My friend had one and I thought it was awesome because it fit in a pocket so easily. I couldn't afford one though. I bought a nice Sony tape deck for my car instead, and made mixtapes from my computer... Back in the hayday of Napster.
When I was ~13 MP3 players just didn't exist yet and sony had a Minidisc player which let me have ANY music I wanted instead of just a single cd or tape etc. I begged my mom for one for Christmas and she got me one and I was so excited. Turns out you couldn't just drop songs onto the minidisc you had to record them onto it like a Tape! I spent hours recording and filling up a disc so I could get on my Razor Scooter and scoot down to my frieds house 5 min away. I should of just used my cd player :P
I always liked the colorful discs. At one point I found a pack of clear colorful 3.5" floppy discs and some people thought they were minidiscs. That was back in technical high school in computer tech class.
A casualty of the Japanese economic bubble bursting in the early 1990s. Japan was all-in on magneto-optical (MO) technology, but Americans refused to pay those high prices. Americans waited until CD-R burners became affordable and the media was really cheap.
@@seanwieland9763 I've seen MO disks (the larger ones) used as a backup storage solution at a mid-sized company in Europe. They had a washing-machine sized device with a robotic arm that could access hundreds of these. Very neat, although by the time I got to see it (early 2010s) it was only kept around for legal reasons and not used anymore. They had actually reverted to tape storage for newer backups, since MO couldn't handle the amount of data created anymore.
100%. They always wanted to set a standard that would have others pay them royalties. After RCA and the radio royalties everyone wanted a piece of that action.
Ironically Sony is who invented the 3.5” 1.44MB floppy by not keeping it proprietary, but the managers at Sony saw this as a failure rather than a win condition.
@@seanwieland9763 He literally ambushed the Sony guys on a golf course (look, I don't like to stereotype the Japanese...but...), holding a Vaio running MacOS. He wanted to put MacOS on Vaio, and Sony said "Nah."
@@hoilst265that's not a stereotype of a Japanese businessman, it's just what successful people do in their free time world over, and Sony was definitely living it up back then. Golf as a hobby has mostly dried up in Japan after the bubble era since it's just too expensive, living frugally is a virtue now.
Love the minidisc format. Especially with current modern software allowing me to write music on it like putting files on a USB stick. Simply brilliant.
Never have I clicked so fast on a video when I saw mini disc! 5:40 That is a nifty little thing that I wish manufacturers put on there notebook machines more, options for specific things like keypads, drives or IO ports, all with a single connection type that can be interchangeable.
Framework goes somewhat in that direction but there USB-C Based Expansion Slots are far smaller. The Framework 16 has a big slot with PCIe x8 on the back, good for GPUs, Networkcards and Storage but not Disk Drives or similar thinks. Panasonic has (or had?) also some very Modular and expansive devices, with a Disk Drive Bay...
2 หลายเดือนก่อน
Dell did that at one point, on their Latitude line of laptops, sadly even they have abandoned that
Many people still using MD here in japan ,the latest machine modular recorder is able to record high quality audio using toslink capture from amazon ,it sounds fantastic it really looks MD was made decades ahead of its time ! !
одно только жалко - сам формат MD с его ATRAC - это не lossless хранилище для музыкальных данных. вот что интересно, какой объем компьютерных данных этот носитель способен хранить.
Just ordered an MZ-RH910 and the last Hi-MD disc from Sony available on amazon (at least the last new one from Sony for international buyers). So looking to get back into minidisc after 20 years!!!
Congrats on your purchase, enjoy! I got an MZ-RH10 last year but (as expected) the OLED display was gone. Work great with the remote control tho so no regrets.
my dad jumped on the minidisc wave pretty quickly, for the standalone deck and portable player. I do remember going to one of the sony stores and seeing a PC tower with a minidisc drive. I had the portable player with me, so the rep wanted to show me how i could play my minidisc on the computer
Prior to the advent of low cost GB+ SD cards and ssd's, Mini Disc was the top random read write removable storage tech out there. As a big MD fan since the early 90s with a Sharp portable player in 93, stereo component md recorders 94+, and an mzr30 recorder since 98, was always amazed and frustrated that the MD wasn't used far more commonly for data storage, as a floppy and cdrw replacement, post 2000, especiallywith the higher capacity HiMD. Sony kept it back for themselves way too long
@@seanwieland9763 To be fair, there were many competing solid state storage standards in late 90s, early 00s- compact flash, sd, memory stick, xd, SmartMedia, mmc and others. Still doesn't excuse Sony for complicating things further
I can tell you why it wasn't more commonly used: It was expensive, to the point that it was primarily a toy for rich early adopters in the beginning. Even as time moved on and disc prices dropped to a tenth of where they were in the early '90s, they were still at least 20x more expensive than CDs - just when Flash storage began to take off and writeable DVDs became commonly available. On top of that you had to deal with the fact that barely anyone had a drive and that those drives were never cheap either. By that point, it was more of an ideological conviction or sunk cost fallacy that kept people attached to the format and barely any new customers were willing to invest into it.
@no1DdC Agreed in general, but I meant to imply that if Sony had aggressively licensed the format and pushed to get adoption rates higher with external usb zip drive competitor himd, then prices may have fallen fast enough. Even with history as it is, md was tough to beat for recording live audio until at least 2010 or later, when sd card recorders could do 3+ hr recording of lossless wav.
@@alexxbaudwhyn7572 By 2010, the format had been practically dead and obsolete for at least half a decade. Just because you stuck with it doesn't mean anyone else saw it as "tough to beat". I owned cheap, fast and reliable Flash storage with more capacity than any MD and none of the silly DRM by 2004 at the latest. Meanwhile, harddisk-based MP3 players like the iPod had long since conquered the high end enthusiast market that Sony was trying to cater to.
Still the best way to store your valuable data. Because it feels more physical than a solid state drive. Something you can touch and reach anytime you like.
I just wish MD Data was a bigger format with a variety of drive options, so you could use it as storage medium for retro PC's, like they did in action films from the 90's like Goldeneye or The Matrix.
Absolutely one of the most desirable laptops made but they werent cheap. Sony made some gorgeous coloured laptops too, orange, green, crimson - beautiful vibrant colours too. Be nice to see you revirw those too.
I love my MD so much. I was lucky to buy the last box of 100 disks sealed new-in-box blanks from a Sony store that closed. I already bought so much before that I have yet to open that box. :)
@@beardedlion It would be nice but in the end, having 1 or 2 albums per disk adds to the experience of still using these today. There's no way I'll ever pay 70-90 per disks to these bandits.
@@UCs6ktlulE5BEeb3vBBOu6DQ yeah, that's fair. I did make many compilation disks in the past years and that's also what attracted me to the format. For some casual listening I even made some LP2 discs. But I'd love to have some HiMD discs to record some lossless PCM to. You would still have the constraint of 2-3 albums worth of capacity, just at lossless quality.
You're absolutely right. Companies are not willing to take the risk in designing something different. Modern smartphones are a great example. Early smartphones manufacturers regularly tried unique form factors and features, but today, nearly all smartphones look the same.
Man that Inspiron 8000 photo in the section about the ati 7500 was a blast of nostalgia. My dad had one for work and I tried to get him to order yellow wrist rests for the whole time he did lol
I was big into MD in the day.... Still have my home-based players/recorders. I had in dash in car, a portable one and even a ES home unit and now I even have a Pro-recorder/player (MDS-85)..... I even had a few models of in dash car systems, I used to have a 3 disk in dash changer from Eclipse, I imported it from Japan and shocked that it worked perfectly with US devices. It was a pretty cool setup....
Those were in the windows of the local Sony store... Looked mint! Total beast of advertising around it so you couldn't walk past without not seeing it.
My memory of XP came back to life when i saw this video..the font, green progress bars, blue color..omg what a time to live..win 95/98/me/2000/xp etc…❤
Someone had one of these in the MiniDisc Con at VCF SW this year. Such a sweet machine! They had a bunch of other modules too including the subwoofer and keypad.
back in those years, about the year 2000 we, at the local radio station, somethings dreamed about it how it would be like.....MD in a PC. Thanks Colin for showing us how it would be like.
Such a shame. If only Sony opened up their MiniDisc format at that era, to work as openly as the mp3 format, MD format probably can still thrive today.
I still have mine (and i have all the optional accessories for the bay and the recovery discs.) I had a minidisc changer in my car and this laptop was fantastic for making complilations and albums. I loved that period.
Those Sony scroll wheels were pretty neat when used with the menu software. Click the wheel to pop it up then scroll to select various functions or launch programs you set it to open.
I used to subscribe to Sony’s PULSE magazine/catalogue and just loved looking at all the cool products they came out with including the VAIO computers. I always wanted one of those cool sub-notebook size Memory Stick VAIOs. Years later I did get myself an 11” Apple MacBook Air so kind of half-lived out my dream 😂
Nice find! I've never been able to get my hands on this model. I still have all my MD gear, including the MZ-RH1, and my JB980 Minidisc deck (which still sees occasional use).
I remember getting to see one of these laptops in person with the MD drive in it. It was quite cool and also quite thick. This video actually can't show off how thick it really is, you have to see one for yourself to know.
Sony computers are super cool, a built in MD drive makes it even more awesome! The software really holds it back though, both with the restore images and the MD software. If more applications were able to make use of this hardware, MiniDisc would have been used way more. iTunes with this drive would be amazing, just like how it works with iPods. If they made it so NetMD could also support data as well as audio, it would have been a solid option for everything.
My recollection of Sonic Stage was that it never read music from a minidisc. The function of the "transfer back" button was tied to the DRM system. SonicStage would only let you transfer a music file to a minidisc a set number of times, and when you reached that limit it refused to write it. The official way to be able to put that track on a new minidisc was to find one of the old ones and transfer it back off that disc, which meant it deleted it from that disc and restored "one credit" allowing you to write it again to a new disc. The quicker workaround was to delete the track from your sonicstage library and drag the MP3 back on, so it thought it was a different file and you got the full number of transfers again.
SonicStage had a "check in" option to restore the transfer limit to songs in your library, yes, but the limit went away with version 4.3 or 4.4 so you could "check out" the same song as much as you wanted. But it's true there was never a real digital transfer off of MD, at least not originally; some modern home-brew software has enabled that feature, which is a huge benefit for people who made original recordings on the format.
@@fsfs555 - I was close in my recollection, it's been a while since I did a SonicStage MD write. I have an old Dell XP laptop with it on. Most of my more recent MD recordings have been digital via optical in.
I remember that painful hell before later versions. Fortunately, the final generation of Hi-MD gear (eg, the RH1) permitted transfer *from* MDs, including those recorded in the Non-Hi-MD SP ATRAC3 format, to PC.
i have the same laptop, i don’t have the MD module, but i have the floppy, numeric keypad, and subwoofer module. that subwoofer module surprisingly sounds very good and adds a nice bit of room and volume to the laptop!
I just got back into MiniDisc, and not a moment to soon. Last week when the cyclone hit the Seattle area I had not electricity and the couple of recorded Minidisc’s were my only source of entertainment.
Sonicstage was criticised at the time but back then I had a Sony 1GB MP3 player and the battery lasted for 50 hours between charges. So. converting music files with Sonic stage may have been a pain but worth it for such a long battery life. Stunning!
My mom used that as her work laptop for many years. It came included with the keypad, subwoofer and drive modules. I think she left the subwoofer installed most of the time.
the sony nv laptops subwoofer module made them killer little boom boxes. even against modern machines like macbooks the speakers still held up thanks to the subwoofer. ive still got my old sony someplace but i seldom power it on because the hinges are cracking sadly.
i had a minidisc player in the 90s and thought it was cool at the time but don’t miss it. i even gave away my player and discs a few years ago to a minidisc aficionado.
I wish i had this in 2001 as a daily MD user both listen, record + using it for jingles to this day on community radio were it still tends to be a second choice to do spots with.
what a cool throwback! love how innovative Sony was. however, i can't help but think that the miniDisc format really never took off like they hoped. i mean, wasn't it just a bit too late? with the rise of mp3 players, it feels like the miniDisc was destined to be a niche product. what do you all think?
Hard to believe it's over 20 years old, when Windows XP hardware still feels new to me. Compared to 486 tech 10 years prior to this laptop, it goes to show how fast your computer was already out of date the day you bought it, and well before the PC building enthusiast market like today.
Imagine the universe where MD was just a storage medium, capable of holding any data, without restrictions, without copyright management, freedom to quickly transfer from one disc to another...
A shame, that Sony is meanwhile not a big player in the PC business anymore. They built such great devices. I always wanted to have a Vaio standalone PC (Notebook were out of my reach at that time money-wise), but they never were a big thing here in here. Combined with my beloved Minidisc this would have been a perfect fit 🙂.
Back on the day Sony tried to install its priority formats in every thin they’ve done. At the early 2000’s the very first DVD player we own at home was from Sony, it was ridiculously expensive and had many ports, actually ones that I’ve never seen before intended for new high definition format like HDMI and optic audio, couple media ports to reproduce files straight from a Sony Clié, and a USB port to connect it to a PC (before PCs included dvd readers). But one of the most interesting thing was the Mini Disc and Memory Stick readers to play your media files on your living room’s tv, and according to the Bible (manual) included, you could save all the photos (taken on a cyber shot of course) from the memory stick in to a mini disc, directly from the DVD player without using a computer, we never tried it cause blank minidiscs were hard to find here in Mexico but always tough it was an interesting feature.
Used to use my Hi-MD player (MZNH-600) as a portable drive back in the early 2000's; used standard USB when you couldn't be guaranteed that the internet cafe would have a CD burner, and since it was 1GB a Hi-MD was a more cost effective option than flash storage at the time (slow as molasses but capacity was king back then).
Wow, I cant believe Sony kept MD on the market until 2006. I remember wanting an MD player in the late 90s after my friend got one, but never got one. I went from tape walkman to Disc based mp3/cd player in the early 2000s, to ipod mini in 2004, and onto a Samsung solid state mp3 player in 2007. Sony and their proprietary media storage types have always been an interesting choice. Besides the MD, their memory sticks were a big pain in the ass for how much they cost, and then making the UMD format for the PSP.
I used to have a cool lil program that would mask anything I wanted as an audio file and it was great for storing photos onto mini discs, I belive it was called wrapster
Zip was a huge flop and unreliable. If you got one you would have put files on the disk only to discover the drive fail soon after with the click-of-death and scramble the disk. Believe me, you _definitely_ don't want one ;-)
Minidisc remains the coolest format ever. I had a player, it felt like jacking into the future every time I put a disc in.
Just like fiddling with yourself in a Delorean
@@3rdalbum Jack to the future 😂
My friend had one and I thought it was awesome because it fit in a pocket so easily.
I couldn't afford one though. I bought a nice Sony tape deck for my car instead, and made mixtapes from my computer... Back in the hayday of Napster.
When I was ~13 MP3 players just didn't exist yet and sony had a Minidisc player which let me have ANY music I wanted instead of just a single cd or tape etc. I begged my mom for one for Christmas and she got me one and I was so excited. Turns out you couldn't just drop songs onto the minidisc you had to record them onto it like a Tape! I spent hours recording and filling up a disc so I could get on my Razor Scooter and scoot down to my frieds house 5 min away. I should of just used my cd player :P
DVD-RAM inside a cartridge is a good way to still relive that feeling with more modern capacity. There are still Fujitsu MO drives around too.
There is a reason they used mini disk for data storage in the matrix, it just looks cool.
Two grand....."If you get caught using that"
I always liked the colorful discs.
At one point I found a pack of clear colorful 3.5" floppy discs and some people thought they were minidiscs. That was back in technical high school in computer tech class.
Weren't they also in the movie Eraser?
A casualty of the Japanese economic bubble bursting in the early 1990s. Japan was all-in on magneto-optical (MO) technology, but Americans refused to pay those high prices. Americans waited until CD-R burners became affordable and the media was really cheap.
@@seanwieland9763 I've seen MO disks (the larger ones) used as a backup storage solution at a mid-sized company in Europe. They had a washing-machine sized device with a robotic arm that could access hundreds of these. Very neat, although by the time I got to see it (early 2010s) it was only kept around for legal reasons and not used anymore. They had actually reverted to tape storage for newer backups, since MO couldn't handle the amount of data created anymore.
Sony locking down their formats with proprietary BS is what killed many of their cool ideas.
100%. They always wanted to set a standard that would have others pay them royalties. After RCA and the radio royalties everyone wanted a piece of that action.
Ironically Sony is who invented the 3.5” 1.44MB floppy by not keeping it proprietary, but the managers at Sony saw this as a failure rather than a win condition.
Yea same with UMD
Yeah....that stick of gum memory thing didn't age well.
Rip PS Vita
MiniDisc was so stylish at the time and they still look so good!
How MiniDick can be stylish?
early 2000s sony is peak cool technology
Steve Jobs visited Sony and explicitly wanted to emulate their emphasis on design and quality. Apple became more Sony than Sony.
@@seanwieland9763 tbh i think the complexity and sheer variety of sony products of the time is still unreached by apple
@@seanwieland9763true, i remember steve jobs said he was heavily inspired by sony, and saw sony as the only rival of apple
@@seanwieland9763 He literally ambushed the Sony guys on a golf course (look, I don't like to stereotype the Japanese...but...), holding a Vaio running MacOS. He wanted to put MacOS on Vaio, and Sony said "Nah."
@@hoilst265that's not a stereotype of a Japanese businessman, it's just what successful people do in their free time world over, and Sony was definitely living it up back then. Golf as a hobby has mostly dried up in Japan after the bubble era since it's just too expensive, living frugally is a virtue now.
Oh how I wish minidisc PC drives existed more, I'd love to mess with them for that sweet tactile feel.
Love the minidisc format. Especially with current modern software allowing me to write music on it like putting files on a USB stick. Simply brilliant.
Techmoan is salivating.
>Techmoan mentioned
Never have I clicked so fast on a video when I saw mini disc!
5:40 That is a nifty little thing that I wish manufacturers put on there notebook machines more, options for specific things like keypads, drives or IO ports, all with a single connection type that can be interchangeable.
100 percent agreed, finished watching Dawid abusing a Chromebook which was running win. 11 lol and saw this
Framework goes somewhat in that direction but there USB-C Based Expansion Slots are far smaller.
The Framework 16 has a big slot with PCIe x8 on the back, good for GPUs, Networkcards and Storage but not Disk Drives or similar thinks.
Panasonic has (or had?) also some very Modular and expansive devices, with a Disk Drive Bay...
Dell did that at one point, on their Latitude line of laptops, sadly even they have abandoned that
Many people still using MD here in japan ,the latest machine modular recorder is able to record high quality audio using toslink capture from amazon ,it sounds fantastic it really looks MD was made decades ahead of its time ! !
одно только жалко - сам формат MD с его ATRAC - это не lossless хранилище для музыкальных данных.
вот что интересно, какой объем компьютерных данных этот носитель способен хранить.
What is this "machine modular recorder"? I can't find it by that name
私は日本人だけど、今の時代にMDを使っている人を見たことがないよ。
SP isn’t just for compatibility with older minidisc players, it’s also the highest audio quality option.
Just ordered an MZ-RH910 and the last Hi-MD disc from Sony available on amazon (at least the last new one from Sony for international buyers). So looking to get back into minidisc after 20 years!!!
Congrats on your purchase, enjoy! I got an MZ-RH10 last year but (as expected) the OLED display was gone. Work great with the remote control tho so no regrets.
my dad jumped on the minidisc wave pretty quickly, for the standalone deck and portable player. I do remember going to one of the sony stores and seeing a PC tower with a minidisc drive. I had the portable player with me, so the rep wanted to show me how i could play my minidisc on the computer
Prior to the advent of low cost GB+ SD cards and ssd's, Mini Disc was the top random read write removable storage tech out there.
As a big MD fan since the early 90s with a Sharp portable player in 93, stereo component md recorders 94+, and an mzr30 recorder since 98, was always amazed and frustrated that the MD wasn't used far more commonly for data storage, as a floppy and cdrw replacement, post 2000, especiallywith the higher capacity HiMD. Sony kept it back for themselves way too long
In that Sony ad, they were still trying to force people to buy their proprietary MemoryStick format instead of the open SD card format.
@@seanwieland9763 To be fair, there were many competing solid state storage standards in late 90s, early 00s- compact flash, sd, memory stick, xd, SmartMedia, mmc and others. Still doesn't excuse Sony for complicating things further
I can tell you why it wasn't more commonly used: It was expensive, to the point that it was primarily a toy for rich early adopters in the beginning. Even as time moved on and disc prices dropped to a tenth of where they were in the early '90s, they were still at least 20x more expensive than CDs - just when Flash storage began to take off and writeable DVDs became commonly available. On top of that you had to deal with the fact that barely anyone had a drive and that those drives were never cheap either. By that point, it was more of an ideological conviction or sunk cost fallacy that kept people attached to the format and barely any new customers were willing to invest into it.
@no1DdC Agreed in general, but I meant to imply that if Sony had aggressively licensed the format and pushed to get adoption rates higher with external usb zip drive competitor himd, then prices may have fallen fast enough.
Even with history as it is, md was tough to beat for recording live audio until at least 2010 or later, when sd card recorders could do 3+ hr recording of lossless wav.
@@alexxbaudwhyn7572 By 2010, the format had been practically dead and obsolete for at least half a decade. Just because you stuck with it doesn't mean anyone else saw it as "tough to beat". I owned cheap, fast and reliable Flash storage with more capacity than any MD and none of the silly DRM by 2004 at the latest. Meanwhile, harddisk-based MP3 players like the iPod had long since conquered the high end enthusiast market that Sony was trying to cater to.
Still the best way to store your valuable data. Because it feels more physical than a solid state drive. Something you can touch and reach anytime you like.
And somehow you can't touch an SSD?
I just wish MD Data was a bigger format with a variety of drive options, so you could use it as storage medium for retro PC's, like they did in action films from the 90's like Goldeneye or The Matrix.
They could have even had Computer Software on MiniDisc but it just didn't happen.
Absolutely one of the most desirable laptops made but they werent cheap.
Sony made some gorgeous coloured laptops too, orange, green, crimson - beautiful vibrant colours too. Be nice to see you revirw those too.
Technology definitely peaked in the 2000's. I would kill for a modern laptop this modular and unique
Sony used to be awesome with innovative design and products. Clié comes to mind...
But they just HAD to lock the music down... FOOLISH.
@@christophero1969 how else is Sony Music going to make moolah "their reasoning"
I love my MD so much. I was lucky to buy the last box of 100 disks sealed new-in-box blanks from a Sony store that closed. I already bought so much before that I have yet to open that box. :)
If only HiMD media were as popular. Those things are selling at crazy prices these days
@@beardedlion It would be nice but in the end, having 1 or 2 albums per disk adds to the experience of still using these today. There's no way I'll ever pay 70-90 per disks to these bandits.
@@UCs6ktlulE5BEeb3vBBOu6DQ yeah, that's fair. I did make many compilation disks in the past years and that's also what attracted me to the format. For some casual listening I even made some LP2 discs. But I'd love to have some HiMD discs to record some lossless PCM to. You would still have the constraint of 2-3 albums worth of capacity, just at lossless quality.
@@beardedlion ATRAC 3 Plus 352 is good enough for "lossless"
I LOVED the "wild west" era mini-laptops. It was a cool race of who could make the most compelling but most expansive or most connectable device.
You're absolutely right. Companies are not willing to take the risk in designing something different. Modern smartphones are a great example. Early smartphones manufacturers regularly tried unique form factors and features, but today, nearly all smartphones look the same.
Sonys biggest mistake was never to focus on making MD the next data storage format. Pure multi purpose, multi use file storage, like CD-R and CDRW.
I have the same blue minidisc player. Very underrated format and still use it when I want to go offline.
So glad to have been able to watch this while on my lunch break. Thanks Colin!
Man that Inspiron 8000 photo in the section about the ati 7500 was a blast of nostalgia. My dad had one for work and I tried to get him to order yellow wrist rests for the whole time he did lol
Glad I’m not the only one who had issues with the Sonic Stage app
I've never rewound someone's intro, yours is so good I had to jam to it a few times😂
That expansion side numpad is pretty astounding!
I was big into MD in the day.... Still have my home-based players/recorders. I had in dash in car, a portable one and even a ES home unit and now I even have a Pro-recorder/player (MDS-85)..... I even had a few models of in dash car systems, I used to have a 3 disk in dash changer from Eclipse, I imported it from Japan and shocked that it worked perfectly with US devices. It was a pretty cool setup....
Those were in the windows of the local Sony store... Looked mint! Total beast of advertising around it so you couldn't walk past without not seeing it.
Man! This computer is so cool!!!!!
My memory of XP came back to life when i saw this video..the font, green progress bars, blue color..omg what a time to live..win 95/98/me/2000/xp etc…❤
Someone had one of these in the MiniDisc Con at VCF SW this year. Such a sweet machine! They had a bunch of other modules too including the subwoofer and keypad.
Dang this laptop is decked out
One week a color classic. Now an MD VAIO. Great content!
back in those years, about the year 2000 we, at the local radio station, somethings dreamed about it how it would be like.....MD in a PC.
Thanks Colin for showing us how it would be like.
Thanks Colin! Still looking forward to seeing you improve/mod your personal custom retro PC
MD was awesome. I wouldn't miss that era! Also a pity VAIO got discontinued. Writing this on my still properly in use Z-Series.
Such a shame. If only Sony opened up their MiniDisc format at that era, to work as openly as the mp3 format, MD format probably can still thrive today.
7:02 is that the sweet ear nectar that i have spotted? jamiroquai?
Minidisc has to be one if the most well documented formats on youtube by now. There are probably more videos about Minidisc than CD, DVD or Blu-Ray.
I still have mine (and i have all the optional accessories for the bay and the recovery discs.) I had a minidisc changer in my car and this laptop was fantastic for making complilations and albums. I loved that period.
Those Sony scroll wheels were pretty neat when used with the menu software. Click the wheel to pop it up then scroll to select various functions or launch programs you set it to open.
You gotta respect how “all-in” Sony went with MiniDisc. That’s so ride-or-die type of loyalty for their products.
Gosh. This video gave me flashbacks of how not user friendly windows was,… the internet connect icon and its troubleshoot page 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
0:53 inFAMOUS (edit turn on captions)
Great game!
thanks for all the effort you put into your videos!!!!
man that closing thought "something that is left to be desired these days" 100% dude
I loved my minidisc player so much! Used it every single day for years! At the time it was a really cool piece of tech!
What a coincidence, I just watched your Minidisc buyer's guide last night.
I used to subscribe to Sony’s PULSE magazine/catalogue and just loved looking at all the cool products they came out with including the VAIO computers.
I always wanted one of those cool sub-notebook size Memory Stick VAIOs. Years later I did get myself an 11” Apple MacBook Air so kind of half-lived out my dream 😂
Another computer MD drive that's limited to audio? 🙄 MD should have supported data from the start.
It was on purpose, a firewall between data and audio that ruined minidisc on the computer. This is because Sony was a big record label as well.
Transfer rate was quite slow, not an issue for music though
With a few tweaks it could have killed off CD.
Sony : goat of design
and worst with product names? go figure.
Nice find! I've never been able to get my hands on this model. I still have all my MD gear, including the MZ-RH1, and my JB980 Minidisc deck (which still sees occasional use).
These modular devices are always fun to see. Would be nice to have modern devices like these.
El mejor formato que he tenido en mis manos. Gracias. No sabia que existia laptop mini disc. 👍
I remember getting to see one of these laptops in person with the MD drive in it. It was quite cool and also quite thick. This video actually can't show off how thick it really is, you have to see one for yourself to know.
Sony computers are super cool, a built in MD drive makes it even more awesome! The software really holds it back though, both with the restore images and the MD software. If more applications were able to make use of this hardware, MiniDisc would have been used way more. iTunes with this drive would be amazing, just like how it works with iPods. If they made it so NetMD could also support data as well as audio, it would have been a solid option for everything.
This feels so uniquely Japanese cyberpunk and I love it
My recollection of Sonic Stage was that it never read music from a minidisc. The function of the "transfer back" button was tied to the DRM system. SonicStage would only let you transfer a music file to a minidisc a set number of times, and when you reached that limit it refused to write it. The official way to be able to put that track on a new minidisc was to find one of the old ones and transfer it back off that disc, which meant it deleted it from that disc and restored "one credit" allowing you to write it again to a new disc. The quicker workaround was to delete the track from your sonicstage library and drag the MP3 back on, so it thought it was a different file and you got the full number of transfers again.
SonicStage had a "check in" option to restore the transfer limit to songs in your library, yes, but the limit went away with version 4.3 or 4.4 so you could "check out" the same song as much as you wanted. But it's true there was never a real digital transfer off of MD, at least not originally; some modern home-brew software has enabled that feature, which is a huge benefit for people who made original recordings on the format.
@@fsfs555 - I was close in my recollection, it's been a while since I did a SonicStage MD write. I have an old Dell XP laptop with it on. Most of my more recent MD recordings have been digital via optical in.
I remember that painful hell before later versions. Fortunately, the final generation of Hi-MD gear (eg, the RH1) permitted transfer *from* MDs, including those recorded in the Non-Hi-MD SP ATRAC3 format, to PC.
i have the same laptop, i don’t have the MD module, but i have the floppy, numeric keypad, and subwoofer module. that subwoofer module surprisingly sounds very good and adds a nice bit of room and volume to the laptop!
Been looking for one of these for ages!
Recently I got a Sony Vaio PCV-W121 an all in one with a minidisc drive. It's the funkiest computer I've ever seen and it's a blast using it.
I miss so much the VAIO computer series. Definitely they don't do it like they used to.
Interesting video. The Pentium 4M though didn't come out until mid 2002, with availability to months after that.
I just got back into MiniDisc, and not a moment to soon. Last week when the cyclone hit the Seattle area I had not electricity and the couple of recorded Minidisc’s were my only source of entertainment.
How did you play them without electricity? Solar battery chargers?
Eh, plenty of player-only portables can reach 24+h of playback on the internal gumstick battery + single AA in the sidecar.
Tdnc reviews are black caviar in tech review segment. True delicacy served in impeccably exquisite way. ❤
Man this could have been a amazing competition for graphic designers and photographers useing zip drives 😮
MiniDisc looked really futuristic back then, and I still find it cool today.
Sony is Sony, Apple, Samsung, and others can never occupy the place Sony always has
Sonicstage was criticised at the time but back then I had a Sony 1GB MP3 player and the battery lasted for 50 hours between charges. So. converting music files with Sonic stage may have been a pain but worth it for such a long battery life. Stunning!
Great, another tech item I didn’t know of, that I want to have now.
My mom used that as her work laptop for many years. It came included with the keypad, subwoofer and drive modules. I think she left the subwoofer installed most of the time.
I can imagine that laptop was damn expensive at the time
the sony nv laptops subwoofer module made them killer little boom boxes. even against modern machines like macbooks the speakers still held up thanks to the subwoofer. ive still got my old sony someplace but i seldom power it on because the hinges are cracking sadly.
Honestly, I think a built in MD drive in a laptop is super cool. I can see why it didn't catch on, but it's still really neat.
From tech giant to GAASsy gameslop manufacturer. You had come a long way snoy babay!
Nice rare find.
Nice! I still have my MiniDisc player/recorder. Don't use it anymore but I loved it when I used it. It sits next to my Sport Walkman. o7
i had a minidisc player in the 90s and thought it was cool at the time but don’t miss it. i even gave away my player and discs a few years ago to a minidisc aficionado.
I wish i had this in 2001 as a daily MD user both listen, record + using it for jingles to this day on community radio were it still tends to be a second choice to do spots with.
what a cool throwback! love how innovative Sony was. however, i can't help but think that the miniDisc format really never took off like they hoped. i mean, wasn't it just a bit too late? with the rise of mp3 players, it feels like the miniDisc was destined to be a niche product. what do you all think?
I have an i7 Vaio from 2012. Still works good. Got it used. But it to this day it’s the best laptop I’ve had.
Those swappable batteries were awesome!
I absolutely love MiniDisc and that laptop is now on my 'impossible to get' wishlist 😍
Hard to believe it's over 20 years old, when Windows XP hardware still feels new to me. Compared to 486 tech 10 years prior to this laptop, it goes to show how fast your computer was already out of date the day you bought it, and well before the PC building enthusiast market like today.
Imagine the universe where MD was just a storage medium, capable of holding any data, without restrictions, without copyright management, freedom to quickly transfer from one disc to another...
Maximum PC, now there is a name I haven't seen in many many years
A shame, that Sony is meanwhile not a big player in the PC business anymore. They built such great devices. I always wanted to have a Vaio standalone PC (Notebook were out of my reach at that time money-wise), but they never were a big thing here in here. Combined with my beloved Minidisc this would have been a perfect fit 🙂.
Back on the day Sony tried to install its priority formats in every thin they’ve done. At the early 2000’s the very first DVD player we own at home was from Sony, it was ridiculously expensive and had many ports, actually ones that I’ve never seen before intended for new high definition format like HDMI and optic audio, couple media ports to reproduce files straight from a Sony Clié, and a USB port to connect it to a PC (before PCs included dvd readers). But one of the most interesting thing was the Mini Disc and Memory Stick readers to play your media files on your living room’s tv, and according to the Bible (manual) included, you could save all the photos (taken on a cyber shot of course) from the memory stick in to a mini disc, directly from the DVD player without using a computer, we never tried it cause blank minidiscs were hard to find here in Mexico but always tough it was an interesting feature.
Blank minidiscs were hard to find anywhere outside Japan and they were 3x the price of CD RWs.
I've got this too, Got in Japan last year . I also have a MX-1 a P3 750 Desktop also with a Mini Disc Built-in
Used to use my Hi-MD player (MZNH-600) as a portable drive back in the early 2000's; used standard USB when you couldn't be guaranteed that the internet cafe would have a CD burner, and since it was 1GB a Hi-MD was a more cost effective option than flash storage at the time (slow as molasses but capacity was king back then).
I want this so much, Im a MiniDisc addict
Wow, I cant believe Sony kept MD on the market until 2006. I remember wanting an MD player in the late 90s after my friend got one, but never got one. I went from tape walkman to Disc based mp3/cd player in the early 2000s, to ipod mini in 2004, and onto a Samsung solid state mp3 player in 2007.
Sony and their proprietary media storage types have always been an interesting choice. Besides the MD, their memory sticks were a big pain in the ass for how much they cost, and then making the UMD format for the PSP.
I used to have a cool lil program that would mask anything I wanted as an audio file and it was great for storing photos onto mini discs, I belive it was called wrapster
Minidisc is an amazing format. I hope it will come back someday, like Polaroid did.
ME: hears "totally normal" in a video about a computer
ME: expects Sean from Action Retro to pop into the picture
I had a dell laptop with an SXGA+ screen and I still love it!
Gosh, idk what it is, but retro formats like Zip and MD make me feel like i want one!
Zip was a huge flop and unreliable. If you got one you would have put files on the disk only to discover the drive fail soon after with the click-of-death and scramble the disk. Believe me, you _definitely_ don't want one ;-)
@g4z-kb7ct looks like you need 3,600 years of Computer school :)