MiniDisc

The MiniDisc was Sony’s magneto-optical recording format, a small disc housed in a protective plastic caddy, announced in September 1992 and on sale in Japan that November. Sony positioned it as the modern successor to the compact cassette: recordable like a tape, but skip-resistant, instantly navigable, and editable in ways tape could never manage. You could record, name your tracks, split and combine them, and reorder a whole disc with a few button presses.

Underpinning it was ATRAC, Sony’s proprietary audio compression, which let a disc smaller than a CD hold a comparable amount of music. That engineering was genuinely clever, and in Japan the MiniDisc became a mainstream consumer format through the late 1990s, popular with commuters, students, and musicians who valued its recording and editing abilities. Tapers and field recordists prized it too.

Outside Japan the format never broke through. It arrived caught between the entrenched CD and, soon, the cheap recordable CD-R, and it carried a premium price for discs and hardware. Sony’s insistence on its own ATRAC ecosystem, and its long resistance to the open MP3 standard, kept the format walled off just as digital music was about to explode.

The MP3 player, and above all Apple’s iPod in 2001 paired with iTunes, made compressed music on a physical disc look instantly obsolete. Flash memory did the rest. Sony tried to extend the format with Hi-MD in 2004, but the trend was irreversible. The company stopped shipping MiniDisc players in 2013, ending the format’s commercial life while leaving a devoted collector following behind.