B-List Holy Grail: MiniDiscs

Tuesday March 2, 2010 by Tim Maly

Part of a series: B-List Holy Grails

MiniDiscs: It has been a near-universal of science fiction for the storage media of the future to be sexy, smaller versions of our current ones. But, when miniature discs finally arrived… in fact, I don’t recall even noticing their arrival. But some guy I knew did get a MiniDisc player, right around when iPods began to take over the world. He would burn a little playlist onto each one, and carry them all in differently coloured little mini-cases. It was immediately obvious to anyone other than him what a fantastically useless piece of technology this was compared to the now-ubiquitous MP3 player.

Written by: David Rusak

Tim:
I was slow to come around to this one, but then I remembered every hacker movie from the 80s and 90s (even The Matrix).

Ryan:
I liked this one, but I thought it was maybe too precise. The future is often today made either bigger or smaller, and I’ve seen movies in which the future was either giant laserdiscs-sized CDs or tiny tiny CDs – effectively, a MiniDisc. I also knew a guy who was big into MiniDiscs! I think he has an iPod now. JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE

Poster Child:
As minds trapped in the present, we always make the mistake of imagining the future to be like the present refined. The future is more about game changers.

What’s this all about?

In the waning days of 2009, Julian Dibbell mentioned videophones as a holy grail technology that ended up being a b-teamer. I liked the concept so much that I ran a contest on Quiet Babylon, looking for more examples.

This is one of the shortlist finalists as chosen by a panel of judges consisting of myself, Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics & Project Wonderful and street artist Poster Child.

All of: B-List Holy Grails

B-List Holy Grails (and a Contest!)
B-List Holy Grail Contest Winners
B-List Holy Grail: Wristphones
B-List Holy Grail: Email
B-List Holy Grail: Monorails
B-List Holy Grail: Lasers
B-List Holy Grail: MiniDiscs ((YOU ARE HERE))
B-List Holy Grail: Push-button Jobs
B-List Holy Grail: Laundry Machines

Heck No I Won't Be Identified

I had an MD player. Yes. And I hated it.
It was one of the worst purchases I've ever made (and I was only in grade 10 then, a lot of time had passed!). I think I bought the lowest-grade option, around 2001? Maybe 2002. Anyway, the biggest flaw for me was that you had to record everything in real time from your PC.

Now, either that is the price you pay for the no-frills version (screw you, Sony) or I just couldn't figure out how to transfer like you would to a real disc, but there you go. Also, do you know why I bought one? Because it was big in Japan, and I had grown up on Sailor Moon and Evangelion.

...Yes, I was THAT girl. Ridiculous.
John de Jong

Oh, jeez, I forgot the most important thing I ever did with my MD player:

I plugged it into the optical output of my PS2 and recorded all the radio stations in GTA and GTA:Vice City. There was something delectably awesome about driving down the road and listening to Wave 103, commercials and all.
John de Jong

OK, so this may come off as being way egotistical, but Ryan may very well be REFERRING TO ME. I was definitely "big into MiniDiscs", and can justify my choices thusly:

I bought my MZ-N505 in May of 2002, for about $300. At the time, the only MP3 players you could buy for that kind of money were gigantic Discman-sized behemoths. I was looking for something portable. MiniDiscs definitely fit the bill.

Moreover, I was PC-only back then, and didn't have FireWire on any of my computers. Even if I wanted an iPod, and didn't mind the fact that it cost twice as much as the MiniDisc player I got, I wouldn't be able to use it.

In theory I also bought it to bootleg concerts, since there weren't any MP3 players with optical inputs, but I actually never used it for that purpose so it's moot.

And how can you not like having a variety of interesting-looking MiniDiscs? They definitely looked like they came from the future. A future that allowed you to personalize your listening experience by using discs that had Hello Kitty silkscreened on them, if that was your thing.

Regardless, I used it for about three years. In those three years, I also special ordered a remote, and flashed the firmware so that I could access all sorts of previously disabled function.

Then the honeymoon ended. The prices of iPods came down, and I began to realize that the ATRAC sound quality was terrible if you wanted to fit more than one CD's worth of stuff on one MiniDisc. And the software was absolutely terrible.

I ended up buying a third-gen iPod off a friend of mine, and never looked back.

Anyhoo, long story short: MiniDiscs were *the* portable music solution eight years ago, but they weren't able to keep up the pace with other technologies. Now they're wholly irrelevant.
LifeWithoutBuildings

The one benefit to the MiniDisc was that it was great for bootlegging concerts. Great recording capabilities and a small size that made it easy to sneak into the more discriminating venues. Somewhere in a box in Ohio I have a recording of a near-the-end Pavement concert on MiniDisc. I wouldn't even know what to do with it if I found it!