Discovering music was so exciting back then. You couldn’t buy these types of albums in the UK without going to specialist importers, so being able to download a couple of tracks (at a speed of like 3Kb/s!) and record them to MD for the journey to work was geek heaven. I had a full-time job as a 'multimedia designer' – my first web dev job – and had started downloading badly encoded low-bitrate MP3s of ska-punk bands, like Less Than Jake or college radio bands like Harvey Danger, via the internet. "I bought my first MiniDisc player, a Sony MZ-R30, brand new from Currys in late 1997. It has NetMD support and runs off a single AA battery - Images: Damien McFerran / Time Extensionįor Smith, MiniDisc's appeal was niche – but it's what led him to become a lifelong fan of the media. The Sony MZ-N505 is a good example of an affordable mid-range MiniDisc player. The experience of listening to and sharing music elbowed out the option of higher quality." At these price points, it wasn’t an attractive proposition when CDs were cheaper, and cassettes were in every car, room, dorm and could be copied over and shared. Pre-recorded MD albums didn’t help either, being priced around £16–20 back in the day, against the standard £12–14 price of a CD. At its most attractive price point, it was still close to $250 – around £200 now. "The first MiniDisc portable player was $750 (that’s £590 in today’s money), putting it well out of reach for anyone but serious musos and gadget freaks. "Looking back, it’s pretty clear that the MiniDisc didn’t take off in the West due to cost," says web designer and MiniDisc junkie Jake Smith. A year later, when it ceased production of MiniDisc, it confirmed only 22 million players had been sold. It's perhaps not a spoiler to point out at this juncture that MiniDisc was not the Walkman-level success its creator had hoped for in 2010, Sony announced it had sold 200 million Walkman personal stereos. It was a laborious process – but one that, compared to other options at the time, felt like the future. Most MiniDisc players had the recording ability built-in, permitting users to record (usually in real-time) from their source using an optical connection and then manually add the track names afterwards. Blank discs enabled users to record their own albums, very much like the 'mix tapes' which were popular during the era of cassettes. Not only were the discs small and portable, they could hold the same amount of audio as a compact disc – but with another key selling point. The time seemed perfect for a new audio medium to arise, and who better to spearhead this revolution than the company which had created the portable audio industry overnight with the Walkman in 1979? Subscribe to Time Extension on YouTube CDs were popular at home, but portable CD players were still costly and bulky. This was a time when the humble cassette (which, lest we forget, was never intended to be used to listen to music) was still the dominant force when it came to portable audio. Sony announced the MiniDisc in September 1992. In the years before solid-state memory took over, the idea of carrying around data on tiny discs felt like the future – and for many people, it still does. It flopped at the box office, and the device in question was hardly presented as a positive use of MiniDisc, but – in the mind of this author, at least – it did a lot to romanticise Sony's product. You could argue that the film – which starred Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett and Juliette Lewis and was co-written by James Cameron, no less – was a poor advert for Sony's audio format. While the movie was ahead of its time in that regard (it is set at the turn of the millennium, and we still don't have that kind of funky technology), it made use of a media format which was, in '95, at least, expensive and highly desirable in the movie, memories were recorded onto MiniDiscs. In the 1995 cyberpunk movie Strange Days, the characters strap devices to their head that record their memories and physical sensations so they can be 're-lived', either by themselves or others.
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