I bought a cheaper MZ-N510 which came with amazing car accessories. I still have them, as well as a bunch of pre-recorded MDs (guess I have to hang on to those now), and it was my favorite medium up for years. What replaced it for me was the Network Walkman NW-E3. An "MP3" (Well, ATRAC3) player with 64MB of storage (and I used the dreaded OpenMG Jukebox software for that as well). Minidiscs were the love of my life from 1993 until 2003. It wasn't extremely popular in Israel, but I'm very happy to have had this experience. Thanks for the video! I've been waiting for this for quite a while, and the hope of seeing it is why I became a patron of your channel in the first place.
I'm glad you liked it..and I'm also happy that I've finally finished it. Now I can move onto making videos about some things that are a less common and no one is waiting for (much less pressure).
You continually excel at putting together very interesting and informative videos. I knew next to nothing about this format and really enjoyed this. Thanks for all of the hard work you put into your channel.
Thanks old chap - happy to see that it's being well received.
Do you use a teleprompter or cue cards or something. That is an impressively long single take without any flubs!
It's all improvised (albeit working to a vague plan of where I want to start from and end up) and changes each time, I say it, however the bit you don't see are the dozens of versions of that take that went off the rails.
Great video as always, although I didn't realise that my owning a CD Walkman was not 'mainstream'. Somehow I completely missed Minidisc.
It will very much depend on where you lived - probably even changing from town to town. I remember seeing someone take one out on a train to change the disc and thinking...ooh that's odd, not because of the person, it just reminded me that I'd never seen anyone use one before.
Fantastic video! I've been anticipating this one for a long time and enjoyed every second. As an American, I had never heard of MiniDisc until my sister brought home a boyfriend from the UK in the late 90s. The format was completely novel to me and as surprised as I was to have never seen it, he was also surprised to see zero MiniDiscs on the streets and in stores here in the States. It was only then that I started to realize that America doesn't always have the latest and greatest of everything...
Back in the 90s MD was just expensive for me to justify, along with portable CD players. I drove everywhere so cassette still did what I needed (and I loved buying a new CD and recording it onto a new chrome tape). I bought my JDM van last year and it had an MD/CD player, which I've now replaced. Inside it was a Japanese home recorded MD. So I finally got MD by accident. Great video as always, thanks.
Really enjoyed this one. Thank you! I worked at a local radio station in 1995 where we transferred all our jingles on to minidisc. We had previously had large cart walls. I seem to remember the Sony MD player/recorder we did it on was grey in colour, the size of a shoebox, quite deep and had a plug-in keyboard for naming tracks. Wonder how much that would be worth now?
That model comes up a lot on eBay...but it's probably not ideal for a home environment so I've always given it a miss. I do remember the BBC putting all their old music onto MD, I saw some behind the scenes show about it back in the day.
Excellent video and worth the two year wait! As a former video professional I appreciate the work in this, especially the editing. A tour de force. You are appreciated, Sir! :)
No thank you Sir, I appreciate the positive feedback.
I think that is one of the best videos, 45 minutes and not one little boring second. I never had aby MD stuff because I did not like the ATRAC compression. And I never even heard of Hi-MD before. Veryinteresting. The extra muppets I think were one of the best ones I have ever seen. As always: Thanks for a great video!
I'm glad it didn't get boring as it's impossible for me to tell while making it. I have an idea what goes on for too long, but I can never be sure.
Thanks for this fantastic video, Mat. By chance I saw the MiniDisc format at an electronics show in Hong Kong in 1992, grabbed a brochure that explained how it worked and decided I had to have one. It was just brilliant. The next year they launched in Australia and I parted with AU$1,500 for the MZ-1. I loved the unit but buying another rechargeable battery for it was way too expensive, and in the end it was a lemon. I had two other machines after that (one Sony, one JVC) and one of those was no good either, and the machines were always expensive but the principle of MD was and is quite smart. Of course, it's well and truly obsolete today with larger capacities and no moving parts.
MD in particular is more obsolete to me than even cassette, because I have plenty of things that only exist on cassettes, but everything I had on MD was a copy of something that I already had...whether a CD or an MP3 file. If I want to listen to these things now, I'll just listen to the CD.
I guess it's your longest video yet. Good work, man, and I'm sure it will have lots of views. I owned a compact MD system from Sony and I've used MD to copy CDs. I guess MD is one of those technologies killed by music publishers, not by technology. And then file age came...
I think a lot of people had MDs in their mini hifi systems. At one point they were being used in place of a cassette deck. Even my mother in law had one in hers, but I don't recall her ever using it.
Very well put together - I missed the MD - went straight across from compact cassette and CDs, to MP3 CD and then iPod. Your video filled in a lot of detail I was unaware of - look forward to the next installment..
The MP3 CD thing was the part that never happened for me. That would have only really been affordable in the latter part of the 1990s and about the time I got my MD machine.
Thank you so much for making this video. Very interesting and informative. I did use MD and for me it was never a failure. Just technology evolved and it has become obsolete with new mp3 devices coming out but it was a wonderful piece of technology and I enjoyed using it.
BTW - thank you as always for a well produced and interesting video.
Two thoughts: 1) I think the first I ever saw a minidisc was a scene in the Columbia Picture's 1993 "Last Action Hero" where it was subtly (?) product-placed around a scene in a jeep coming out of the La Brea Tar Pits if I remember correctly. Schwarzenegger or the kid pop the disc in a portable player I think. I remembered at the time thinking how futuristic it looked but I guess I didn't realize Sony had been selling them since Sep. 1992. 2) At the beginning of this video I think it's mentioned that MD can DIGITALLY record a CD. But that is flat wrong isn't it? EDIT: so after after watching 2/3rd I realize I knew much less about the format than I thought. Did SonicStage actually allow digital transfer then?
Well you could take a digital output from a CD and put it into the optical in on a MD and record the digital signal (which was then compressed to ATRAC) - or using Sonicstage rip a CD to ATRAC and sent the data down the USB. Or you could record analog audio from say a record player which would be converted to ATRAC data by the MD.
Awesome! Can't wait to watch it later. Great to have our first Techmoan, short feature film! 😜 Seriously, I've been waiting a long time for this one so it will serve me well to relax tomorrow after work!
I'm really happy to have finished this one. Now I no longer have to answer all the emails I receive that ask if I've heard of a thing called a Minidisc.
very long video indeed.. but interesting. I never thought of minidisc as a flop. I always thought it was sort of like LaserDisc... just a niche product for the high end market. I never owned one, but I do remember seeing them in shops here in the USA. They were usually just too expensive and didn't really accomplish anything for me that would justify the price. I sort of wanted one, but just never forked over the cash.
The flop statement would be accurate for some markets, but the thing that upset me was when I saw a well established news website for children in the UK (Newsround) referring to it as one of the worst inventions ever and a flop with only 50,000 sold in a year. They were using US first year sales data together with penetration performance in another market to educate UK children about the history of a piece of tech in the UK. On the other hand we're now often told about how everyone had a Nintendo NES in the 1980s ...but in the UK, very few kids had one, because we couldn't afford the games. Most children had a Spectrum or C64 with games that cost as little as £1.99, so a machine with £30+ games wasn't attractive. I think the problem is that young people write these articles about old tech that was out before their time and just repeat what they read on another website. It's much the same as me talking about DBX discs, I can only repeat the information I can find, I can't remember it myself.
MD's were a non-event here in Australia, too. I was always curious about them, but far to poor to ever buy one. Fascinating video, though. and quite informative. Love your work, and appreciate the effort and dedication you plough into it: it really shows.
I noticed that only when putting up my ebay links to MD players...there was nothing found in the AUS ebay store.
I loved my MD back in the day. I still bought my music on CD (No iTunes in the UK back then) and recorded them to MD - a tortuous process, especially when it came. to naming the tracks and albums. I had a full size unit in my hi-fi rack and Sony sold an IR keyboard for it, solely for the purpose of typing in the labels. Things got better when I traded up my portable player for a NetMD version - I could rip my CD on the PC, using EZ CD which would use Gracenote to label the tracks automatically and then transfer them over at many time playback speed. Then we got iTunes in the UK and I bought my first iPod - and the MD was suddenly obsolete for me. I only ever bought one pre-recorded MD - "Without You I'm Nothing" by Placebo
I remember a buddy jumping on the MD band wagon in 2004 or 2005. He was all jazzed about it but I remember thinking he was foolish for getting an end of life device. I had just gotten an iPod and could see everything moving to solid state devices. I never realized they had been that big in Europe.
Great video as always, Love your shirt!
Also, if you want the modern equivalent of the remote, Sony actually sells this device: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/SBH54-Black-Stereo-Bluetooth-Headset/dp/B0154G9CYY" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.amazon.com/SBH54-Black-Stereo-Bluetooth-Headset/dp/B0154G9CYY</a>
Two other comments: I'm American, but I actually also did use my own minidisc player throughout most of my time in high school, in the late 90s. I know at least one other person had one, and i had quite a lot of fun with mine.
Great video. Thanks for all the hard work - it was certainly worth it. I hope it wasn't one of those lovely MD players that attacked you and caused the scratch on your hand.
Great video! Can't believe Mini Disc has been around as long as I have. I loved my MZ-N510 and definitely remember some issues with SonicStage around the time Sony added that awful music store riddled with DRM.
Great stuff, I look forward to watching this, I loved my Minidisc players back in the day.
So we have MP3 players.. could I propose we call these things ATRAC players?
Yes! Thanks for all the fantastic videos, I've only subscribed since last year but you're easily among my favorite channels & I'm a big MD fan too.
Mat, thank you. I've been hoping to get a chance to see your perspective since I learned that you intended to do a video. Honestly, this is way cooler than a movie release to me!!
I'm ecstatic. I loved the MiniDisc and it was a great tech. I think if Sony hadn't DRMd the daylights out of it and had split the later MP3 hardware from that absolutely terrible SonicStage software, hiMDs could have made a good run against the iPod.
omg finally
Yessss! I've been waiting so long for this 😄