Bit of MiniDisc movie trivia for ya: Near the beginning of _The Matrix,_ Neo sells a guy some valuable data written on what is presumably an MD Data disc. But if you pause the scene and look closely, especially on the higher-resolution releases of the movie, you can see that Neo's actually handing off a "TDK Studio" _audio_ MiniDisc. Which, as discussed in this Oddware episode, was not compatible with MD Data storage and did not store computer data. But it sure looked cool!
The first thing that I remember when you said you were going to cover the MDData was the scene from the Matrix. This has always make me wonder if that was real or not. Thank you for this video!!! :D
Also, since comments always bring up Sony Universal Media Discs (UMDs) as a comparison to MiniDiscs: Nope, they are not the same and are two distinct formats. The primary difference being that MiniDiscs are a magneto-optical storage medium that use a ferromagnetic material to store data, whereas UMD is an optical medium utilizing one or more non-magnetic, non-writable layers more akin to a DVD. Furthermore, MD Data stores its files in a distinct way even from MiniDiscs, as mentioned in this episode of Oddware, with its own proprietary MD Data file system. So other than UMDs and MD Data discs being small, disc-based storage formats developed by Sony, there is little relation, which is why I didn't bother going into it this during the video :)
LGR having an MO drive like that would have been awesome. I honestly wish cdr/rw would have been so unreliable that MO technology would not have died. I have a Fujitsu Gigamo and it’s fantastic.
Luke Donaldson I know, they're like the one company that didn't go beige for everything! (Though, I guess the PlayStation and PSOne ended up becoming beige....)
PlayStation grey is way better than beige, and I loved the purple on the VAIO computers. The only Japanese outfit that made cooler looking hardware than Sony was '80s Sharp. The X1, Famicom Twin, and X68000 are simply gorgeous machines.
Minidiscs should’ve been a data format from the get go, much like Zip disks, but Sony botched the format by making audio and data disks incompatible. With CDs, it was mostly compatible, depending on the hardware. But it would’ve been cool if normal minidiscs would work with data minidisc drives.
It found a use in cinema in the espionage and cyber-thriller genres, looking neat and hi-tech on screen when a CD would just seem so mundane and unexciting by comparison.
These things could have been a great replacement for floppy discs. They were smaller than CD's and far more durable. I can only think the reason they failed was mainly due to the strange lack of compatibility between minidisc formats and the high price. The SCSI interface itself is most likely a culprit as back in the day those were really expensive.
probs also didn't catch on because of the amount of parts for assembly in comparison to cd's. If youre some guy with money looking to get a factory assembling some electronic thing going I imagine a disc is an easier sell than a disc wrapped in plastic with a springy sliding door. investment, part sourcing, and assembly all seem way tougher for one over the other
TechMoan def changed my mind about minidiscs. I’m a little sad the format never took off in the states. Probably would have saved me from so many scratched CDs and crap. Data storage on MD is some next level stuff right there. This was a great video and as always I’ve learned something awesome.
I had a MiniDisc player when i was in highschool and i remember it not very reliable. The disks were regularly broken without any visual damage. Also to fill them up with music was very annoying, you had to record it like a tape, not just copying files like on the later MP3 players. The audio quality was also not very good because Sony's proprietary codec, at least from todays standpoint.
That was the earlier model MD's. Later on they did release the NetMD format which worked in a similar way to MP3 players, which at the time were quite expensive and had very little in terms of capacity. I think my first MP3 player could hold about 10 tunes at 128kps. The downfall was the Sony's heavy implimentation of DRM protection where you had to "check" a song in and out of their software Sonicstage. Despite all of that I actually still use my Net MD every day, mostly out of nostalgia, and operate Sonicstage through XP running in virtual box. Definitely a novel format at the time, I'd love to get hold of their final version the Hi-MD, but the prices are still surprisingly high even now!
Oh dear. I thought that I had seen the worst of Sony but this takes the biscuit. A great idea, and they even had a proprietary format that was gaining some traction, but then they ruin it with breaking compatibility, charging too much, needing unnecessary software and an interface that most didn't have. Sony in the 1980s looked like they would take over the world, but ruined it with stunts like this. I suspect in the next 10 years Apple will do the same.
Someone who clearly never had any other Sony product.... The last Sony DVD player I ever bought was in the early 2000s. A great player but it had one flaw.... audio sync delay... it was REALLY noticeable too. It must have been about 200ms or 300ms but it would become apparent and annoy you. So, I asked Sony customer service about it and they said that they had a firmware upgrade to fix that. I asked if I could download it and put it on a CD-R or something like you could on Philips players at the time. They said, "no" and that I had to ship the player to them at my expense and pay to ship it back... then wait about 3 weeks for them to upgrade the firmware. Instead of dealing with that (since I didn't have the original box anymore), I just gave it away to someone and bought another model. One that I could do a firmware update on..... And I'll never forget Sony starting to sell MP3 players and then simultaneously adding rootkits to CDs so you couldn't rip them and if you put it on the PC, it wouldn't let you rip it and then made you pay for DRM versions of the songs on the disc. And then some CDs (Iron Maiden's Dance of Death is one of them), you couldn't even read it if you put it in your player. You could get around that by taking a Sharpie marker and drawing over the metal ring on the outside of the disc (this is true and is the reason my CD has sharpie on that side). I had to go to the store and buy a sharpie.
MiniDisc was a great player but it was the shitty ass transfer software that brought it down. It should have been all USB transfer but nope. Only one that had that was the expensive MZ-RH1.
@@BavarianM @ccricers is right, if you have an NetMD Player, you can sync it via USB with your computer, that's right, but only if it was synced with Net MD, if you have a recorded MiniDisc, the only way to get it on your computer is via the MZ-RH1. I've got an Net MD Player so i know the problem with recorded MDs, I thought i could digitalize my vinyls to MD and then get the ATRAC files on my computer, but only the MZ-RH1 would support this way of copying from a MD, which is not created via NetMD
CD-R's could only be written to once and required a pre-installed CD writer and reader though, which in 1993 was still very, very rare to see in PC's. To have a unit like this, that you could listen to music on on the train, then plug into a PC at your destination and both read and write data to was, for the time, very cool.
CD-Recorder in 1993 was ~$10K :) and was the size of an amplituner, look up Philips CDD 521. This was a huge improvement over 1991 offerings the size of a mini fridge and $40K price tag. Still, MDH-10 was released in middle of 1995, not 1993.
Love Sony minidisc audio. Served me well during my first and second deployments. Mp3 player's at that time were expensive had micro hard drives and the software for mp3pro was more than the player's at that time 1999-2003. Still used a pcmcia IOMEGA Clik disc with 40mb clik disc a 2x speed CD burner, these were the devices available. Much appreciated LGR, your reviews are amazing informative and much appreciated.
Say LGR have you figured out how to get your IOMEGA clik disc fully functional, use Windows Me it functions wonderfully, however in xp it will not function at all. Not even driver support. Used it on my Gateway Solo 1150cl and it sounds like music as it accesses the data on each clik disc.
Sony tried again in 1998 with HiFD, a more direct replacement for floppy disks that retained compatiblity with reading and writing ordinary 3.5" floppy disks, while supporting 200 MB of data storage on HiFD disks. But it ended up being so problematic that Sony took it off the market and issued a full recall. They re-released an improved version of HiFD in 1999, but by then Zip disks could store up to 250 MB and CD-RWs were becoming cheaper, so it was a flop -- just one of many in Sony's history!
As always it was a matter of price. Every Sony Format has been more or less way too expensive than the target group of consumers could afford. MiniDisc was sold to the young people but they couldn't afford it. And also Sony's extreme patent fees for using their technology. They kinda got stuck a little too much in their arrogance that everyone would support their formats, no matter what. Like in the Broadcast Segment. They really couldn't differ between that and the regular consumer market. Also why they thought they could justify the prices for their MemoryStick line. And with the HiFD they really didn't do themself a favor as well. Which is sad because engineering-wise they really always did a lot. Good know how, terrible marketing decisions.
Sony has had many flops but also many wins. If they never push the envelope and take risks, we never would have got things like the PlayStation series..
Moore's Law is slowing down, with people saying the peak storage capacity will happen in the next 30 years, but the things they're doing with data storage these days is insane. It would be interesting to see Clint talk about some of the upcoming techs but that's not really his style. :)
Do consumer grade tape drives even exist? All I've been able to find were devices for commercial use, starting at $2000+ -- it probably makes more sense to use tarsnap (www.tarsnap.com) for off-site 'tape' backups in any case.
I've never had a minidisc disc go bad. Even ones cooking in the car had no problem playing back ever. One nice thing about MO technology is that the data surface is not susceptible to magnetic damage until its heated to a xtremely high temperature.
Always comparisons to the ZipDisk..... But I am still getting good regular use out of my LS-120 SuperDisk drives to this day in some of my retro rigs. Clearly the superior large capacity drive format of that era.
@14:17: Ah, an underrated DMX classic! His uncharacteristic fusion of instrumental Synth-pop makes for a catchy anomaly in the rapper's extensive catalogue.
I used to be a really big Sony fan, but as I see more of their products from the 90s, my opinion of them has changed a lot. I can't even keep track of all the proprietary battery modules they used. I've got an MD player and two early CD player models, all three of which use different proprietary cells. The bolt-on external AA modules were worse than just carving out the space internally to use standard cells. And what purpose does it serve to use a non-standard audio connector on the headphone pass-through on that remote? Seriously, it's like they just got a kick out of re-engineering the wheel. Not to mention the fact that out of five portable disc players that I have, only ONE still works right. The hinges on another have deformed under the pressure of its own spring-loaded mechanism, which presses into the CD and causes it to struggle to spin the disc correctly. The MD player has read errors seemingly at random. Two other CD players can't even detect the disc. The oldest (their original portable CD player -- the D-5) is, ironically, the only one that performs flawlessly. I'm beginning to think they were really impressed with their own cleverness back then, but usually failed to make anything that would actually last.
I worked at PlayStation and I bet Sony electronics pitched this to Ken Kutaragi at PlayStation for the original PSX 😁 Great find and awesome video as always, I always find your videos a great inspiration for my channel, thank you.
I used to work in London opposite the small Sony store which was part of Sony's massive office space. The place was full of useless tech, including the mini disc. RGB nice chan.
Pretty sure these were targeted at business people who didn't care about the cost because their companies were writing off the inflated cost as business expenses.
Man, Sony really locked down the MiniDisc. Fear of copyright? Also, having to use proprietary software just to read/write? Puny data size at insane cost and a lack of flexibility really made it useless!
Back in the day I was always intrigued by the internal version of the MD Data Drive. It came in a 3,5" form factor and if I remember correctly there were both PATA and SCSI versions. Also, a bit more MiniDisc trivia: when you're talking about appearance of the technology in movies, don't forget to mention "Strange Days". Great 90s cyberpunk movie IMHO, prominently featuring the discs throughout the whole movie!
I wanted something like this in the late 90s because I had a portable MD recorder and an MD player in my car, and I wanted to be able to put MP3s on MD straight from the PC. That was later possible with NetMD, but the software for that was unstable and obnoxious to use. It's too bad this didn't work like that.
I still have it and I bet it still works. I had it in two different cars, but that was also two cars ago. It was a Sanyo, and actually had a very good AM/FM radio as well. I bought it on clearance at Walmart for $125.
Ugh memories of that awful Sony OpenMG jukebox/Sonicstage software. Terrible, it crippled the NetMD - could have been so much better. Think I remember there was a plugin for Winamp a bit later that made it more usable but by then it was too late, MP3 players had taken over.
I've always been a huge fan of the Minidisc format, and I still am in 2018. After watching this I've now learned about the data variant so thank you for that.
Loved my MiniDiscs back in the day, but I think Sony shot themselves in the foot by not supporting data storage through NetMD. When I saw Apple had made a thumb drive that was also an MP3 player, my MD days were coming to an end.
Daniel Flugt, it was all about copyprotection, you have to remamber that sony is also a music company. These things were also ridiculous expensive, even the basic music players! Great technology however...
They were overly paranoid when it came to copyright, but I think it was more a case of them seeing the success Apple had with the iPod and realsing they needed to keep up. Also, were they really that expensive. I seem to recall being baffled when I saw what Apple charged for an iPod (part of the reason I with a Shuffle), plus it was more restrictive with how you got music onto it. Of course you could get a DiscMan instead, but it wasn't really portable in the same way
Ah Sony, always with is janky weird proprietary storage mediums that end up crashing or not going anywhere other than their own stuff... Also damn, Clint's getting Quite FIT
Between LGR and Techmoan, you could build quite an impressive playlist of underknown physical media formats. Just when I think I've learned of them all, here comes yet another!
I loved MD's. Back in the mid 90's the college I went to used the format extensively in the theatre department, and I loved it instantly. A couple years later they did indeed buy a 4-track audio machine that used the MD Data disks.. I still have one in storage with one of my sound designs on it.. But no way to extract the audio anymore :/ Anyway - I have a large collection of MD's (mostly recordable ones) that I made from '95 to about '03 or so, and I still enjoy the format. There's always something "special" for me with physical mediums: Cassettes, R2R, MD, etc... While I love the convenience of modern music distribution, there's no "feeling" to it. You just click "buy" and it's on the computer/phone. Just not the same. So thanks for another great video!
Awesome work LGR! It doesn't matter what you upload, you make whatever it is extremely interesting, and very much worth watching with the in-depth history of the said thing! Keep it up!!!
I think the major problem with MD-Data is primarily because it was entirely separate to music MD. Had the format been integrated with regular MiniDisc from the start, it might have been more successful... as would regular MiniDiscs... Also, Sony really should have added the drivers for their MD-Data file system to be accessible from the default shell. 155kB/sec... isn't that about the same rate as a CD at 1x speed? Probably just your unit, but again, if MD-Data used regular recordable MiniDiscs that were the same as music MiniDiscs... and you could record using regular MD recorders... it might have had more of a chance.
*These super aggressive copy write laws are really protecting artists like DMX from going hungry. Why buy a whole CD with artwork case and high sound quality when you can rip a few seconds of a song from a video with someone talking over it played on PC speakers then compressed into a camcorder then recompressed uncompressed and played on your computer! Way better then owning the CD. Didn't DMX spend all his money on crack anyways? Wouldn't want to take crack out of the pipe from starving artists that get a small percentage of their work*
I agree, it's gotten really bad. The fact that a tiny snippet of music (which legally would be permissible as sampling) can get your video automatically demonetized is just ridiculous. You hear short extracts of songs like that on TV all the time, and I'm pretty sure the creators don't need to license them. If anything it should be seen as free advertising for the song's artist, since someone who likes the extract might be motivated to seek out and buy the full song.
@@tdark987 I put lets plays up of The Last of Us. They muted my whole video and unmonitized it cus the music quietly playing in the background with me talking over it and sounds of gun shots and zombies screaming. How can you claim audio on a video with me talking over the music? Aparently they own my voice as well. Im sure people are listening a 2 hour lets play for a the music instead of buying it. Hell I dont even know if they sell a soundtrack, so how they losing money off the music over a lets play?
I think the big problem is that they're so goddamned cheap about actually employing people for this, so >99% of cases are flagged by an automated script - a rather buggy one from what I gather, that's prone to false positives - and never actually reviewed by a human. That's also why the dispute/appeals process seemingly takes forever and the responses are often rushed; there's probably not all that many employees for a huge backlog of tickets, and the incentive is to get through them as quickly as possible (at the expense of actually doing the necessary research). You'd have thought with all the money Google has they could afford to hire a few hundred more people for this.
And I once disputed it saying I wasn't infringing copyright, and I got a generic reply saying that I was wrong and it would be still be muted. Its not even Sony having an issue, they even encourage livestreaming and recording their games, thats why they even have built in software for it. TH-cam hurts the legit video makers, while people upload full music albums and slightly change the pitch to bypass the bots and never get caught and even make money off monetization. Its proof their system is broken. Hell I had a video taken down awhile ago that was posted in like 2006 or 2007 cus it had copyrighted music. Like really you need to take down an old Runescape video from that many years ago? Their bots are broken, and they need to fix them.
In that case it sounds like they now might even be using scripts to automatically respond to appeals (or the first stage, at least). That's bad. I suppose they were just sick of dealing with the backlog, but this just isn't a proper solution.
*I can't believe I've just spent 5 hours looking at all this "Oddware"! Even worse, I've worked with almost all of them through the years...* *Thank you LGR: these are great looks back!*
Game Interest sony used that connector for almost all their audio devices for ages. Their walkman cd players used them too. Im pretty sure theyre all more or less compatible with each other.
Sony used this connector for all kinds of portable devices (and no the remotes are not all compatible). Sony used this with CD players, MD Walkman, PSP (as you mentioned), and even cassette walkman models.
Ironically, I used my minidisk player to record off the radio. I need to go through them sometime and take a trip down memory lane. Ah, such a great format..
honestly the semi-universal battery adapters that sony made were a great thought on their part because alot of their stuff all used this kinda standard battery backup.
Sony used to do this with many of their movies.... Last Action Hero had someone (Arnold, I think) visibly putting in a MiniDisc in a portable player on the screen. It wasn't subtle either.... very zoomed in too.
Great video. It's interesting because so many of the things in this video were similar to hardware which I had from my standard audio minidisc player from Sony - for example, the AA battery case was similar to what came with my MZR-909 in look (plugs into power + screw it in tight) with a single AA battery support. From my much older Sony Discman (before they became CD Walkman), I had remotes which didn't have screens but had the same proprietary connector to the device with the different headphones plug into the remote. Newer Sony products used the standard 3.5mm connector on the remotes so if anyone gets stuck trying to get this to work in 2018, they can look for the other Sony remotes which should work.
I used to use my MiniDisc audio player all the time! Took a single AA battery, and I used the heck out of it! I recorded all the audio onto blank audio MDs analog (kinda like recording songs from CDs onto cassette tapes), and used Sony ear buds with it to listen. I even labeled all the songs individually using the MD player's controls (I was hardcore with it). I loved that little thing to death, it was my upgrade from my Sony portable CD player (which was an upgrade from my Sony Walkman). Lots of teenage memories spread across those devices! Haven't used them in ages, they probably all still work!
Just to add my $0.02 MD Audio discs CAN be used for data, just not on the drive you are demonstrating. Once NetMD and later HiMD came out, the drives would also allow hooking to the USB port of a computer to transfer music, and also files. Music required the use of their proprietary software but data files transferred just like any other USB drive. Being a magneto-optical format the discs are much more resilient than almost any other format currently out there. They are a great way to store data you don't want to lose, as long as you can keep the drives working that is. I have a number of discs containing videos and picture files that are still readable, long after the recordable CD/DVD counterparts have died from bit-rot.
And my Yamaha MD8, which uses a DATA-MD drive, can record 2-track audio onto regular audio minidiscs - to further correct/clarify what LGR says in the video.
I remember entering a contest in Keyboard magazine to win a Sony digital multitrack recorder that wrote on Mini disc data discs in 1996 when I was in Highschool. In fact the digital multitrack recorder I ended up buying, a Roland VS-840EX (with a 250MB ZIP drive), had an optical output for recording directly to Mini Disc audio format. I recorded so much audio through that output, it was cool having a red light emit through a 3.5mm fiber optic cable. . . "I'm recording lazers". . .
I was an early adopter of the MiniDisc audio format, purchasing the MZ-1 back in 1992 and then a few of other recorder/players over the years. Sitting next to me in a rack is a Sony MDS-E12, a 1U rack mount recorder. I have a bunch of discs containing the music my brother wrote in the 1990's and 2000's. I need to archive it, and it's the only player that currently works. I've heard they had data storage capabilities early on, but not a single store in my area carried them, much less heard of them.
Nostalgia Nerd is great. As are Modern Classic, AkBKukU, Modern Vintage Gamer, The Obsolete Geek, RetroManCave, and my newest favorite, Perifractic's Retro Recipes.
I'm subscripted to Perifractic's since only last week (as well as being familiar and/or subscribed to all the rest you list). I can certainly relate! I'm glad I've found it.
Dude, I seriously love ur channel. Best quirky tech from the past, it's always a good trip down memory lane. Makes me feel good to know I'm not alone in remembering weird old tech
I only saw it in commercials. As a kid I found it cool but way too expensive (Same with MiniDV). Until i could finally afford it myself somewhere in 2009. Before that I only knew 2 people who used MiniDisc. They both had NetMD decives and used it like people used their MP3 sticks. Packing them with as much stuff as possible.
@@timking3587 Yes! CDs, suck (unless only considered as a replacement for LP) In portables,car decks and for recording, MiniDisc was the best medium since Compact Cassette,
After watching this video, an idea appeared to search for modern musical compositions in the “.mid” format. Found a whole site dedicated to this subject. I listened to music from Painkiller - and immediately a big smile on my face =))) Thank you for the video!
When the Gamecube first came out, I asked my friend if it would require memory cards and he scoffed at me because "how are they going to write save data to a disc?!". I felt foolish, but today, like 15 years later, I am vindicated. It was totally in the realm of possibility to have both RW and R-only sections on the same disc.
There's also the fact that it is SCSI... maybe it's just me, but I never had a computer with a SCSI interface growing up. At least not since I was old enough to know what it was.
I can't say anything about the reliability of the data drive, as I naturally never had one. But my teen years were spent walking around with an MD walkman, I had 4 different devices in succession, and loved them all. And those discs and machines had legendary reliability. I recently dragged my one remaining player out of storage and went over my MD collection, all discs I tried still work 100%, and most of them I played and recorded over countless times over their life. As opposed to pure optical media, like CD-Rs and DVD-Rs that seem to stop working after a couple of months, these were the bomb.
While this video gives me an unnecessary number of reasons to invest heavily in this format, just to be able to peruse a drawer of highly illegal software contained on MD data discs while listening to the immersive tones of Massive Attack’s Dissolving Girl, I am even more impressed with how much the promotional picture at 2:45 screams the early 90s. What a truly fabulous time in our history. Now the only thing I want is to be driven to a motion blur while riding my slick racing bike with CD-ROM wheels. Ah, the nostalgia.
I had a Hi-MD unit (and loved it), but always wanted the Hi-MD unit that was expressly designed for plugging into a digital camera via USB and backing up photos while on the go. Totally impractical now, but at the time, it was everything I could have hoped or dreamed of.
Yes!. New Oddware. I love this series. I knew a guy who did mobile discos for weddings n stuff. He used Minidisc for all his music compilations. faster than cd too for searching n stuff and very fast writing speed, if i remember correctly.
I still have a minidisc player, a NetMD. I admit I could use it more often, but I bought it out of nostalgia for the unit I had in high school, a portable recording model that accepted optical audio in. One of my favorite things about the one I had in high school was that the case was made of metal and felt so much nicer in the hands than CD players. I had fun dubbing music to it from the radio or a CD or my Napster files. It was so cool for my music collection to take up less space than CDs and that the player fit in my pocket. Then came iPods.
MiniDisc's used slight compression to fit music on discs. My guess is that the data discs used the same compression scheme, which would cause those errors in windows when trying to launch files directly off the disk.
I bought a similar device way back then and learned the hard way that it had one quite insane rule; it would only deal with files that had valid DRM on it, so I could only put files on it that had a valid "free to use" licence in them. That meant that all my personal recordings where disallowed. Obviously I brought it back the next day, what good is a minidisc writer that basically will not write any files at al...
Still a proud owner of a Sony MZ-RH1 here. These things sell for crazy prices nowadays, but I will keep this one anyways. Using this player over USB, you can also write arbitrary files onto Hi-MDs which have a capacity of 1GB. It's pretty cool.
I didn't know to much of what you were talking about concerning this video, but I still gave you thumbs ups because you're a cool guy. By the way LGR, back in the day, I bought a Packard Bell Legend Supreme 1605 computer. I bought it as a bundle package, back then the bundle package included the monitor, computer, speakers, keyboard, mouse, printer, cables. I thought that that was pretty neat. You can't get all of that in a bundle anymore. Man, this was one bad computer! Way ahead of it's time. I got it back in 1997. If I knew then what I know now, I would still have that computer and that would be the ONLY computer that I would use. I didn't know a lot about computers back then, anyways the reason I got rid of the computer was because Windows 95 crashed, I got some floppys from a friend in Puerto Rico to reinstall it. It took 20 disk back then, my friend only gave 19 of them, so it never installed correctly and also the optical drive went out and I didn't know how to replace it. So it set in my closet and I finally threw it away. Looking back, man, I could just kick myself. I just googled a picture of the Packard Bell Legend Supreme 1605. It showed a setup of the computer. Ah man, that was one good looking computer, and it really performed. Another google search of the Packard Bell Legend Supreme 1605 showed the specifications of the computer and it doesn't disappoint. Hopefully one of these days I will come across one, and when I do, you better believe it's going to be mine. You know what LGR, computers back then were more interesting back then unlike computers of today, which are so very boring. To be quite honest, I just don't care for computers of today, and I really don't care for any laptop. I just don't. Give me a computer of yesteryear any day. Anyways LGR, if you read this, thanks so much for taking time out to do so. I would love so very much to what you think about what I have written. Have a great weekend! :-) 08.18.18
My work still owns a md data, Sony digital camera. It is quite a relic. It is still around since most usb drives are disabled and special permission is needed to use usb transfer on cameras. Most of us just use our phones to take pictures inside the plant though.
I have the feeling finding all the stuff to make a video takes forever. I'll bet you had the idea for this and all your other videos 2-5 years ago. That's dedication :)
Bit of MiniDisc movie trivia for ya:
Near the beginning of _The Matrix,_ Neo sells a guy some valuable data written on what is presumably an MD Data disc. But if you pause the scene and look closely, especially on the higher-resolution releases of the movie, you can see that Neo's actually handing off a "TDK Studio" _audio_ MiniDisc. Which, as discussed in this Oddware episode, was not compatible with MD Data storage and did not store computer data. But it sure looked cool!
Hollywood trickery! ;)
And in Johnny Mnemonic, the 320 GB of data Keanu Reeve's character had uploaded into his head was initially stored on a minidisc, too!
Neo are a hacker maybe he find a way to store data on a audio disc. Just Kidding, regards from Brazil.
Just like an old Commodore 64 cassette tape game. Checks out from here.
The first thing that I remember when you said you were going to cover the MDData was the scene from the Matrix. This has always make me wonder if that was real or not. Thank you for this video!!! :D
Also, since comments always bring up Sony Universal Media Discs (UMDs) as a comparison to MiniDiscs:
Nope, they are not the same and are two distinct formats. The primary difference being that MiniDiscs are a magneto-optical storage medium that use a ferromagnetic material to store data, whereas UMD is an optical medium utilizing one or more non-magnetic, non-writable layers more akin to a DVD. Furthermore, MD Data stores its files in a distinct way even from MiniDiscs, as mentioned in this episode of Oddware, with its own proprietary MD Data file system. So other than UMDs and MD Data discs being small, disc-based storage formats developed by Sony, there is little relation, which is why I didn't bother going into it this during the video :)
Sure is! Not sure what they were thinking
LGR having an MO drive like that would have been awesome. I honestly wish cdr/rw would have been so unreliable that MO technology would not have died. I have a Fujitsu Gigamo and it’s fantastic.
Huh, I always thought mini-discs were completely optical. I guess that would have made it tricky to write very quickly.
Are they similar to MO disks? Too lazy to look up myself. ;-)
Philip Hanhurst Most likely yeah. Don't we all? 😆😆😆
Man 90's Sony aesthetic is just the greatest
Luke Donaldson I know, they're like the one company that didn't go beige for everything! (Though, I guess the PlayStation and PSOne ended up becoming beige....)
PlayStation grey is way better than beige, and I loved the purple on the VAIO computers. The only Japanese outfit that made cooler looking hardware than Sony was '80s Sharp. The X1, Famicom Twin, and X68000 are simply gorgeous machines.
Real buttons!!! Mechanical sounds!! Ahh.. bliss. :)
@@startedtech new ps ones were a light gray. They just turn beige over time due to the yellowing of the plastic
Looks great
Minidiscs should’ve been a data format from the get go, much like Zip disks, but Sony botched the format by making audio and data disks incompatible. With CDs, it was mostly compatible, depending on the hardware. But it would’ve been cool if normal minidiscs would work with data minidisc drives.
I wonder how much that decision was influenced by them wanting to prevent people pirating music easily or being accused of enabling that.
@@drMoonish there were lots of record companies refusing to support minidiscs, but also Sony didn’t make minidisc drives similar to floppy drives.
It found a use in cinema in the espionage and cyber-thriller genres, looking neat and hi-tech on screen when a CD would just seem so mundane and unexciting by comparison.
@@willman85 it was used as movie props probably as product placements for Minidisc!
These things could have been a great replacement for floppy discs. They were smaller than CD's and far more durable. I can only think the reason they failed was mainly due to the strange lack of compatibility between minidisc formats and the high price. The SCSI interface itself is most likely a culprit as back in the day those were really expensive.
probs also didn't catch on because of the amount of parts for assembly in comparison to cd's. If youre some guy with money looking to get a factory assembling some electronic thing going I imagine a disc is an easier sell than a disc wrapped in plastic with a springy sliding door. investment, part sourcing, and assembly all seem way tougher for one over the other
TechMoan def changed my mind about minidiscs. I’m a little sad the format never took off in the states. Probably would have saved me from so many scratched CDs and crap. Data storage on MD is some next level stuff right there. This was a great video and as always I’ve learned something awesome.
Sony didn't want it to become a standard so it was never going to take off anywhere
Marky Shaw but you can always buy double side-double layer 2.8 GB mini DVDs for mini cameras to save your data. They are resistive to sharp objects.
Techmoan is awesome.
I had a MiniDisc player when i was in highschool and i remember it not very reliable. The disks were regularly broken without any visual damage. Also to fill them up with music was very annoying, you had to record it like a tape, not just copying files like on the later MP3 players. The audio quality was also not very good because Sony's proprietary codec, at least from todays standpoint.
That was the earlier model MD's. Later on they did release the NetMD format which worked in a similar way to MP3 players, which at the time were quite expensive and had very little in terms of capacity. I think my first MP3 player could hold about 10 tunes at 128kps. The downfall was the Sony's heavy implimentation of DRM protection where you had to "check" a song in and out of their software Sonicstage. Despite all of that I actually still use my Net MD every day, mostly out of nostalgia, and operate Sonicstage through XP running in virtual box. Definitely a novel format at the time, I'd love to get hold of their final version the Hi-MD, but the prices are still surprisingly high even now!
This device was perfect for mowing the lawn.
You could listen to a lot of Weird Al without having the songs skip.
weird al rules
what a coincidence, weird al - white & nerdy begins with "they see me mowin"
Super bulky compared to other portable MD players
Oh dear. I thought that I had seen the worst of Sony but this takes the biscuit. A great idea, and they even had a proprietary format that was gaining some traction, but then they ruin it with breaking compatibility, charging too much, needing unnecessary software and an interface that most didn't have.
Sony in the 1980s looked like they would take over the world, but ruined it with stunts like this. I suspect in the next 10 years Apple will do the same.
Someone who clearly never had any other Sony product.... The last Sony DVD player I ever bought was in the early 2000s. A great player but it had one flaw.... audio sync delay... it was REALLY noticeable too. It must have been about 200ms or 300ms but it would become apparent and annoy you. So, I asked Sony customer service about it and they said that they had a firmware upgrade to fix that. I asked if I could download it and put it on a CD-R or something like you could on Philips players at the time. They said, "no" and that I had to ship the player to them at my expense and pay to ship it back... then wait about 3 weeks for them to upgrade the firmware. Instead of dealing with that (since I didn't have the original box anymore), I just gave it away to someone and bought another model. One that I could do a firmware update on.....
And I'll never forget Sony starting to sell MP3 players and then simultaneously adding rootkits to CDs so you couldn't rip them and if you put it on the PC, it wouldn't let you rip it and then made you pay for DRM versions of the songs on the disc. And then some CDs (Iron Maiden's Dance of Death is one of them), you couldn't even read it if you put it in your player. You could get around that by taking a Sharpie marker and drawing over the metal ring on the outside of the disc (this is true and is the reason my CD has sharpie on that side). I had to go to the store and buy a sharpie.
Apple is already slipping down the tube.
MiniDisc was a great player but it was the shitty ass transfer software that brought it down. It should have been all USB transfer but nope. Only one that had that was the expensive MZ-RH1.
@@ccricers no it wasn't
There are alot of NetMD models that you can transfer via usb
I own one and that's how I burn music to it
@@BavarianM @ccricers is right, if you have an NetMD Player, you can sync it via USB with your computer, that's right, but only if it was synced with Net MD, if you have a recorded MiniDisc, the only way to get it on your computer is via the MZ-RH1. I've got an Net MD Player so i know the problem with recorded MDs, I thought i could digitalize my vinyls to MD and then get the ATRAC files on my computer, but only the MZ-RH1 would support this way of copying from a MD, which is not created via NetMD
gotta be honest, for 1993 having a device that did portable mass data storage AND functioned as a music player, in the same unit, is pretty damn cool
*cough* *cough* CD-Rs
CD-R's could only be written to once and required a pre-installed CD writer and reader though, which in 1993 was still very, very rare to see in PC's. To have a unit like this, that you could listen to music on on the train, then plug into a PC at your destination and both read and write data to was, for the time, very cool.
My CD-Rs work with standard CD players, also weren't there CD-RWs?
CD-Recorder in 1993 was ~$10K :) and was the size of an amplituner, look up Philips CDD 521. This was a huge improvement over 1991 offerings the size of a mini fridge and $40K price tag.
Still, MDH-10 was released in middle of 1995, not 1993.
Oh OK (also, CD recorder? Don't you mean CD burner?)
Your channel is a vaporwave dream.
Gives me lots if fun ideas for 3D printing / open source electronics projects
Love Sony minidisc audio. Served me well during my first and second deployments. Mp3 player's at that time were expensive had micro hard drives and the software for mp3pro was more than the player's at that time 1999-2003. Still used a pcmcia IOMEGA Clik disc with 40mb clik disc a 2x speed CD burner, these were the devices available. Much appreciated LGR, your reviews are amazing informative and much appreciated.
Say LGR have you figured out how to get your IOMEGA clik disc fully functional, use Windows Me it functions wonderfully, however in xp it will not function at all. Not even driver support. Used it on my Gateway Solo 1150cl and it sounds like music as it accesses the data on each clik disc.
Sony tried again in 1998 with HiFD, a more direct replacement for floppy disks that retained compatiblity with reading and writing ordinary 3.5" floppy disks, while supporting 200 MB of data storage on HiFD disks. But it ended up being so problematic that Sony took it off the market and issued a full recall. They re-released an improved version of HiFD in 1999, but by then Zip disks could store up to 250 MB and CD-RWs were becoming cheaper, so it was a flop -- just one of many in Sony's history!
Thanks for the story. Maybe someone could do a video on it...
As always it was a matter of price. Every Sony Format has been more or less way too expensive than the target group of consumers could afford. MiniDisc was sold to the young people but they couldn't afford it. And also Sony's extreme patent fees for using their technology. They kinda got stuck a little too much in their arrogance that everyone would support their formats, no matter what. Like in the Broadcast Segment. They really couldn't differ between that and the regular consumer market. Also why they thought they could justify the prices for their MemoryStick line. And with the HiFD they really didn't do themself a favor as well. Which is sad because engineering-wise they really always did a lot. Good know how, terrible marketing decisions.
Thanks KRAFTWERK2K6 for the information. I so wish HiFD did succeed. It would have made mine and so many other people's lives easier.
Sony has had many flops but also many wins. If they never push the envelope and take risks, we never would have got things like the PlayStation series..
Can't belive we can buy a terrabyte of external storage for around $50-70 usd these days. My how far storage has come!
びんびんごはんケーキー That's been the case for a very long time though. Things seem pretty stagnant.
You can get a standalone terabyte hard drive for like $30 now!
Moore's Law is slowing down, with people saying the peak storage capacity will happen in the next 30 years, but the things they're doing with data storage these days is insane. It would be interesting to see Clint talk about some of the upcoming techs but that's not really his style. :)
I still miss the ability to back up my hard drive to a tape cartridge. The tape drives and tapes cost more than just buying another hard drive now.
Do consumer grade tape drives even exist? All I've been able to find were devices for commercial use, starting at $2000+ -- it probably makes more sense to use tarsnap (www.tarsnap.com) for off-site 'tape' backups in any case.
next up: minidisc sandwich on LGR foods
just like that gross banana mayonnaise salad brutalmoose made a while ago
Yeah, I was going to say that's been covered off by BrutalMoose's History Kitchen.
didn't he straight up puke?
Clint: hmmmmm... crunchy [crunching noises]
Ooooh! I hope he breaks out the torch to melt some cheese onto it.
I just finished watching Techmoan´s Video, on the other MINI-DISK.
OH YEAH GET ME SOME MORE OF THAT MINI-DISK.
Can't get enough of that MiniDisc, MiniDisc, MiniDisc...
Can't get enough of that MiniDisc, keeps me goin' strong...
SquirrelBacon god damn i thought that, too haha
Daniel Lopez *Disc
The amount of school projects that I've lost with my Zip disks and Zip drives... I'm wondering if the Sony version was more reliable.
I used Zip discs for backups. Or tried to. This did not work very well.
I remember losing entire design projects transferring between the lab and home on zip drives. That dreaded click of death.
I've never had a minidisc disc go bad. Even ones cooking in the car had no problem playing back ever. One nice thing about MO technology is that the data surface is not susceptible to magnetic damage until its heated to a xtremely high temperature.
From this experience I’m assuming they weren’t reliable hahaha
Marcus Schulz I have a set of about 15 zip disks from the late 90s that still worked last I checked about 2-3 years ago.
All us cool 90s kids had MiniDisc.
Always comparisons to the ZipDisk.....
But I am still getting good regular use out of my LS-120 SuperDisk drives to this day in some of my retro rigs.
Clearly the superior large capacity drive format of that era.
@14:17: Ah, an underrated DMX classic! His uncharacteristic fusion of instrumental Synth-pop makes for a catchy anomaly in the rapper's extensive catalogue.
His deadpan delivery of accurately placed moments of silence really accentuate the message.
RIP DMX
@@syahminorizan8064 Wow, he IS dead, by three weeks. Much respect, X.
I used to be a really big Sony fan, but as I see more of their products from the 90s, my opinion of them has changed a lot. I can't even keep track of all the proprietary battery modules they used. I've got an MD player and two early CD player models, all three of which use different proprietary cells. The bolt-on external AA modules were worse than just carving out the space internally to use standard cells. And what purpose does it serve to use a non-standard audio connector on the headphone pass-through on that remote? Seriously, it's like they just got a kick out of re-engineering the wheel.
Not to mention the fact that out of five portable disc players that I have, only ONE still works right. The hinges on another have deformed under the pressure of its own spring-loaded mechanism, which presses into the CD and causes it to struggle to spin the disc correctly. The MD player has read errors seemingly at random. Two other CD players can't even detect the disc. The oldest (their original portable CD player -- the D-5) is, ironically, the only one that performs flawlessly.
I'm beginning to think they were really impressed with their own cleverness back then, but usually failed to make anything that would actually last.
Nick Guy I have a lot of 90s Sony components and they all still work great, but they’re full sized AV decks, not portables
Whenever I watch an LGR video I feel like I'm on vacation. Don't ask me how to explain that I just get all warm and fuzzy. Haha.
In all honesty, yeah I get where you're coming from.
sus
Yepe, they are not the same and are two distinct formats
I worked at PlayStation and I bet Sony electronics pitched this to Ken Kutaragi at PlayStation for the original PSX 😁 Great find and awesome video as always, I always find your videos a great inspiration for my channel, thank you.
Retro Gamer Boy coooool. Ya I can totally see this happening. I wonder if it was part of their Nintendo talks.
Huh. The Hybrid MD makes more sense now.
This definitely made me think of the PSP's disc drive
I used to work in London opposite the small Sony store which was part of Sony's massive office space. The place was full of useless tech, including the mini disc. RGB nice chan.
John Galt you can easy check up on me. My website and LinkedIn profile are on my channel :)
Holy crap that price!!
Pretty sure these were targeted at business people who didn't care about the cost because their companies were writing off the inflated cost as business expenses.
At that time all storage was expensive as hell.
Man, Sony really locked down the MiniDisc. Fear of copyright? Also, having to use proprietary software just to read/write? Puny data size at insane cost and a lack of flexibility really made it useless!
Puny data size?? 140 MB was enormous at the time
Minidisc audio was f-ing amazing in the mid 90s. Fantastic format for portable audio.
Back in the day I was always intrigued by the internal version of the MD Data Drive. It came in a 3,5" form factor and if I remember correctly there were both PATA and SCSI versions.
Also, a bit more MiniDisc trivia: when you're talking about appearance of the technology in movies, don't forget to mention "Strange Days". Great 90s cyberpunk movie IMHO, prominently featuring the discs throughout the whole movie!
I wanted something like this in the late 90s because I had a portable MD recorder and an MD player in my car, and I wanted to be able to put MP3s on MD straight from the PC. That was later possible with NetMD, but the software for that was unstable and obnoxious to use. It's too bad this didn't work like that.
I have never seen an MD player in a car. Strange that it never even occurred to me.
I still have it and I bet it still works. I had it in two different cars, but that was also two cars ago. It was a Sanyo, and actually had a very good AM/FM radio as well. I bought it on clearance at Walmart for $125.
Check out Jay Leno's Garage of a JDM Mazda Autozam AZ-1. It has a in-dash Mini Disc player.
Ugh memories of that awful Sony OpenMG jukebox/Sonicstage software. Terrible, it crippled the NetMD - could have been so much better. Think I remember there was a plugin for Winamp a bit later that made it more usable but by then it was too late, MP3 players had taken over.
Ah my one and only MD device was a cheap NetMD variant. Still loved it but after a year mp3 players made way more sense.
I've always been a huge fan of the Minidisc format, and I still am in 2018. After watching this I've now learned about the data variant so thank you for that.
Loved my MiniDiscs back in the day, but I think Sony shot themselves in the foot by not supporting data storage through NetMD. When I saw Apple had made a thumb drive that was also an MP3 player, my MD days were coming to an end.
Daniel Flugt, it was all about copyprotection, you have to remamber that sony is also a music company. These things were also ridiculous expensive, even the basic music players! Great technology however...
They were overly paranoid when it came to copyright, but I think it was more a case of them seeing the success Apple had with the iPod and realsing they needed to keep up.
Also, were they really that expensive. I seem to recall being baffled when I saw what Apple charged for an iPod (part of the reason I with a Shuffle), plus it was more restrictive with how you got music onto it.
Of course you could get a DiscMan instead, but it wasn't really portable in the same way
Ah Sony, always with is janky weird proprietary storage mediums that end up crashing or not going anywhere other than their own stuff...
Also damn, Clint's getting Quite FIT
Soma LGR bodybuilding videos coming next year.
Between LGR and Techmoan, you could build quite an impressive playlist of underknown physical media formats. Just when I think I've learned of them all, here comes yet another!
I loved MD's. Back in the mid 90's the college I went to used the format extensively in the theatre department, and I loved it instantly. A couple years later they did indeed buy a 4-track audio machine that used the MD Data disks.. I still have one in storage with one of my sound designs on it.. But no way to extract the audio anymore :/
Anyway - I have a large collection of MD's (mostly recordable ones) that I made from '95 to about '03 or so, and I still enjoy the format. There's always something "special" for me with physical mediums: Cassettes, R2R, MD, etc... While I love the convenience of modern music distribution, there's no "feeling" to it. You just click "buy" and it's on the computer/phone. Just not the same.
So thanks for another great video!
My favorite TH-camr! Love your content, Clint! Thank you for keeping it real and straightforward. 👍🏻
Awesome work LGR! It doesn't matter what you upload, you make whatever it is extremely interesting, and very much worth watching with the in-depth history of the said thing! Keep it up!!!
I remember that DMX *Italo disco* album, it was odd.. but then again so were the early 2000's.
I love the zoom-ins when inserting discs. Satisfying is an understatement.
I think the major problem with MD-Data is primarily because it was entirely separate to music MD.
Had the format been integrated with regular MiniDisc from the start, it might have been more successful... as would regular MiniDiscs...
Also, Sony really should have added the drivers for their MD-Data file system to be accessible from the default shell.
155kB/sec... isn't that about the same rate as a CD at 1x speed?
Probably just your unit, but again, if MD-Data used regular recordable MiniDiscs that were the same as music MiniDiscs... and you could record using regular MD recorders... it might have had more of a chance.
Integrated Audio and Data, but also if the Audio format didn't have these DRM limitations to your own recordings.
Always thought these were so cool as a teen. I love how it was used in Johnny Mnemonic as well.
*These super aggressive copy write laws are really protecting artists like DMX from going hungry. Why buy a whole CD with artwork case and high sound quality when you can rip a few seconds of a song from a video with someone talking over it played on PC speakers then compressed into a camcorder then recompressed uncompressed and played on your computer! Way better then owning the CD. Didn't DMX spend all his money on crack anyways? Wouldn't want to take crack out of the pipe from starving artists that get a small percentage of their work*
ha love it so true
I loved the win95 driver's look using the old Borland UI library. That tool was written either in Turbo C or Turbo Pascal
Man TH-cams copyright rules are dumb. I am sure people are watching LGR to hear 10 seconds of a song instead of paying for it...
I agree, it's gotten really bad. The fact that a tiny snippet of music (which legally would be permissible as sampling) can get your video automatically demonetized is just ridiculous. You hear short extracts of songs like that on TV all the time, and I'm pretty sure the creators don't need to license them.
If anything it should be seen as free advertising for the song's artist, since someone who likes the extract might be motivated to seek out and buy the full song.
@@tdark987 I put lets plays up of The Last of Us. They muted my whole video and unmonitized it cus the music quietly playing in the background with me talking over it and sounds of gun shots and zombies screaming. How can you claim audio on a video with me talking over the music? Aparently they own my voice as well. Im sure people are listening a 2 hour lets play for a the music instead of buying it. Hell I dont even know if they sell a soundtrack, so how they losing money off the music over a lets play?
I think the big problem is that they're so goddamned cheap about actually employing people for this, so >99% of cases are flagged by an automated script - a rather buggy one from what I gather, that's prone to false positives - and never actually reviewed by a human. That's also why the dispute/appeals process seemingly takes forever and the responses are often rushed; there's probably not all that many employees for a huge backlog of tickets, and the incentive is to get through them as quickly as possible (at the expense of actually doing the necessary research).
You'd have thought with all the money Google has they could afford to hire a few hundred more people for this.
And I once disputed it saying I wasn't infringing copyright, and I got a generic reply saying that I was wrong and it would be still be muted. Its not even Sony having an issue, they even encourage livestreaming and recording their games, thats why they even have built in software for it. TH-cam hurts the legit video makers, while people upload full music albums and slightly change the pitch to bypass the bots and never get caught and even make money off monetization. Its proof their system is broken. Hell I had a video taken down awhile ago that was posted in like 2006 or 2007 cus it had copyrighted music. Like really you need to take down an old Runescape video from that many years ago? Their bots are broken, and they need to fix them.
In that case it sounds like they now might even be using scripts to automatically respond to appeals (or the first stage, at least). That's bad. I suppose they were just sick of dealing with the backlog, but this just isn't a proper solution.
*I can't believe I've just spent 5 hours looking at all this "Oddware"! Even worse, I've worked with almost all of them through the years...*
*Thank you LGR: these are great looks back!*
The plug on the remote for headphones looks very similar to the one Sony made for the PSP.
Game Interest sony used that connector for almost all their audio devices for ages. Their walkman cd players used them too. Im pretty sure theyre all more or less compatible with each other.
@@m4xwellmurd3r hmm... If I had this MiniDisk device I'd definitely give it a try.
The one for the power on the battery/adapter too.
Sony used this connector for all kinds of portable devices (and no the remotes are not all compatible). Sony used this with CD players, MD Walkman, PSP (as you mentioned), and even cassette walkman models.
They are compatible, i used to use mine with my psp.
Absolutely loved MD! Had a few different brands too. You could record onto MD from any source. Really useful.
I do think if Sony did a price drop on the drive it would have been a good competitor to the Zip drive
Ironically, I used my minidisk player to record off the radio. I need to go through them sometime and take a trip down memory lane. Ah, such a great format..
another failed sony proprietary format? you don't say
it was very good, but they ruined it with drm.
honestly the semi-universal battery adapters that sony made were a great thought on their part because alot of their stuff all used this kinda standard battery backup.
MD Data was also featured in the first Jason Bourne movie (train scene).
Sony used to do this with many of their movies.... Last Action Hero had someone (Arnold, I think) visibly putting in a MiniDisc in a portable player on the screen. It wasn't subtle either.... very zoomed in too.
ugh I love the MD loading sound... it's such a nice click-thunk
reminds me alot of the disk drive in the playstation portable .
Antonio Napoli reminds me of a floppy disk
Great video. It's interesting because so many of the things in this video were similar to hardware which I had from my standard audio minidisc player from Sony - for example, the AA battery case was similar to what came with my MZR-909 in look (plugs into power + screw it in tight) with a single AA battery support. From my much older Sony Discman (before they became CD Walkman), I had remotes which didn't have screens but had the same proprietary connector to the device with the different headphones plug into the remote. Newer Sony products used the standard 3.5mm connector on the remotes so if anyone gets stuck trying to get this to work in 2018, they can look for the other Sony remotes which should work.
8:16 Unless you have a very early Mac, most beige Macs (All Old-World PowerPCs) have a SCSI interface built-in.
I used to use my MiniDisc audio player all the time! Took a single AA battery, and I used the heck out of it! I recorded all the audio onto blank audio MDs analog (kinda like recording songs from CDs onto cassette tapes), and used Sony ear buds with it to listen. I even labeled all the songs individually using the MD player's controls (I was hardcore with it). I loved that little thing to death, it was my upgrade from my Sony portable CD player (which was an upgrade from my Sony Walkman). Lots of teenage memories spread across those devices! Haven't used them in ages, they probably all still work!
Data Eata sounds like something an Ork would say from the Warhammer 40k universe
Just to add my $0.02 MD Audio discs CAN be used for data, just not on the drive you are demonstrating. Once NetMD and later HiMD came out, the drives would also allow hooking to the USB port of a computer to transfer music, and also files. Music required the use of their proprietary software but data files transferred just like any other USB drive. Being a magneto-optical format the discs are much more resilient than almost any other format currently out there. They are a great way to store data you don't want to lose, as long as you can keep the drives working that is. I have a number of discs containing videos and picture files that are still readable, long after the recordable CD/DVD counterparts have died from bit-rot.
And my Yamaha MD8, which uses a DATA-MD drive, can record 2-track audio onto regular audio minidiscs - to further correct/clarify what LGR says in the video.
Wow that's terrible speeds for such an expensive device, it almost feels like an insult to the Scsi standard if you ask me,
No, Clint mentioned that the manual listed the speed as 150 KBps.
150KB is CDROM x1 speed, not that terrible.
I remember entering a contest in Keyboard magazine to win a Sony digital multitrack recorder that wrote on Mini disc data discs in 1996 when I was in Highschool. In fact the digital multitrack recorder I ended up buying, a Roland VS-840EX (with a 250MB ZIP drive), had an optical output for recording directly to Mini Disc audio format. I recorded so much audio through that output, it was cool having a red light emit through a 3.5mm fiber optic cable. . . "I'm recording lazers". . .
I'm not sure why but when I think of Mini Discs I always think of the movie Strange Days
The most cyberpunk way to store experiences and memories
I love this stuff. Thanks clint for all your content and years of entertainment.
Yay more LGR!
I was an early adopter of the MiniDisc audio format, purchasing the MZ-1 back in 1992 and then a few of other recorder/players over the years. Sitting next to me in a rack is a Sony MDS-E12, a 1U rack mount recorder. I have a bunch of discs containing the music my brother wrote in the 1990's and 2000's. I need to archive it, and it's the only player that currently works.
I've heard they had data storage capabilities early on, but not a single store in my area carried them, much less heard of them.
Now, if 8 Bit Guy releases a video today as well, it will make this one heck of a Friday LOL.
I watch Techmoan, too. :)
LGR + Techmoan + 8-bit guy = *The Trifecta*
Nostalgia Nerd is great. As are Modern Classic, AkBKukU, Modern Vintage Gamer, The Obsolete Geek, RetroManCave, and my newest favorite, Perifractic's Retro Recipes.
I'm subscripted to Perifractic's since only last week (as well as being familiar and/or subscribed to all the rest you list). I can certainly relate! I'm glad I've found it.
Dude, I seriously love ur channel. Best quirky tech from the past, it's always a good trip down memory lane. Makes me feel good to know I'm not alone in remembering weird old tech
I remember the first time I saw minidiscs, in 1996, I thought, someone should make a game boy using these.
I only saw it in commercials. As a kid I found it cool but way too expensive (Same with MiniDV). Until i could finally afford it myself somewhere in 2009. Before that I only knew 2 people who used MiniDisc. They both had NetMD decives and used it like people used their MP3 sticks. Packing them with as much stuff as possible.
KRAFTWERK2K6 I never saw them in person. Only in my ads. I also wanted a computer but never got one until 2003.
Still remember those first being out and everyone wanting one to be cool. Awesome video.
Man, I always wished the MD would catch on. I thought it was such a brilliant format. But nope.
Yessss, mini discs! I had an MDH-10 and a shoe box of MDs I picked up from a garage sale in 2001. It was AWESOME for storing my roms and emulators!
Stupid outdated formats. YES.
Outdated yes but Sony Mini Disk players where so much better then CD players.
@@timking3587 Yes! CDs, suck (unless only considered as a replacement for LP) In portables,car decks and for recording, MiniDisc was the best medium since Compact Cassette,
You're stupid too and nobody asked a thing about it
Outdated yes, stupid no
Minidisc is great but Minidisc DATA, no !
After watching this video, an idea appeared to search for modern musical compositions in the “.mid” format. Found a whole site dedicated to this subject. I listened to music from Painkiller - and immediately a big smile on my face =)))
Thank you for the video!
When the Gamecube first came out, I asked my friend if it would require memory cards and he scoffed at me because "how are they going to write save data to a disc?!". I felt foolish, but today, like 15 years later, I am vindicated. It was totally in the realm of possibility to have both RW and R-only sections on the same disc.
0:50 I almost spat out my beverage when you mentioned the price. Holy crap, that thing was not a bargain.
Well back then it was. Multi giga byte memory for most devices was just a pipe dream back then.
There's also the fact that it is SCSI... maybe it's just me, but I never had a computer with a SCSI interface growing up. At least not since I was old enough to know what it was.
I can't say anything about the reliability of the data drive, as I naturally never had one. But my teen years were spent walking around with an MD walkman, I had 4 different devices in succession, and loved them all. And those discs and machines had legendary reliability. I recently dragged my one remaining player out of storage and went over my MD collection, all discs I tried still work 100%, and most of them I played and recorded over countless times over their life. As opposed to pure optical media, like CD-Rs and DVD-Rs that seem to stop working after a couple of months, these were the bomb.
CANYON.MID... haha.. I predicted that one :) :)
The Sony MD data multi-track recorder was my first digital multi-track recorder. Lovely piece of gear.
Oddware time with LGR nice way to spend lunch lol
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But can it run
Duke3d?
i SEE YOUR REFERENCE
Robo-Teh- Kid I almost used the reference, But then I remembered LGR trying to play Duke from a click drive. Plus that meme is worn out lol.
While this video gives me an unnecessary number of reasons to invest heavily in this format, just to be able to peruse a drawer of highly illegal software contained on MD data discs while listening to the immersive tones of Massive Attack’s Dissolving Girl, I am even more impressed with how much the promotional picture at 2:45 screams the early 90s. What a truly fabulous time in our history. Now the only thing I want is to be driven to a motion blur while riding my slick racing bike with CD-ROM wheels. Ah, the nostalgia.
Thorstein Johannessen the 90's was an amazing time, the music (trip hop!!!), the tech, the graphics design and cartoons just to name a few.
R.i.P D.M.X
Well you opened my eyes to something I never knew existed.
That early 2000s mixtape is delightfully cringe.
I had a Hi-MD unit (and loved it), but always wanted the Hi-MD unit that was expressly designed for plugging into a digital camera via USB and backing up photos while on the go.
Totally impractical now, but at the time, it was everything I could have hoped or dreamed of.
Minidisc is the best physical media format. I wish it caught on instead of CD/DVD
Takeshi7 ....what? How on earth is it better?
The capacity for its time was really good, writable DVD were not within consumers reach for a few years when this medium was available
Takeshi7 it’s actually way worse
140mb capacity vs 650mb of CR rom
$30/disks vs $2 re-writeable CDs
CD-roms are also thinner and have cheaper players.
TheMarkedWorld Plus they are a lossy format, can't record audio above 256 kbps
Hi-MD was not lossy. look it up. Also these data ones can store lossless audio. No reason why they couldn't.
Yes!. New Oddware. I love this series.
I knew a guy who did mobile discos for weddings n stuff. He used Minidisc for all his music compilations. faster than cd too for searching n stuff and very fast writing speed, if i remember correctly.
HURRAY :D A MINIDISC VIDEO
I really enjoy the oddware series of videos you do. I honestly didn't know that MiniDiscs existed until I watched a video from Techmoan back in 2016.
I always wanted a minidisc player when I was 18. Looked so cool. An episode of CSI featured a minidisc being played also.
I still have a minidisc player, a NetMD. I admit I could use it more often, but I bought it out of nostalgia for the unit I had in high school, a portable recording model that accepted optical audio in. One of my favorite things about the one I had in high school was that the case was made of metal and felt so much nicer in the hands than CD players. I had fun dubbing music to it from the radio or a CD or my Napster files. It was so cool for my music collection to take up less space than CDs and that the player fit in my pocket. Then came iPods.
Thanks Clint for the trip down memory lane. Used to use one of these until I accidentally dropped it. Not sturdy at all..
MiniDisc's used slight compression to fit music on discs. My guess is that the data discs used the same compression scheme, which would cause those errors in windows when trying to launch files directly off the disk.
I used to write MP3 to my MiniDiscs all the time, and I totally loved my Sony MZ-S1. I need to go find that thing now.
I bought a similar device way back then and learned the hard way that it had one quite insane rule; it would only deal with files that had valid DRM on it, so I could only put files on it that had a valid "free to use" licence in them. That meant that all my personal recordings where disallowed. Obviously I brought it back the next day, what good is a minidisc writer that basically will not write any files at al...
There is a special place in my heart for MiniDisc. So many fond memories.
Still a proud owner of a Sony MZ-RH1 here. These things sell for crazy prices nowadays, but I will keep this one anyways. Using this player over USB, you can also write arbitrary files onto Hi-MDs which have a capacity of 1GB. It's pretty cool.
I didn't know to much of what you were talking about concerning this video, but I still gave you thumbs ups because you're a cool guy. By the way LGR, back in the day, I bought a Packard Bell Legend Supreme 1605 computer. I bought it as a bundle package, back then the bundle package included the monitor, computer, speakers, keyboard, mouse, printer, cables. I thought that that was pretty neat. You can't get all of that in a bundle anymore. Man, this was one bad computer! Way ahead of it's time. I got it back in 1997. If I knew then what I know now, I would still have that computer and that would be the ONLY computer that I would use. I didn't know a lot about computers back then, anyways the reason I got rid of the computer was because Windows 95 crashed, I got some floppys from a friend in Puerto Rico to reinstall it. It took 20 disk back then, my friend only gave 19 of them, so it never installed correctly and also the optical drive went out and I didn't know how to replace it. So it set in my closet and I finally threw it away. Looking back, man, I could just kick myself. I just googled a picture of the Packard Bell Legend Supreme 1605. It showed a setup of the computer. Ah man, that was one good looking computer, and it really performed. Another google search of the Packard Bell Legend Supreme 1605 showed the specifications of the computer and it doesn't disappoint. Hopefully one of these days I will come across one, and when I do, you better believe it's going to be mine. You know what LGR, computers back then were more interesting back then unlike computers of today, which are so very boring. To be quite honest, I just don't care for computers of today, and I really don't care for any laptop. I just don't. Give me a computer of yesteryear any day. Anyways LGR, if you read this, thanks so much for taking time out to do so. I would love so very much to what you think about what I have written. Have a great weekend! :-) 08.18.18
Man I used to have one of these, never managed to get it to work with any of our computers at the time.
The DataEata is SO DOPE! We need that brought back in 2021, refreshed, Sony!
Nice share! I used to have a MD player but never knew the data variant existed.
My work still owns a md data, Sony digital camera. It is quite a relic. It is still around since most usb drives are disabled and special permission is needed to use usb transfer on cameras. Most of us just use our phones to take pictures inside the plant though.
I have the feeling finding all the stuff to make a video takes forever. I'll bet you had the idea for this and all your other videos 2-5 years ago. That's dedication :)