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.
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...
День назад
Dell did that at one point, on their Latitude line of laptops, sadly even they have abandoned that
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.
@@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.
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!!!
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.
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
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
Over the decades I've become aware of a subtle metric by which the wealth of society can be inferred: How often corporations try things that aren't guaranteed to be successful. In the early 2000s there was a lot of that kind of experimentation. Nowadays there's very little, because consumers have much less disposable income to throw at interesting and quirky novelties.
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.
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 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.
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.
Sony had it's own "modern audience," the "Prosumers," who would have bought Apple laptops, otherwise. MiniDiscs were kept locked away at Sears, which was the only store I knew of that stocked those "private school/rich kid" toys. It's interesting to see how the M/O MiniDisc succeeded for some, as I copied music CDs to compact cassette, instead.
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.
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.
Mann, I just turned 13 in 2003, was gifted the Sony MZ-NE410 from my parents. It was glorious. Took a vacation that Christmas. My little brother, who was maybe 9 or so, was chasing me around a parking lot at night. Had it in my hand. Didn’t see the speed bump. I hit it, I trip hard, Sony goes flying 20 feet, smashes in pieces. I was devastated. Absolutely crushed.
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...
This could have been next Blu-ray. If MD hadnt been nerfed with all the drm restrictions, and the physical format had been updated with DVD equivalent density, and eventually Blu-ray density, this could have been the form factor that won. Even if it took two of these to represent one HD movie. They could have built drives with two receptacles.
Sony's internal siloization has been a problem for a very long time. It affected all their many videotape formats - yes, there were many more than you think. A lot of the time it looked like they did something "because they could" and then only later tried to see if it was profitable. Probably a big simplification, but this is what happened with the original Playstation and I daresay possibly the original MiniDisc, too, to some extent. Imagine if they had had 'Bigger Picture' people to make things happen across all those silos... oh the missed opportunities...
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 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 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 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.
7:06 No, the two steps could not happen in parallel, they always happened sequentially (even creating SP mode tracks on the disk passed through LP2 mode transcoding before).
SONY had a lot of proprietary stuff. Like their memory sticks called... Memory Stick. A removable flash memory card format. I think a lot of their stuff failed because of it. They wanted to go their own way with some stuff, but failed.
One of Sony's standard game plan is to just steal what's around, blindly shrink it a bit, and market it as cool superior substitutes. Some worked some failed, like 3.5" floppy worked but mp3 Walkmans didn't, but constantly making weird incompatible format is their world domination super formula, not their repeated mistakes.
The biggest insult was the PSVita proprietary storage. Instead of giving up and use MicroSD, they made a new storage format smaller than a MicroSD but stupidly expensive. And it was only used for the Vita
@@claudiobizama5603 They had an xkcd # 221 situation right as they were finalizing Vita specs and that was clearly a kneejerk to it. That card was just too suspiciously close to microSD for zero apparent reason
@@claudiobizama5603 They made it smaller than MicroSD, because with the PSP, people were using cheap MemoryStick to MicroSD adapters. With a smaller format, this wasn't easily possible anymore. Typical corporate nonsense.
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.
This was part of the CD copy protection system from Sony BMG; NetMD didn't have *that* problem, but had several others, including a limit on how many times you can 'check out' a song to MD, and the inability to transfer MD-recorded audio (including from mic/line input) back to the PC - although these restrictions were removed for their last generation of gear.
Sony not offering a spare cd player Minidisc retrofit drive absolutely held the format back fully. They freaked and knew it was the ultimate piracy system. Md could have made cassette piracy seem small.
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.
Man, I kinda miss this era of laptops. Maintenance on these things was so easy. Battery no longer holds a charge? It's behind a latch and doesn't even need a screwdriver. Wanna expand the storage or RAM? Maybe even add in a wi-fi card? Just need a screwdriver and you're golden. Nowadays it's such a pain to get inside a laptop. And even if you can get in, you'll be dealing with parts glued in place or soldered to the board. Also, Sony's laptops were always so weird. While the whole market rushed to copy every single idea Apple has had since the introduction of the Macbook, Sony just casually did their own thing. It didn't make them popular, but at the least they were unique.
If you go back a couple of years you can find some good laptops. For example I just picked up a Dynabook / Toshiba Portege X30-G. It's a 10th-Gen i7 10510U with 13" touch screen, NVME m.2, 32GB RAM, Thunderbolt 3 etc. The TB3 dock makes it very useful as a daily driver. RAM is standard 2x SODIMM slots, NVME standard m.2 slot, battery screws in, CPU base clock 2.3GHz but can boost up to 4.95GHz (although it actually never does even at full load... the turbo-boost thing is a bit of a gimmick IMO). It's not a gaming beast but for everyday use it is very nice. The best thing is the prices now. Retail was around $3.5k-$4k, got this one (like-new) for $350. It's more than capable of doing most tasks. From power-on to desktop it loads Win11 in 4 seconds. I also have an earlier Portege Z30T-C, same thing basically just with 6th-Gen i7 6600U, but this one has a dock connector and I got the proper Toshiba dock for it which makes it a great desktop PC. Basically if you filter out the lemons you can find some good stuff out there :-)
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.
5:10 woah, I think I have that exact Sony camera I always thought that MiniDisc was simply the coolest way to store anything, the tactility of a floppy disc, storage of a Zip disc, reliability of optical (even better since it is magneto-optical) and it came is so many colors and designs. It's such a shame this concept didn't make it to Hi-MD.
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.
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....
Meanwhile the bargain bin MP3 player I had when this laptop came out (the thumb drive type powered by a single AA battery that billions of which must have been produced by now) was just removable USB storage that you could write any data you wanted to in a few seconds. Sure, it held less, but it also cost next to nothing and was the very opposite of a hassle to use.
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.
I have a different model of this same line that I bought in 2001 in Japan. Still runs and the battery even works although it gets less than 30 min. Mine has a DVD drive, volume key is with the F-keys and it was a lot thinner being "only" 1' thick. Had the same 1400 X 1050 screen. no mini disc. I really loved the machine back in the day and it was solid running windows NT (correction: Windows 2000). That was the best version of windows for me. Hardly any hangs ups just light and fast.
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).
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 just recently onto this obscure format a few month prior, and as fascinating and cool this technology is, I have been waiting for someone to make a cover of this sony laptop, since the information on this particula models are very little, even on MinidiscWiki. Through this example, if Apple didn't launch the Ipod, then maybe Sony could have think of making a portable MD external drive with USB port for computer and laptop , which is more logical and financially beneficial than MD Data and Net MD expensive home deck system for computer, especially for hardcore Minidisc player . P/s: Sorry for long writing, it a surprise that you found this one of a kind gem, and even in fine condition, hope you make more content on the Mindisc and other obscure media format. :))
1050 is probably the rarest of the resolutions I can think of. I am posting form a laptop with that kind of screen. 30 pixels away from 1080. Minidisk is a complete waste of a format. It is NOT lossless, which means it is no better than a flash drive loaded with good bitrate MP3s. DVD audio is superior in every way. Thin(ner) VAIO laptops were such a cool design. Shame those computers have no value beyond the design.
Far fewer people did. It was still a middle class and up activity in the early 2000s. Laptops in were also the exception back then. If you had a computer in the early 2000s, it was most likely a beige box that cost about half as much as this laptop and shared with the entire family.
@@cncgeneral Back then, 2000 bucks adjusted for inflation only got you a slightly better than entry level PC that needed some serious upgrades to become good at gaming. PC gaming was a very expensive hobby in the early 2000s (and even more so in the '90s, when it was truly a luxury), at least if you wanted to experience reasonably new titles. I was forced to upgrade for the first time within months of buying the PC and then again half a year later. Four years after purchase, the machine was almost completely obsolete for new games (unless those games were small Indies or well-optimized late ports from the PS2), despite having gone through two CPU, three GPU and three RAM upgrades (plus some storage replacements and upgrades). Looking at screenshots of my desktop from that time, I was exclusively playing games that were already a few years on the market.
Hey, for the future in Quake 3 you can open the console with the tilde key and type: r_mode -1 r_customwidth 1400 r_customheight 1050 vid_restart The game should now be running in 1400x1050.
Mindisc was underutilized in computers, Sony should’ve not only made it for Vaio line of computers, they should’ve made Minidisc drives for other manufactures like IBM, Dell, Acer, Compaq computers! The format was very limited to Sony products.
It was typical Sony hubris. They wanted royalties and a monopoly on the market and since other manufacturers wouldn't go for it they just took all their toys and went home
That's awesome, loved my minidisc player back in high school in the 90s, it's too bad it never really caught on. Also 2 hours battery is pretty impressive for a battery that has less capacity than phones do now.
When the optional add-on is more expensive than the actual player/recorder, not only makes people gravitate towards the designated device but also consider a cheaper alternative laptop, Sony and its weird decisions.
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.
Just bought a 2002 head unit with flip down MD for my car so regardless of there being no logical earthly reason to use MD it persists because the idea and hardware are just neat...
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!
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
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.
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.
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!!!
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.
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
Techmoan is salivating.
SP isn’t just for compatibility with older minidisc players, it’s also the highest audio quality option.
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 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.
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
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. :)
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.
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.
Glad I’m not the only one who had issues with the Sonic Stage app
Sony : goat of design
and worst with product names? go figure.
Man! This computer is so cool!!!!!
Dang this laptop is decked out
I've never rewound someone's intro, yours is so good I had to jam to it a few times😂
Over the decades I've become aware of a subtle metric by which the wealth of society can be inferred: How often corporations try things that aren't guaranteed to be successful. In the early 2000s there was a lot of that kind of experimentation. Nowadays there's very little, because consumers have much less disposable income to throw at interesting and quirky novelties.
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.
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.
thanks for all the effort you put into your videos!!!!
So glad to have been able to watch this while on my lunch break. Thanks Colin!
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.
What a coincidence, I just watched your Minidisc buyer's guide last night.
I have the same blue minidisc player. Very underrated format and still use it when I want to go offline.
One week a color classic. Now an MD VAIO. Great content!
Thanks Colin! Still looking forward to seeing you improve/mod your personal custom retro PC
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.
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 had it's own "modern audience," the "Prosumers," who would have bought Apple laptops, otherwise. MiniDiscs were kept locked away at Sears, which was the only store I knew of that stocked those "private school/rich kid" toys. It's interesting to see how the M/O MiniDisc succeeded for some, as I copied music CDs to compact cassette, instead.
man that closing thought "something that is left to be desired these days" 100% dude
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.
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.
Mann, I just turned 13 in 2003, was gifted the Sony MZ-NE410 from my parents. It was glorious. Took a vacation that Christmas. My little brother, who was maybe 9 or so, was chasing me around a parking lot at night. Had it in my hand. Didn’t see the speed bump. I hit it, I trip hard, Sony goes flying 20 feet, smashes in pieces. I was devastated. Absolutely crushed.
rip
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...
Interesting video. The Pentium 4M though didn't come out until mid 2002, with availability to months after that.
Been looking for one of these for ages!
This could have been next Blu-ray. If MD hadnt been nerfed with all the drm restrictions, and the physical format had been updated with DVD equivalent density, and eventually Blu-ray density, this could have been the form factor that won. Even if it took two of these to represent one HD movie. They could have built drives with two receptacles.
Tdnc reviews are black caviar in tech review segment. True delicacy served in impeccably exquisite way. ❤
Sony's internal siloization has been a problem for a very long time. It affected all their many videotape formats - yes, there were many more than you think. A lot of the time it looked like they did something "because they could" and then only later tried to see if it was profitable. Probably a big simplification, but this is what happened with the original Playstation and I daresay possibly the original MiniDisc, too, to some extent. Imagine if they had had 'Bigger Picture' people to make things happen across all those silos... oh the missed opportunities...
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 absolutely love MiniDisc and that laptop is now on my 'impossible to get' wishlist 😍
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 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!
Man this could have been a amazing competition for graphic designers and photographers useing zip drives 😮
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 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.
7:06 No, the two steps could not happen in parallel, they always happened sequentially (even creating SP mode tracks on the disk passed through LP2 mode transcoding before).
SONY had a lot of proprietary stuff. Like their memory sticks called... Memory Stick. A removable flash memory card format.
I think a lot of their stuff failed because of it. They wanted to go their own way with some stuff, but failed.
it's clearly shown in the video and everyone knows the memory stick from the PSP days!
One of Sony's standard game plan is to just steal what's around, blindly shrink it a bit, and market it as cool superior substitutes. Some worked some failed, like 3.5" floppy worked but mp3 Walkmans didn't, but constantly making weird incompatible format is their world domination super formula, not their repeated mistakes.
The biggest insult was the PSVita proprietary storage.
Instead of giving up and use MicroSD, they made a new storage format smaller than a MicroSD but stupidly expensive. And it was only used for the Vita
@@claudiobizama5603 They had an xkcd # 221 situation right as they were finalizing Vita specs and that was clearly a kneejerk to it. That card was just too suspiciously close to microSD for zero apparent reason
@@claudiobizama5603 They made it smaller than MicroSD, because with the PSP, people were using cheap MemoryStick to MicroSD adapters. With a smaller format, this wasn't easily possible anymore. Typical corporate nonsense.
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.
6:25 “Strongly imposed DRM” - wasn’t it also literally a rootkit?!
This was part of the CD copy protection system from Sony BMG; NetMD didn't have *that* problem, but had several others, including a limit on how many times you can 'check out' a song to MD, and the inability to transfer MD-recorded audio (including from mic/line input) back to the PC - although these restrictions were removed for their last generation of gear.
Those restrictions are also nonexistent nowadays if you use WebMD Pro with the supported NetMD devices :)
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.
quaint? a volume wheel is way better than buttons imo, much more precise
anyway, great video :)
Though sucks when it gets dirty. Few out quality analog wheel volume controls.
Sony not offering a spare cd player Minidisc retrofit drive absolutely held the format back fully. They freaked and knew it was the ultimate piracy system. Md could have made cassette piracy seem small.
Sony also made Minidisc Data, which was completely proprietary, and was a data only format, not music.
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.
Man, I kinda miss this era of laptops. Maintenance on these things was so easy. Battery no longer holds a charge? It's behind a latch and doesn't even need a screwdriver. Wanna expand the storage or RAM? Maybe even add in a wi-fi card? Just need a screwdriver and you're golden. Nowadays it's such a pain to get inside a laptop. And even if you can get in, you'll be dealing with parts glued in place or soldered to the board.
Also, Sony's laptops were always so weird. While the whole market rushed to copy every single idea Apple has had since the introduction of the Macbook, Sony just casually did their own thing. It didn't make them popular, but at the least they were unique.
If you go back a couple of years you can find some good laptops. For example I just picked up a Dynabook / Toshiba Portege X30-G. It's a 10th-Gen i7 10510U with 13" touch screen, NVME m.2, 32GB RAM, Thunderbolt 3 etc. The TB3 dock makes it very useful as a daily driver. RAM is standard 2x SODIMM slots, NVME standard m.2 slot, battery screws in, CPU base clock 2.3GHz but can boost up to 4.95GHz (although it actually never does even at full load... the turbo-boost thing is a bit of a gimmick IMO). It's not a gaming beast but for everyday use it is very nice. The best thing is the prices now. Retail was around $3.5k-$4k, got this one (like-new) for $350. It's more than capable of doing most tasks. From power-on to desktop it loads Win11 in 4 seconds. I also have an earlier Portege Z30T-C, same thing basically just with 6th-Gen i7 6600U, but this one has a dock connector and I got the proper Toshiba dock for it which makes it a great desktop PC. Basically if you filter out the lemons you can find some good stuff out there :-)
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.
5:10 woah, I think I have that exact Sony camera
I always thought that MiniDisc was simply the coolest way to store anything, the tactility of a floppy disc, storage of a Zip disc, reliability of optical (even better since it is magneto-optical) and it came is so many colors and designs. It's such a shame this concept didn't make it to Hi-MD.
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.
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....
Great, another tech item I didn’t know of, that I want to have now.
Ugh, sonic stage was such a pain in the ass. I had a NetMD MiniDisc player/recorder and used the USB port to put music on it. So slow and irritating.
Meanwhile the bargain bin MP3 player I had when this laptop came out (the thumb drive type powered by a single AA battery that billions of which must have been produced by now) was just removable USB storage that you could write any data you wanted to in a few seconds. Sure, it held less, but it also cost next to nothing and was the very opposite of a hassle to use.
I used to use a Playstation 2 with Toslink to record to MD instead of Sonicstage because I hated it that much lol.
No way 😅 MiniDisc for laptop.
I like to see this technology come back with Blue-Ray tech
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.
ME: hears "totally normal" in a video about a computer
ME: expects Sean from Action Retro to pop into the picture
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 have a different model of this same line that I bought in 2001 in Japan. Still runs and the battery even works although it gets less than 30 min. Mine has a DVD drive, volume key is with the F-keys and it was a lot thinner being "only" 1' thick. Had the same 1400 X 1050 screen. no mini disc. I really loved the machine back in the day and it was solid running windows NT (correction: Windows 2000). That was the best version of windows for me. Hardly any hangs ups just light and fast.
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).
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'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
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 want this so much, Im a MiniDisc addict
Woah, amazing!
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 wonder what the drive would sound like if it failed?
As burned CDs fall to bitrot I desperately wish MiniDisc had became a standard format for data storage.
I just recently onto this obscure format a few month prior, and as fascinating and cool this technology is, I have been waiting for someone to make a cover of this sony laptop, since the information on this particula models are very little, even on MinidiscWiki. Through this example, if Apple didn't launch the Ipod, then maybe Sony could have think of making a portable MD external drive with USB port for computer and laptop , which is more logical and financially beneficial than MD Data and Net MD expensive home deck system for computer, especially for hardcore Minidisc player .
P/s: Sorry for long writing, it a surprise that you found this one of a kind gem, and even in fine condition, hope you make more content on the Mindisc and other obscure media format. :))
Could be wrong but I think Techmoan did a video on external MD drive with md-Data support
@zuzkazuzka8284 But it does not support for normal MD for music
@@quynhanphan7395 I believe it did. Even this video mentions a model that has usb for netMDs but otherwise is your bog standard MD player.
1050 is probably the rarest of the resolutions I can think of. I am posting form a laptop with that kind of screen. 30 pixels away from 1080.
Minidisk is a complete waste of a format. It is NOT lossless, which means it is no better than a flash drive loaded with good bitrate MP3s. DVD audio is superior in every way.
Thin(ner) VAIO laptops were such a cool design. Shame those computers have no value beyond the design.
Nice rare find.
It always shocks me how expensive computers used to be. $2200 in 2002 is like $4000 today. And yet, people bought this stuff
Far fewer people did. It was still a middle class and up activity in the early 2000s. Laptops in were also the exception back then. If you had a computer in the early 2000s, it was most likely a beige box that cost about half as much as this laptop and shared with the entire family.
@no1DdC even half as much is crazy, hardcore gamers aren't spending $2000 on a pc regularly
@@cncgeneral Back then, 2000 bucks adjusted for inflation only got you a slightly better than entry level PC that needed some serious upgrades to become good at gaming. PC gaming was a very expensive hobby in the early 2000s (and even more so in the '90s, when it was truly a luxury), at least if you wanted to experience reasonably new titles. I was forced to upgrade for the first time within months of buying the PC and then again half a year later. Four years after purchase, the machine was almost completely obsolete for new games (unless those games were small Indies or well-optimized late ports from the PS2), despite having gone through two CPU, three GPU and three RAM upgrades (plus some storage replacements and upgrades). Looking at screenshots of my desktop from that time, I was exclusively playing games that were already a few years on the market.
Now you can get a fairly decent gaming laptop for $700.
This feels so uniquely Japanese cyberpunk and I love it
Hey, for the future in Quake 3 you can open the console with the tilde key and type:
r_mode -1
r_customwidth 1400
r_customheight 1050
vid_restart
The game should now be running in 1400x1050.
Mindisc was underutilized in computers, Sony should’ve not only made it for Vaio line of computers, they should’ve made Minidisc drives for other manufactures like IBM, Dell, Acer, Compaq computers! The format was very limited to Sony products.
It was typical Sony hubris. They wanted royalties and a monopoly on the market and since other manufacturers wouldn't go for it they just took all their toys and went home
@ that mentality is the reason Sony lost format wars, because they refused to license their technology without big royalties from competitors!
Benoftheweek,audiopilz,tdnc uploading in a similar time frame is something i did not expect
love mini disc so much !!!!!!!!! I want this laptop
That's awesome, loved my minidisc player back in high school in the 90s, it's too bad it never really caught on. Also 2 hours battery is pretty impressive for a battery that has less capacity than phones do now.
It's really not. My contemporary HP Pavilion had 5 hours with the same capacity battery.
@@JohnZombi88 yea, a laptop that wasn't a desktop replacement that could play games.
Imagine if Sony wasn't so silo'd and the business units worked together and made some amazing cohesive products back in the day? kinda would be nuts.
I had a dell laptop with an SXGA+ screen and I still love it!
When the optional add-on is more expensive than the actual player/recorder, not only makes people gravitate towards the designated device but also consider a cheaper alternative laptop, Sony and its weird decisions.
Just wondering, does it possible to use supermium xp with web minidisc pro instead of Sonicstage or Simple Burner?
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.
Just bought a 2002 head unit with flip down MD for my car so regardless of there being no logical earthly reason to use MD it persists because the idea and hardware are just neat...