The Sony MZ1 MiniDisc player, the first to hit the market in 1992.

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Mini Disc

See also: IBM's VM operating system family, where minidisk refers to a logical unit of storage more...

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A MiniDisc (MD) is a magneto-optical disc-based data storage device initially intended for storage of up to 80 minutes of digitised audio. The technology was announced by Sony in 1991 and introduced January 12, 1992, and is capable of storing any kind of binary data. The music format is based on ATRAC/ATRAC3, using digital rights management, various bitrates, and sampling directly from the digital or analogue input. Minidiscs are popular in Japan as a digital upgrade to cassette tapes, but have not been as popular in the United States despite multiple marketing efforts by Sony. Minidiscs were also marginally popular for a time in the United Kingdom between 1998 and 2001, when a limited selection of Minidisc albums were available alongside CD and Cassette albums. Minidiscs are now primarily used for recording.

Market history

Along with Philips and Matsushita' Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) system, the MiniDisc was targeted as a replacement for analogue cassette tapes as the recording system for Hi-Fi equipment but, as a consumer format, MiniDisc has met with only limited success, though it has enjoyed a loyal niche following in some circles. It did not catch on as well U.S. and Europe as Sony had hoped; in Japan, it is still relatively popular, though quickly being replaced by flash and HDD-based audio players like Apple's iPod. The low initial uptake of the format was attributed to the small number of pre-recorded albums available on MD as a relatively small number of publishers embraced the format. The initial high cost of equipment was also a factor. The pre-recorded disks disappeared from the market rather suddenly in the late 90s.

The company avoided the mistake that it had made in the 1970s with the Betamax video recording system, and this time licensed the MD technology to other manufacturers, with JVC, Sharp, Pioneer, Panasonic and others all producing their own MD systems. In recent years MiniDisc has faced new competition from CD-Recordable, solid-state memory recording (flash memory), and hard disk recording, while the popularity of traditional cassette tape refuses to wane in certain quarters. MiniDisc is widely respected as being a very reliable format when it comes to portable audio storage, such as field recording.

MD Data

MD Data, a version for storing computer data was announced by Sony in 1993, but it never gained significant ground, so today MDs are used primarily for audio storage. The format was able to store 140 MB on a special disc, but was plagued by low write speeds and slow seek times. MD Data drives also could not write to audio-MD's, only the considerably more expensive data blanks. MD-Data2 blanks, which held 650 MB of data, were introduced around 1997, but were only used in Sony's short-lived MD-based camcorder.