- Will MiniDisc Survive?
The MiniDisc Community Pages ran an essay contest in May 2000 looking
for the answer to this question. To our delight, we received over 40
submissions from people all over the world. Here you can read the
winning essay and some of the runner ups.
- Larger MD Capacities
Sharp
and Sony had both said they would have a
~650MB MD-data drive ready by 1997. Sharp was rumored to be developing
980MB and 3.6GB MD-data drives for introduction in 1998. (Maxell's
``Mammos system'' shows
one method of achieving the densities needed to record multiple
gigabytes on an MD sized disc). These larger MD formats were intended
for general data storage but would have also allowed the development
of new devices, such as a MiniDisc Camcorder (imagine a pocket sized
version of the NEC Disk Cam, which
could make video editing as simple and easy as MD audio editing), or a
professional, non-compressing audio recorder. Although the format has
not yet (ca. 1999) been introduced, a prototype MD-Discam has
been shown by Sony at trade fairs.
A tiny (50mm) 730MB MO disc dubbed the iD Photo disc has also been introduced, and
though the disc drive is intended for video and still
cameras, using it in a portable audio application would not be impossible. Maxell's website has further technical information.
- Solid State Audio
The age of solid state audio is close at hand.
For portable playback applications in particular,
solid state (e.g. flash memory) media's insensitivity to shock
is a compelling benefit.
Several such players are already on the market
(MP Man, Rio (which I liked), Yepp [with a base
station that has recording capability], Audible and e.Digital),
with more on the way. Solid state media
is orders of magnitude more expensive than moving media however, and
so its use for archiving audio seems unlikely to be
cost effective, at least for many years to come.
Flash memory capacity follows Moore's law (a doubling of capacity
every 18 months), this means that in 2004 a device with 16 times
the capacity of today's Rio (32MB) would be available. Such a device
could hold 8 hours of high quality audio and, were it dockable in a
car player, provide most of the play-only benefits of MD. Conversely
however, I feel a solid state player with less than 4 hours capacity
is worse than useless. Your favorite songs once downloaded will be
repeated ad nauseum, with no relief in sight unless you have
your PC nearby. They are a disservice to the music lover.
- Audio Delivery by Wire
- Online Purchase and Downloading
Internet based audio delivery was pioneered by the Internet Underground Music Archive,
which has provided free music downloads by relatively unknown
artists since 1996. The Internet revolution and the ease with which
music can be traded online has forced the recording industry to take
Web based audio delivery seriously and sanction alternatives to traditional
music retailing. The RIAA's recently announced Secure Digital Music
Initiative is both a recognition of Web-delivered music's intrinsic appeal
and an effort to keep matters within its purvey. And today already,
bonafide purchase of mainstream music is possible from several web
sites (such as Liquid Audio,
a2bmusic,
CDNow and
Virgin).
Several papers examine this new paradigm of network audio delivery: Music on the Internet by Iconocast,
Robin Whittle's paper Music
Marketing in the Age of Electronic Delivery, and Emils Rode and
Tolga Yaveroglu's Analysis
of Recorded Music Markets.
- Realtime Delivery
Physical media, no matter what their form, cannot provide an
open ended choice of music. The ideal home audio system would dispense
with permanent physical copies of music and
instead provide music on demand from a remote server. An
experimental system along just such lines was created by Ken
Thompson, the father of Unix. Similar ideas have been pursued in
Europe in projects such as MODE, which
delivered music over ISDN using MPEG Layer 3 and
employed an interesting Multi
Media Protection Protocol (MMP) that allowed music rental
(by way of expiration dates) over wire.
Online delivery systems represent a movement that may bring on the death of pre-recorded discs. I
predict however, that this dawning age of music
delivery by wire will actually spur recordable MiniDisc use, since we
will still need to store, edit, and carry along our downloaded music.
It could be argued that recordable/erasable CDs will fill this niche,
but the MiniDisc's editing capabilities, portability and ruggedness
cannot be matched by CDs of any kind. It must be said however that
a home audio server, such as Lydstrom's SongBank SZ-6000 coupled with a portable
solid state player could almost entirely supplant MDs, so long as
recording capability is left out of the question (see ``MD's Niche'',
below).
- Media on Demand
There have been recent announcements by
Liquid Audio,
Virgin and
Sony/Digital On-Demand of a ``half fast'' music on
demand system, in which you order a CD or MD from a record store kiosk
and have it made while you wait.
Although earlier attempts at making CDs
on demand seemed to have fallen through (as indicated in these
1
2
3
mail messages), in fact the new Sony/Digital On-Demand system is based upon resuscitated
technology from the IBM/Blockbuster system.
In Japan, Kiosks for vending songs to a customer's recordable MD blank
are already available, an eTown article covers these developments.
- MD's Long-Lived Niche
At the turn of the millenium we are in the midst of the Information
Revolution. The increasing penetration of computing and networking
infrastructure makes it less likely that one particular storage
format will come to dominate, since the fluidity of information
between formats is so much less impeded (consider the CD, in the wake
of the Internet audio boom even its hold is slipping). This being
said, I think MiniDisc's excellence at providing high quality audio in
a superbly small, robust and editable format will ensure a long reign of
success (to 2015 or beyond) as the follow-on to the audio
cassette. The format has clearly ``made it'' in Japan and apparently
in Europe as well. The MD story in the US is hopeful but less clear,
since we Americans seem to have a natural aversion to new and
incompatible formats.
In other parts of the world (take Thailand for example), I am
doubtful that MD will ever become as ubiquitous as cassette. After
all, the MD and cassette are just a means for enjoying music, and
where a society's standard of living will not support a high-tech
solution, the low-tech cassette will do nicely (cassette players also
enjoy a certain low-tech robustness to rough handling and harsh
environments that MD equipment lacks, though MD's medium is certainly
superior). Some societies experience a technology infrastructure so
rudimentary that musical entertainment is limited to live
performances by musicians with acoustic instruments. MiniDisc will not
help them.
In any case, I foresee a long-lived niche for MD in the role of field
recording to an archival medium. There is no format available today
(nor in the foreseeable future) that allows field recording with a
lightweight battery powered recorder on a rugged, long-lived, and
economical storage medium. I don't suggest that such use alone will
sustain development of the format, but I do predict that it will be
many years (more than 20 perhaps) before a portable MD recorder is
seen as worthless. One could argue that someday a solid state recorder
with a few 100MB of memory could record several hours of material
before needing to be off-loaded onto a server or the Internet. But I
am speaking of remote field recording, where the home computer or
Internet will be inaccessible (though such places may be harder to
find in the future), and to a medium that is fundamentally robust (a
flash card's resilience after going through a washing machine's spin
cycle has yet to be reported).
- Wireless Audio
Audio coders giving CD-transparent performance and running at 64kbps
(stereo) are under development in today's laboratories. Wireless
cellular phone service currently employs data rates near 9.6kbps, but
64kbps and even 384kbps cellular data services are in the planning
stages. The convergence of these two technologies would allow a
portable (medium-less, cache-only) player to provide any music
whatsoever desired. In some respects this represents an ideal: an
individual's choice of music, anytime, anywhere, with no more to carry
than a pocket phone. (In fact a Sony/IBM press release mentions a wireless Japan based
trial due to begin in 2000 that will enable customers to receive and
play music content over NTT DoCoMo's PHS 64K bps data communications
network, using Sony's Memory Stick as a recording media for portable
devices.)
An added feature of such an untethered audio system would be the ability to
record remotely and upload wirelessly onto the network for safe keeping. Except
for MD's niche (see above), when this device is a reality, MD will
indeed seem old-fashioned.
While I have outlined many encroaching technologies that will
eventually help supplant MD, please note that these are future
technologies. They are only minimally viable today, for cost and
infrastructure reasons. Given current consumer technology, MD is the
recordable audio format ne plus ultra. And as long as there exists a
desire to store audio on a versatile, permanent and portable carrier,
MD will have a following.
