Currently, .mp3 players are all the hype. Everyone has one, and if you don't, you're old-fashioned. I do not have an .mp3 player. I tried to have one, but for various reasons it did not please me. I'm a MiniDisc guy. I've always been. MiniDisc has some serious advantages over .mp3 players, whether they be flash or HDD based. Note: Sunday Eve Column.
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When I read:
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However, a major malfunction remains: SonicStage. Even though each Hi-MD player can be used as a mass storage device under windows, Linux, OSX, and even BeOS, you cannot just drag/drop .mp3s onto it. You are forced to use SonicStage. Apple may force one to use iTunes to transfer songs to iPod, but at least iTunes is not a steaming pile of crap. And of course SonicStage is only available on Windows, not on OSX or Linux
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I had to stop reading the article at that point. The problem with MP3 alternatives is that MP3 is universal. MiniDisc, OGG, and other potentially better formats, not so much. 
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The problem with MP3 alternatives is that MP3 is universal. MiniDisc, OGG, and other potentially better formats, not so much.
Let this be a lesson: never stop halfway an article and then comment. Sony has added .mp3 support to Hi-MD last year-- you would've known if you read the entire article.
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Even though each Hi-MD player can be used as a mass storage device under windows, Linux, OSX, and even BeOS, you cannot just drag/drop .mp3s onto it. You are forced to use SonicStage.
The snippet that I quoted said(/implied) that it had MP3 support. But the snippet that I quoted also said that you have to use SonicStage still, which is only available for Windows.
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But the snippet that I quoted also said that you have to use SonicStage still, which is only available for Windows.
True, but iPods require iTunes, which only runs on Windows and Macs. The fact that you can use your iPod on Linux is because open source developers have 'hacked' up software which works with iPods.
In essence, there is nothing stopping an open-source developer from doing the same for MiniDisc.
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In essence, there is nothing stopping an open-source developer from doing the same for MiniDisc.
True. On one hand, MiniDisc has been around for longer than iPod, and yet iPods are (from what I've seen) developed for more actively in Linux than MiniDisc is. But on the other hand maybe that's just because MiniDisc has kinda fallen by the wayside because of bad first impressions with it. Hopefully your article will bring attention to it and it's improvements again, and Linux developers will hack away at support for it. 
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See, if they would have added MP3 and Mac Support 3 years ago I wouldn't have replaced my minidisc with an iPod.
The reason i dumped it (besides the hardware which eventually died) was because the ONLY way to get software on it was through the buggy Windows-only Sony Software that came with it.
Sorry Sony, even if you do fix the problems with it, you're way too late. I got a taste of the high capacity iPod with the extremely easy to use iTunes software and i'm never going back. Good luck with the whole rootkit things though.
This is one of the problems with Sony, they're in too many businesses. Their Music division has longed forced them to cripple their electronics division, or be exclusive to their record label. When one arm of your company is installing rootkits on your computer to prevent you from ripping CDs to mp3, would you really trust that same company with your mp3 device? I don't.
My $0.02CAD.
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The biggest disadvantage to me with any Sony media devices, as mentioned, is that they won't work on OS X or Linux systems. Even the Windows software sucks ass.
Essentially I like the idea of using big Minidiscs over HDD based devices, but until I can easily use it under Linux with my existing media in 320 kbps mp3 format, like I can with iPods or Creative devices, I'm not touching one.
I'm assuming that it still requires you to convert your music to ATRAC, lowering the quality, leaving a duplicate copy of it on your hard drive and preventing you from writing it to more than one minidisc. Just because I'm writing it to all the different players in the house doesn't mean I'm a mass pirate, it just means that the people in our house share the same music (usually listening to it at different times too).
The few people I know who bought a Sony media device became extremely frustrated at the restrictions it placed on them and the general crapness of Sonicstage. Many of them ditched their Sony devices and got iPods.
Minidiscs are useful, we use minidiscs in our school a lot for transferring recordings around, since there's quite a lot of rack-mountable equipment that will use a minidisc.
Edited 2006-04-02 22:06
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and preventing you from writing it to more than one minidisc.
Not that I know of? I've never encountered this limitation, to be honest. It would be quite pointless as well, as you could just use an optical cable to copy it, and then your computer has no say at all.
Oh, and btw, ATRAC has improved a lot in the past 15 years. It is in no way inferior to .mp3.
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Hmm last time I used Sonicstage on my Windows partition (about two months ago) the transfer arrow went grey after I copied it across once. And yeah, you could still use the optical cable but it's just harder...
ATRAC isn't a bad format as such, but all my music is already in MP3 (some FLAC or OGG/Vorbis but currently I don't expect players to play them), and any time you re-encode music you will lose quality. It is noticable because you get the MP3 artifacts as well as the ATRAC artifacts unless you set the ATRAC bitrate to be higher than the source MP3.
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Oh, and btw, ATRAC has improved a lot in the past 15 years. It is in no way inferior to .mp3.<p />
I would have to agree. I have owned two minidisc players in the past 8 years and they are excellent devices. The sound quality has always been superior to me, even with those little earbuds.
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>>Oh, and btw, ATRAC has improved a lot in the past 15 years. It is in no way inferior to .mp3.
>I would have to agree. I have owned two minidisc players in the past 8 years and they are excellent devices. The sound quality has always been superior to me, even with those little earbuds.
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MP3 has improved a lot too. In the double-blind listening tests that I've seen (see Hydrogenaudio.org), modern MP3 encoders easily beat up-to-date ATRAC, as do AAC and most other encoders.
Personally I'm more inclined to trust the findings of that kind of blind test than subjective comments from individuals. After all, I still know people who swear that the sound quality of analogue audio cassettes has never been beaten.
Of course if you're comparing them using poor quality earbuds the difference between codecs would probably be too subtle to hear any real difference. The people carrying out listening tests are generally using much higher quality equipment than that.
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MP3 has improved a lot too. In the double-blind listening tests that I've seen (see Hydrogenaudio.org), modern MP3 encoders easily beat up-to-date ATRAC, as do AAC and most other encoders.
Personally I'm more inclined to trust the findings of that kind of blind test than subjective comments from individuals. After all, I still know people who swear that the sound quality of analogue audio cassettes has never been beaten.
Of course if you're comparing them using poor quality earbuds the difference between codecs would probably be too subtle to hear any real difference. The people carrying out listening tests are generally using much higher quality equipment than that.
Actually I listen to my minidisc player with more than just my earbuds. The biggest difference I find between ATRAC and mp3 is that the bass always sounds distorted with mp3s. It gets very fuzzy and noisy sounding. ATRAC seems to do a much better job pumping out clear bass. You can actually hear the difference even with earbuds because the bass is usually pretty crappy on those things no matter what but my MiniDisc player still sounds good even with the earbuds.
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sonicstage 3.4 removed the limitation on the number of uploads and downloads you can do pr song.
in many ways, sonicstage 3.4 in combo with the upcoming hi-md player is a interestng beast. ok so it takes a bit of time to det the data onto the media (1 second pr MB or there about) but when its made it onto it, its damn safe.
rember, hi-md uses magnetoptical storage, basicly the same as in some backup solutions. and in a very small package...
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I hate carying around media of any size. I hated it back when they were tapes, I hated it when it were cd's and I would hate it if I had a MD player.
You do a nice job explaining the advantages, and I'm sure you're right about them but for me having my entire music collection right there at any given time trumps them all.
Edited 2006-04-02 22:07
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I have a Hi-MD player...the RH1 or whatever it is called...well the one with the OLED display anyway. Cost me over 300 I think but I bought it around June of last year for the trip to India. I like it a lot despite the fact that it has huge problems...for example, fast forwarding and rewinding through long sets of music is extremely slow. Secondly, when I got it it didnt support mp3 formats and thus music had to be uploaded or downloaded from the discs using Sonicstage. Also when I got it, there were absoltely no Hi-MD discs available at that time! But if Sony addresses these issues with faster USB 2.0 support, removal of sonicstage and faster performance I would get another one of these players....way cooler than Ipods IMHO. I mean you can store hours and hours of music on a single hi-md disc but then you can swap discs, which virtually becomes limitless storage capacity and the discs are so very trasportable.
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I had a friend who went to Japan for a year, and came back with an Hi-MD player. I guess over there they are much more popular, which is probably why you've never seen a camera one, even though they are manufactured: Sony sells them for profit in Japan, but probably can't make nearly enough in Europe/US. I have to admit, it was a pretty cool device, and he could either put a CD's worth of CD quality music on a disk, or a bunch of .mp3's. However, the storage of the 2(inches)x2x1/4 disks was kind of a pain. I could definitely see having one for more strenuous activities than I'd want my iPod around for (or simply to plug into a stereo in a kitchen at work).
As to the PSP and why it is not Minidisc compatable, I'd hazzard the guess that it has something to do with the fact that UMD's are not writeable, and Sony and other movie companies do not want them to be, whereas minidiscs are by definition writeable.
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whereas minidiscs are by definition writeable.
No, not true. In the '90s, when Sony sold pre-rcorded MDs, they made them non0writable, just like CD-Rs compared to normal CDs. They could do the same with Hi-MD.
PS: MiniDisc was HUGELY popular here in The Netherlands too. That popularity just didn't survive the .mp3 revolution (because Sony up until March last year refused to introduce .mp3 support).
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But one is still able to get ahold of a blank MD and record media onto it. I suppose that if the PSP could only read pre-recorded MD's that would solve the problem of movie privacy that they were trying to stem, but more likely than not patches could be applied to allow the PSP to still read self-recorded media. Since no one can write to a UMD, movie piracy by way of UMD is not a problem for the movie studios right now.
This isn't to say that it wouldn't have been nice if they'd used MDs instead, as it is a much more open technology, and would have allowed self-recorded movies and music without the purchase of expensive flash media.
Great article by the way.
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PS: MiniDisc was HUGELY popular here in The Netherlands too.
Hugely popular and hugely marketed are quite different things
Me and my friends never could take the Minidisc seriously. It came off to me as something Sony wanted to push onto the masses in order to gain a monopoly. Even back then I felt that it was too restrictive, and didn't have a future since it wasn't 'an open standard'.
Now you've shown the benefits, I'm almost contemplating getting one post-facto however.
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Looking at this sony player, I wonder, how easy is it to for example search for songs of an artist like you can with an ipod in seconds. Does it have an internal database to make those query's possible?
Another thing, md looks to me and i'm sure many others as a passed station, something from the mp2 period. It's from the 90's.
You write " I tried to have one, but for various reasons it did not please me"
Which player did you try?
For me is the itunes+ipod combo is best and there's nothing yet which can beat that in my opinion.
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2006-01-28
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A fairly poor attempt at justifying having bet on the wrong technology. MD did not take off for the simple reason that it sucked when it emerged and it continues to suck.
Poor navigation in the device, sucky software, non-existent cross-platform supoort, media that you need to carry with you. Yeah, great, line me up. This will take off right after Be-OS takes over the world.
This site has an uncanny ability to care to the most meaningless technologies and to disregard those that can change the future.
Wake up and smell the coffee and stop prodding your respective pet projects.
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Poor navigation in the device
Oh? Care to elaborate? I never have any problems with finding my music, you see. My model even has a wheel.
sucky software
I'll give you that. Luckily Sony released 'SimpleBurner', which negates the need for SonicStage, but does have less features.
non-existent cross-platform supoort
No, iTunes+iPod are cross platform. Get real. The only reason it is is because open-source devevelopers hacked it. One change by Apple and *poof* there goes your cross-platform-ity.
media that you need to carry with you
I'd much rather carry some small media with me than a heavy, cludgy, expensive, and fragile iPod.
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I'd much rather carry some small media with me than a heavy, cludgy, expensive, and fragile iPod
You really haven't owned a HDD mp3 player have you :-) ? Expensive maybe, heavy they really aren't - especially when compared to lugging player + disc collection around, as to cludgy - lugging discs + player around as opposed to one all-in-one package is MY definition of cludgy. Fragile, I don't know I've owned 2 HDD mp3 players now and neither has failed one me (although it took about 5 seconds for me to drop my new one - D'oh! )
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I'd much rather carry some small media with me than a heavy, cludgy, expensive, and fragile iPod.
Not to rain on your parade or whatever, but that is some pretty lame FUD to describe iPods. My nano was pretty cheap, incredibly light, not cludgy at all, and very durable (I drop it constantly, it has outlived probably two cell phones by now (one died in a toilet, the other got a busted screen).
And think about it, carrying a bunch of media PLUS a heavy, cludgy, and fragile MiniDisc player. So much worse than carrying a tiny flash drive in your pocket.
You make good points, but they do not stack up to the obvious advantages of mp3 players (primarily flashed based imo)
Edited 2006-04-03 00:12
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(I drop it constantly, it has outlived probably two cell phones by now)
This tells me that people are very different when it comes to handheld consumer electronics like players, phones and so on. My phone, which I've dropped a thousand times, is far, far older than the iPod Nano model
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I don't know what people are doing with Sonic Stage as the only problem I have is that if I format my PC I lose access all my atrac coded rips even if I save the files. Which isn't a problem because I own the cd's and can rip again if I want to. Not to mention their already on a minidisk for me. In my opinion if Sonic Stage is a peice of Steaming Shit then so is iTunes. At least the playlist function in Sonic Stage makes sense.
I have a Gen 1 Hi-MD and the only problem I have is it seems to skip with some discs. Its an unusual skip where i will jump to another section of the disk and play that setion only to return to the right spot. It's a bit odd hearing sections of other songs spliced into the song I'm listening to but it doesn't happen often. I love my MD
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Classic story. First, Sony Electronics division designed MiniDisc -- very advanced technology which definitely could have been a success. Next, Sony Entertaiment totally killed its market potential with the idiotic marketing strategy: no initial mp3 support (then artificially worsening mp3 playback quality, see http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=10621) no drag-n-drop support, crappy SonicStage software, no car hi-md deck, etc. Sony Entertaiment business as usual.
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its not entirely sure if the strange mp3 behavior your pointing to was a deliberate flaw in the device or not.
in any case, its been reported on the same forum that the new hi-md player do not have the mp3 flaw. so most likely it was a oops, not a deliberate attack on mp3 quality...
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I cant belive someone actually wants sony to creat more products, all their products they create are crap, and is full of drm. Why dont people go buy from a company that supports ogg or lets you actualy use and store your music in the way you want.
I have an iriver, they let me put anything I want on it(including if i want, backup my hard drive), it can play mp3, ogg, and many more, without forcing me to use some piece of shit software like apple's itunes to put stuff on it(it reads as an external usb hard drive, and will work with any os).
Edited 2006-04-02 22:43
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There's a very obvious reason Sony didn't use MD for the PSP - piracy. Look at the history of games consoles: every consoles which uses some kind of mass-produced media of which recordable versions are easily available to the public has been vulnerable to piracy, no matter what security the manufacturer attempted to build into the console (PSX, PS2, Xbox - not Xbox 360 yet but I'm sure it's coming). Sony *hates* the piracy that the PS2 is subject to. For Hi-MD to work at all it obviously has to be a standard format that is recordable by design, and after their experience with the PSX and PS2, Sony were never going to use such a design for the PSP. So they did a Nintendo and built a new, proprietary disc format which is intentionally not available to the public as writable discs. Simple.
And Thom, how many times are you going to recycle this little opinion piece? I'm sure I've seen it twice before on this site. Get a new hobby horse, you're not going to convert the world to minidiscs.
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Sorry, I just checked with Google and I was remembering past comment threads, it seems you never posted it as an article before - mea culpa.
I agree with the recent poster about ATRAC3, though. Every properly conducted blind test I've seen doesn't score it very highly. Well-encoded MP3 is much better than many people think; most people are familiar with crappy CBR MP3 encodes with nasty high-end distortion, but a good encode with lame is pretty competitive with Vorbis, AAC, WMA and the like.
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You should compare it to mp3 players with builtin memory or where you can exchange some flash memory. As these contain no mechanical parts they should be even more robust as your minidisc and should also consume less power provide longer battery life for that... (Yes it depends very much on the player)
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Ok as far as hdd mp3 players being fragile goes ... well they really are not that fragile. I have a 60gb Creative ( and yes it is of a poor quality and has cheap asian crap written all over it). Anyway I have dropped this thing on the pavement while playing music and nothing happened to the hdd. No the cheaply made aluminum covers still have scratches but other than that it's been perfectly fine for well over an year now. So all that hdd mp3 players are fragile crap is much of a myth. Also the hdd is turned off most of the time to conserve power. In that state it can take a considerable amount of shock.
The problem with mini disks was the 1gb max storage capacity, high price at the time and really crappy codec. You had to reencode all of your media and most people really don't like to do that. At the same time you have Apple with their format that rivals the best mp3s arround. Also you can actually by songs already encoded in that format that sound really close to a 24bit encoded CD. And at the end of the day people are really lazy when it comes to entertainment.
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> And really crappy codec
ATRAC (especially ATRAC3) is a very advanced codec, far superior to mpeg1 layer3.
http://www.minidisc.org/atrac_vs_mp3.html
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/6/ubb.x?q=Y&a=tpc&s=5000956...
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>ATRAC (especially ATRAC3) is a very advanced codec, far superior to mpeg1 layer3.
Yet in listening tests ATRAC3 comes out worse than just about any other modern codec.
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=21904
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>that test is 2 years old. only recently did sony release a lossless version of atrac. check the minidisc.org forum that the parent post linked to, there is a lot of into on that place.
Obviously any lossless audio is going to sound great, if it didn't sound exactly the same as the source audio then it wouldn't be lossless. But that gives you a lot less music per disc, and in my opinion lossless is unnecessary for portable audio with in-ear headphones.
Compare lossy atrac with MP3 and MP3 easily beats it at the same bitrate.
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A lossless format is hardly relevant to a discussion of the quality of their lossy compression. Given that all lossless formats by definition sound identical, the only sensible way to compare them is to compare the support for each one, the file size and encoding / decoding times, and (if you care about such things) the openness of the format.
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Advice to Sony: sell off the entertainment division for big bucks to some stupid American company while you still can; adopt open standards and let people copy whatever they want onto their devices; make the real money - hey, it's a dot-com business plan with step 2 filled in!
There was a Wired article about Samsung being the new Sony because they don't have a movies/music division screwing up the corporate strategy, and whilst I don't think Samsung make great products, there's something to be said for abandoning outposts in doomed markets whose main dubious attraction is the unethically high margins you get (or once got) for being the middleman.
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I had a very different experience with the durability of minidisc players and media. I went through 3 minidisc players in under 5 years, and I found that the media could take very little punishment. In my opinion the Sony players were generally quite badly made. I had problems with intermittent stereo on one, the hinge on another broke, and it was very easy to get dust and sand inside the player if you weren't careful.
I used a few different brands of minidisc media, including more expensive brands like Sharp. I find it mind-bogging to still see someone repeating the hype about them being practically indestructible. I found that just carrying around minidiscs in my pocket seemed almost guaranteed to kill them. Even if they didn't split open and the sliding cover didn't get damaged (causing them to jam in the player), dust would get inside them sooner or later and even a tiny amount of dust stopped them playing consistently.
On average I'd say that my minidiscs lasted for around 3-6 months of regular use before they failed. In comparison I've owned a HDD MP3 player for a couple of years and despite dropping it a few times it still works perfectly. I can take it to the beach without worrying about it getting filled with sand (that's how I killed my first minidisc player) and it's happy enough rolling around in my coat pocket.
There are also quite a few MP3 players that allow recording, this isn't a unique advantage of minidiscs. Obviously it isn't a feature that most people are interested in or it would be featured on more hardware.
As for storage, I think most people would rather have a HDD player that holds 20Gb than pack their pockets with 20 minidiscs. With an MP3 player's easy to use software and a fast USB2 connection, changing the music on your player isn't much hassle. Especially when compared with real-time recording or using Sony's crappy software to write minidiscs.
Overall I think the minidisc format was badly flawed from the start and is now simply out of date, good riddance to a mediocre technology.
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My experience with MD vs HDD reliability (and usability is very different.
My Sony MZ-N1 (top of the range NetMD player at the time it was released) mini-disc player fell from my belt to the pavement and had to be sent back to Sony for repair (who scratched it and didn't replace one of the screws!). I then didn't use it for ages (no Mac or Linux support) and just left it lying on a shelf for 6 monthes then when I come back to it it doesn't work! I drop my 5G iPod all the time and it isn't even suffering cosmetic damage yet.
Using MP3's on the NetMD players was a real pain, OpenMG Jukebox (the precursor to Sonic Stage - there was nothing open aobut it) was just as buggy and slow with an appauling UI and huge memory usage (And people say iTunes on Windows is bad). It also insisted on you converting all of your MP3's to ARTRAC and then only letting you check them out to a device 3 times before checking them back in (This was very easy to get around by deleting the Sony folder under Application Settings and waiting the age it took to re-scan the directory where all of the converted ARTRAC sopngs are placed). Even copying converted songs to the device over the "fast" USB connection was painfully slow with a single disc taking hours or even having to be left overnight in which time the machine (Athlon 2000+, good for the time) was completly unusable!
Navagating through songs was a nightmare with the jog wheel and the small screen, its only saving grace was the longer screen on the inline remote.
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I don't have an mp3 player and don't want one. I dislike the way speakers stuck in your ear dull reality and interfere with the pleasure of being here now. Mobile phones can be just as tiresome.
I did once have a MiniDisc player that came with a hifi but I never used it. Just one format too many that Sony and not the whole industry was pushing. Most of my music is on my hdds in mp3 format and it was a no-brainer to run an audio lead from a PC to the hifi amp and play it that way. Where I live Sony products always come with an unjustified price premium so I guess I won't be getting a Sony anything again.
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I found using removable media a big hassle, especially when on the move. Fishing out a particular minidisc from my pocket, removing it from its little case, then fitting it into the player without dropping anything could be a real pain. A MP3 player with built in storage is much more convenient.
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Nobody use The Creative player? Zen
http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=3025
better than the ipod, more features and more cheap
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Nobody use The Creative player? Zen
I have a 5 GB Creative Zen Micro, but the lack of drag n drop support, lack of OGG support, and slowly running out of batteries while turned off (because of settings retention?) makes me regret not getting an iRiver.
EDIT: although it seems their newer models completely lack OGG support
Edited 2006-04-03 12:06
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I love MD I've owned many of the models even the second gen. models. The problem then was unless you used optical lines you would not get great quality... now it's software... Yes sonicstage is the worst example of programming I've seen, and comming from sony it's a shame.
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2006-01-04
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The nice thing about MD is the ability to have almost limitless storage.
However, I've spotted something much better than MD for this;
http://www.legendmemory.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&am...
In short, it's an MP3 player that takes generic SD cards, and a single AAA battery for 10 hours of playback. Costs about USD$30. Drag'n'drop mp3s onto it, and you're done. Automagical support under any OS that handles generic USB mass storage devices.
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