Sony MiniDisc: The (Not) Forgotten Audio Format That (Never) Failed 

The MiniDisc™ was one of those pieces of tech that actually looked futuristic for it's time. I think they still look cool.

For those of us old enough to remember portable CD players skipping all the time, Minidisc was a revolution in portable music.

The Japanese exchange student that stayed with my family had a minidisc player, and at the time, that was the coolest thing I had ever seen.

Minidisc will always hold a special place in my heart. I still have my component recording deck, my NetMD portable recorder/player, and a player in my car. I was an early adopter, and I refuse to say goodbye.

I can't help it, MiniDisc feels like the future to me, still.

Virtually every person I knew who owned a mini disc player would say how great it was for recording their band rehearsals. This seemed to be a thing for many years.

I like to think of the MiniDisc as the ultimate physical, digital mixtape. The ability to move, rename, add and delete tracks was a game changer. It was my favorite physical audio media by far. A friend visited Japan in 1999 and noticed that virtually everyone had a CD deck connected to a MiniDisc recording desk connected with a toslink optical cable. Salarypeople would make mixes and take discs with them on the go for all those train rides. I decided to do the same in NYC. I got a Tascam MD recording deck and a couple of super small Sony portable players. The MiniDisc was my source of mobile music entertainment until music apps supported lossless (FLAC) downloads in the 2010s (so I skipped the whole iPod era). I miss my MD hardware.

I was an early adopter of MiniDisc. First I had a Sharp portable recorder for recording radio interviews. I then had a number of high-end Sony 19" Hi-Fi units and also in 1996 an in-car Sony MiniDisc head unit with multi-CD changer. I progessed to NetMD and Hi-MD. Today, MiniDisc remains my preferred recording medium.

I miss my old MD player. Ran on a single AA battery for half of forever.

The footage you’ve captured for this episode has been such a nostalgia trip. Excellent work.

I still use MiniDisc at home and in my car. Works great for recording my band’s rehearsals as well as my guitar/bass/drum practice sessions.

Been in Japan since '91. Owned almost all of this stuff at one time or another. Making the switch from cassetes to MDs, not really ever getting into CDs, renting music from Tsutaya etc. This was pretty nostalgic for me.

Thanks for making this great video.

Everyone I know that owned a MD player, including myself, loved the format. Judging by the comments here, most people felt that way as well.

That metallic blue mini disc player looked so beautiful and still does, can't believe I've seen it again right now after all these years. My old man owned one of these and it was such an awesome little gadget

I had a jvc portable minidisc back in 2000. Greatest player I ever owned. Could record from almost any source with the laser input or 3.5 mm Jack. It was easy to organize files and rearrange them. Could record multiple albums on 1 disk and the nest feature was the headphones. Could change tracks and view titles right on the headphones without even using the player itself. It was YEARS ahead of its time.

I really liked MiniDisc. I loved the ability to add, delete, label and reorder tracks. I had a shelf unit, several portable players/recorders and a MiniDisc player in my car. Fun fact: In 'The Matrix,' Neo sold his software on MiniDisc media.

man...mixtapes, walkmans, limewire... this makes me nostalgic.

I still own all my minidisc recorder’s, players, a boombox and a car stereo. Also have tons of blanks, cases and storage shelfs. Loved the minidisc format! Great video too.

We used these as cheap alternatives to record audio for filmmaking. This was a fantastic format.

This was a great trip down memory lane. I used minidiscs extensively in the late 90s when I was a DJ. We used to bring a recording unit with us to raves and clubs to record sets, and the editing functions made it possible to generate a clean mix that could be used as a master to press CDs. I also had a portable unit to listen to music on the go. It really was a great format for the time, though the copyright limitations were a real pain in the ass. Because the minidiscs (even ones you record yourself) don't allow digital copies due to the copy protection features, I wasn't able to make lossless copies of my mixes until just last year when used high-end units finally dropped enough in price. Unfortunately about half of my minidiscs were unreadable by then. So yeah. I have a love/hate relationship with this format, and SONY in general.

I do have a minidisc and it's still great after all those years. Great sound,small and it still works perfectly after two decades.

I had a portable Sony minidisk recorder that I used to record my bands practices and the sound quality was quite literally AMAZING! I combined the unit with a Sony stereo microphone for recording purposes. I bought 2 of themover the course of a couple of years cause I used to take it to work and it they took quite a bit of accidental abuse. I wish I still owned one. It would literally record a pin dropping.

Oh, I adored my Sony Walkman cassette player back in the day! I hate that I can't for the life of me remember what became of it. Whoa, it just hit me. How did people listen to music on the go, pre-Walkman? Not in the car, but just out and about? I wanted the MiniDisc so much! I was always confused as to why they didn't really catch on. Regular CDs were big and awkward. I've always taken public transportation. I remember leaving the house with either a pile of them in my bag, or taken out of the plastic case and put into those sleeves that were like a little book. I still have a couple of those things. MiniDiscs would've been SO much more convenient on the go! I still have my Sony Walkman CD player. Haven't used it recently, but last time I did, it still worked. I also still have small boom box and the CD player still works. I'm old and cranky and still love my CDs. I can't stand listening to music on my phone. I wish I had ever been able to afford the iPod Classic back in the day. I nearly cried when I learned they stopped making them. I never could afford the latest tech until it had been out a long time. But I somehow missed that entire era. In a lot of ways, music has been taken away from me. I have no idea how normal people listen to music these days. I can't stand it on my phone. I swore it would never happen to me, but I guess I'm officially old. Sigh.

This has got to be the definitive MD documentary on RU-vid now. Not even the Techmoan one is this good.

I invested heavily in MD , as I thought it was a great replacement for the compact cassette and even the CD , I've had a MD player in my car for the last 20 years, and it still works OK and I use it daily , and I have two hi-fi system MD players/recorders & a portable MD Walkman and they all still work OK. Most of my LP's & CD's have been put on to MD too. I was said to see the format die

I love how dedicated Sony is to their proprietary formats. They even had a version that recorded video known as the MD data2.

I STILL have My Mini and Absolutely LOVE IT. 1 AAA battery and you can listen to Impeccable Quality Music in a Combination of Your choice and can even mix music intro and outro one song into next. No Skipping at Any Time No matter the impact. No scratches and easy recording. Almost 60 songs at that time was Amazing. Glad I grabbed one. Sad they didn't catch on. Definitely was before it's time. Also have cassettes and 45"/33" records.

"American record labels hated the arrangement." That's when you know you did the right thing.

As a former Sony employee during the period of the 'rise' and 'fall' of the Minidic, I can say it is quite a nice overview.

My God, I miss Mini-Discs. In radio we used them for commercials in place of the old carts, and we'd record phone calls and bits and skits for on-air play. They were amazing. I had TONS of MDs on hand at home and work.

God, I've always said that minidisc felt like everything good about cassette tapes but distilled into an ideal form. I'm glad I'm not the only one to notice that comparison.

Grown up in Japan (starting from casette), I was fortunate to enjoy the full life cycle of Mini Discs. I especially love the size of the disc, it feels so great.

This is a remarkably high level of detail in such a short documentary piece! Thank you!

I loved mini disc for recording my numerous cd collection,which I then used in my dj business through the 90,s .They took up less space than cds and the music was easily accessible. Brilliant format for music with great sound quality. Should never have stopped their production. Bring them back.

My minidisk was simply the best format I've ever had. I loved my MD player for portable audio. I used to sit on a train with about 20 minidisks, each with two or three albums on them. It made the long journey just fly by!

I still love MiniDisc; I'm an avid user of them today to record LPs to extend their life, as I did with cassettes in the 70's and 80's. Great to record live music too! Thanks for this video.

Great video! Brought back lots of great memories. I had a few portable recorders and players. I still remember buying my first Mini disc player from Circuit City and eventually getting into Net MD a few years later. Never tried out HiMD though. I always wanted to pick up a home deck, but unfortunately never did (I remember when MiniDisco was selling a base model for $129). Such a cool piece of tech at the time.

I got into Minidisc early, in 1994 or so, and I picked up the smallest portable Walkman unit I could find in addition to a stationary unit MDS 320 at home. The neat thing with the MDS 320 remote control was its keyboard. It had all the letters of the alphabet so adding titles became a breeze. My main motivation to ditch compact cassettes, which I had a large collection of was audio quality and skippable tracks. This was a HUGE improvement over cassettes! Downloading music from Napster and Limewire etc had its own drawbacks: slow download speeds over home modems, risk of downloading something else (viruses), and the music files' audio quality was sometimes poor. Most likely, the music industry tried to poison the well by uploading garbage content. Looking back, the effort needed to just listening to your own playlists (mix-discs) were far more involved than todays streaming options where you simply search the artists or songs you like and drag them into a list and you're done

One of the kids in my Scout troop had a MD player in the 90s, when most of us still had tape players. When we saw what it could do (sound quality, song skipping, small size, etc), we all wanted it! While MD might not have become the dominant format, it definitely helped to set expectations for what the next generation of music players had to be.

That was a terrific program. Professionally narrated, edited and nicely researched. Thanks for this!

I had both the Sony MiniDisc component deck and portable player…loved every minute of it ! I never cared for cassette recorders, because the tape always got caught in the cartridge. I didn’t think the DCC recorder would catch on.

I have 2 MiniDisc recorders. I use them to mix my own music, but I had one in the 90s as well. CD recorders came into the picture, but they were expensive. You had a lot of great editing capability on the MiniDisc recorders that CD recorders were not offering yet. Fun toys. Excellent upload!

Aside from vinyl, Mini Disc is my favorite physical audio format. Loved my portable MD player in the early 00's. A single AA battery would provide many hours of music before needing a replacement during family trips, making it cost effective. A 4 pack of AAs would be vital during those summers.

god I miss this format so much. there's just something special about the tactility of physical media, especially clicky-thunky formats like MD. the sound of the player popping open, the disc slotting in and the loading mechanism snapping shut was just fantastic. listening to music on my phone is convenient as hell but it feels a little soulless.

I loved my MD player/Rec unit. I still remember the stick remote control I clipped to the fanny pack as I controlled the device while working out. I still have Pink Floyd's Pulse pre-recorded MiniDisc, but I no longer have the player. Ah, those were good times. Thank you for this tremendous lesson on the strange history of the format wars. Well done!

I once had a player and some discs. For me, still the best audio format up to today. I used it so much

I love my MD player, still use it to record masterclasses. The audio quality is incredible!

I loved my minidisc player in middle school. When Sony introduced their atrac3plus format, I went nuts putting dozens of songs on a single minidisc lp

I loved my Minidisc back in the day. 57 tracks in high quality. I can't believe people favoured CD's over this. They didn't scratch. Held a lot. Were smaller. Damn man they rocked.

What an engaging and well put together piece. Excellent narration and pacing. Immediately subbed! So glad I ran into the channel

Your coverage of the MiniDisc just wowed me with that level of detail to the point of even covering rival media and the whole rise of MiniDisc to the present

The irony of a lossy recording format being an impediment to adoption of the minidisc while the mp3 eventually prevented minidisc with lossless recording from market success is remarkable. An excellent review of a well executed product that can only be described as a successful failure.

I still have my Aiwa MD Recorder/Player with all the accoutrements and I love it. It's a great portable player/recorder for all kinds of things. Thanks for putting out this history of the MD that I had no idea about. I got into the MD in the early 2000's so I was kinda late but it has served me well for 20yrs although not as much when the iPod's came out. It was my main recording gear until the phones got good enough to take it's place.

Minidisc was my fave for recording from vinyl in the day and still is to me a portable game changer NEVER failed. the industry hated the fact you could record digitally from vinyl...I felt like James Bond was given a devise from Q.

I have never use or buy a Mini disc to play music in my life, and this video still made me sad, specially when Mini disc gotten replaced by the iPod even after trying so hard against it's previous competitors to hold it's ground on the market. I know it's just a disk, but I felt a bit sad for it :(

Every gig and concert I went to back in the day I had my MD and stereo mic up my sleeve. I remember leaving concerts and listening to them on the way home. They were also great for multitrack recording before computers made it possible at home. I used to use a minidisc and stereo VCR with metal tape running through my old 8 track mixing desk to layer tracks one at a time. Years of fun and creativity.

tascam dat. brings back so many memories. since 93 ive only seen one other mini disc user. loved the portable recorder. i still have hundreds of disks that i recorded church services and they are as tho you are there.... even tho its over 20 years

MiniDisc was the format that actually made recording and listening _fun_! Unlike cassettes it sounded good, and unlike mp3 players it felt like I was being part of the process. Well-researched and well-made, it was a pleasure to watch!

I had one of these. I created my own music discs, and would edit on the go as well. It’s all been replaced by my phone, but I thought this was the greatest invention ever.

Very smoothly-edited and exquisitely detailed documentary. For us, it covered a period in our lives we had experienced as average consumers, not technophiles, so it provided a wide tapestry for understanding. Your lighting, graphics and close-up was superb.

I totally dug my portable MD recorder/player! I ALWAYS recorded band practice. It was an incredible tool! I was sad when my unit died, so many fond memories

Wow, that part about music kiosks where you could buy individual songs was mind-blowing to me, it's like a predecessor to iTunes

I am from the UK and when I was at High School around 2000 everyone in my year got minidisk players. The optical output on the PS2 was a big driving factor. Even now when we reminisce about our school days my friends and I always talk fondly of the minidisk.

MiniDisk was huge part of my childhood and it was everywhere in Japan back then. It’s surprising to me that it was that expensive in the US. I just don’t remember them being that expensive as pretty much everyone in town had them. Cars audio adapted as well. I kept using them until I moved to the US in 2007 only to find that the world outside Japan was stuck with CD.

I've been a music consumer for 55+ years in the US and have never heard of a few of those formats like DCC. Excellent production!

"Track Mark" was a great feature of the mini disc. This allowed you to split an audio file with the click of one button. I listened to a lot of DJ mixes and this allowed you to split the mix up into separate tracks. This was an amazing feature in a time where the only way to navigate long mixes was to literally hold down forwards or backward until you got to your desired location.

I was living in Japan when the MD came out and I still have some along with a portable player. I had a MD player in my car that you could load 3 MD's in and a unit in my home to record with. Great format and was very useful at the time.

I revisit this video often. Not just for the content but the presentation and thought behind it is outstanding!

I remember these being used in TV shows I loved as a kid, like the 90's animated Spiderman. Any time portable media was used, it was almost always mini disks.

Watching this gave me so much nostalgia of my years with MiniDisc!

As a live and studio engineer in the 2000's, I used MD HEAVILY! I loved it for all of the reasons mentioned in the video, but mostly for its stability. Virtually no crashes. I even owned a Yamaha MD8. MD deck and cart style players were common place in fixed install theaters. I would take two on the road with me when i would tour, a primary and a back up, running simultaneously. Good days.

I used a MiniDisc to play backing tracks for a performing group I was in. It was awesome, precise cueing, flexible and easy to use.

This was such a great format in most respects. I used it to record music I was creating on my friends PC back in 1998 or so. We used it to record CDs as well, since CD burners were still kind of rare for most of us. The sound quality was great and the ability to mark chapters and so on was just coolness.

Observations and Notes: 1. I really thought Minidiscs were the future, and my friends and I agreed that eventually they would hold films and music videos. 2. I loved all the different colours they came in. 3. I have always refused to get rid of my player, discs and blank disks, although I often scratch my head as to what use I can put them to now. 4. Yes, Format Wars are so boring and jade the pallet of the consumer. 5. I must congratulate this channel on it's excellent, well produced content. ❤❤

I just remembered: one of my band mates at that time actually had a device that allowed you to record 4 single audio tracks on MD in parallel, making it a portable 4 track mini studio!

I had a walkman type Minidics recorder late 90s or so. I loved it. But once writable CDs came along, never looked back. Blank MDs were expensive if I recall. Maybe my first time watching this channel, excellent piece.

Great little article, very informative, as an owner of various minidisc player/recorders, it clarified pretty much everything I needed to know about the format and its use and usable lifespan.

Long ago when I worked in radio, MD was the format of choice, especially for on-location recording (interviews, etc) due to the combination of portability and incredible audio fidelity. I love MDs, editing audio from them was a breeze and the resulting audio was always top notch.

I'd argue that minidisc was no failure, it just had a rather short period when it was the right thing.

I loved minidisc. I had portable players and an Aiwa cd/minidisc boombox. When I was a college radio DJ we would use minidisc to use in the studio for recording and playback purposes.

Thank you for this excellent review. I owned so much of this gear! I was just starting my career in music and remember how exciting these years were. This review does a marvelous job at reminding us how transitory tech can be and how blind the music industry has been to disruption. Your point about “cassettes being good enough,” really foreshadows the rise of mp3. I just subscribed and can’t wait to see what you talk about next!

Ive got a minidisc player / recorder. The huge problem with the format was simple. The price. To buy the media it cost a bomb. Every time Sony tries to corner a marketplace with their tech it seems to always end in a train wreck

I still have my mini disk receiver/recorder, 8 mini disks, and the original mini disk player. Also still rerecording on the disks to this day. Such an awesome piece of hardware that was really ahead of it's time.

Great video. You got the rest of the story I always wondered about. Decades ago I installed a MD player in my Honda Prelude and I was king of the road when I slammed that disc in. I just loved that you didn't have to gingerly hold them by the edge like CDs.

Thank you for your contribution by summarizing the life time of this fanantastic media carrier.! Was enjoying your overview and views about the format over time. Ive adopted the MD sinds 1992, bought the second recorder developed by Sony the R2, and since then recorded many many discs. To be used portable, at home and in car. Several devices are trashed due to plastics and mechanics getting old, but I still having at least 10 working decks including the MDS-JA333ES and the MDS-JA30ES, MDX-D3 and many other portable devices at home, and appr. 1000 MDs, Im still a fan for and the format but also about Sony to keep the format alive as long as possible. Note in all these years, I've only had one defective disc. The format is reliable beyond limits.

The A/B erase function in mini disc format was PRICELESS I spent loads of time editing live band rehearsals easily Even turning long jams into comprehensive songs

I moved to Japan in 1998, got one of these, and absolutely loved being able to share music without the increase in tape hiss. I do recall that asking to share an album was more of an ask than if it were cassette, because you were asking to get exactly what your friend may have paid for, rather than a slightly degraded copy.

What a great content! Thank you. I enjoyed it a lot. Personally I always loved the MD. And you are absolutely right if you say that technically the MiniDisc did not fail. The Medium was better than the CD. But to not invest initially a lot of money by lowering the prices to make the product available for the target group they started a struggle that eventually lasted until the iPod changed everything. As someone who grew up with tapes it is crazy to realize that the iPod also is now history for many years.

Ooh, I remember the MD. I had an MD player in my car with a hi Fi system that costs over $10,000, a recorder/player and many MDs. Made my own music and loved how it sounded back then. I still have the player’s pouch and charger but can’t find the player or any discs now. It was quite rare back then here in Singapore.

Thanks for the history lesson! This led me to digging out my old portable MD recorder. In it was a disc with 20 year old recordings of me jamming with a friend. I remember recording it with a cheap mono microphone or even headphones plugged into the mic port at times. Great memories. I couldn't have done this with CD and I doubt it would have lasted so long on MC.

Here in Europe minidisc was somewhat big! Still use it today! Great format to record audio in a hifi setup

I had the mini disk player on the right at 37:54, that was stolen by some workers at my home in germany in the early 2000s. I replaced i with a "dek version". EXCEPT from harddrives in a computer, it was the best recording device since then. I used DAT also. But it was slow. Thanks for the time-travel to this era! Well done!

Favorite format of all time. Imagine with blu ray capacity that we have now, put in minidisk format, would be awesome.

I still own my miniDisc player and many of the discs. Listened to it during my running days.. Still sounds amazing....

I watched a 40 minute documentary on a topic i never really cared about and liked it. Interesting

How many good memories of my dear MD. Listening to songs with girls (two headphone outputs) and many concerts recorded by the mic input.

I had a blue netmd player in college and loved it. It was a amazing device back then. It even had a optical input. My favorite thing about it was the sound the little door made when you closed it. Also it seemed to run forever on 1 AA battery. Great video!

Excellent video that can easily compete or even surpass a professional documentary. Great source of info, clear narration, objective approach.

I have tons of minidiscs. I still listen to them sometimes when i go to the gym