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Minidisks were a solid portable music upgrade and got popular in Europe, but never seemed to catch on in the States before CD burners ripped up the whole paradigm. They were neat but Sony being Sony did a lot of stupid shit with DRM that kinda made them weak in the Napster Revolution.

MiniDiscs were pretty cool until portable music systems were able to play FLAC files. Then they lost the fidelity war. They had stereo component and car console MiniDisc models too.

Had both one of these and a laser disc movie player (still have one that works!), and between those and CDs I had all the shiny media platters in the house! 😆

When Sony MD & iPod were both new, I read that the iPod was a gimmick that wouldn’t catch on so I bought the Sony. The music industry whines about people stealing music but I’ve spent a fortune in collecting vinyl > tapes > CDs > mini CDs > then trying to keep ownership of my music on apple devices

CD cases were wonderful, and prevented a lot of damage. For good or ill, media costs dropped fast enough that they were too expensive for data CDs. I last saw them on MO discs in the mid-90s.

Precisely, they basically did the same thing engineering wise. It's a disc in a protective cover and the insertion tray is the key that exposes the surface of the disc for data access.

You know how they have this saying that Americans would rather use any weird unit of measure than the metric system? Well for a while Sony would rather use any type of medium rather than admit that physical storage was on its way out, largely because it wanted to make money off the storage.

I still have mine. Doesn't see much use nowadays. But I have recordings of my own music on minidisc, so I keep it around. My Motif 6 was a complete studio in a keyboard, and it was the best way to store completed music from it, optical out.

Yeah, you're right. Probably hardware issue & cost control. Sadly. Xbox does support it through an app. 4 something that is supposed to be the center of multimedia in the living room, lacking cd support is a shame, whereas it's working for brs, dvds (which I consider the same old technology as cds)