I loved my mini-disc player. They somehow felt more futuristic than than the better alternatives. It's too bad there was virtually no support for them in the US.

Early minidisc players/recorders will forever be a unique and coveted item for some folks. Sony made a curious 'mistake' in those early units where they added recording functionality AND a fully digital S/PDIF input with zero copy protection or restrictions. You could plug an early portable minidisc recorder straight into a digital audio output from a high end (at the time) CD player to make digitally bit-perfect rips of CDs, or plug it into the digital output of a mixer board to make great live music recordings. You could even get a minidisc drive for computers and copy off your bit-perfect music rips to upload and share on the internet. Very, very quickly Sony realized their mistake and later minidisc players removed S/PDIF inputs (but left the outputs). Nowadays HDMI, etc. have all baked in copy protection to the wire protocols. So for a very short period of time minidisc was this odd little thing that was an enormous threat to the future of the music industry.

Minidisc compression wasn't lossless. I'm pretty sure CD rips on computers existed before then.

Objectively, ATRAC was worse than CD as a compressed format. But it was actually very cleverly done, and it sounded better than MPEG audio at the same bit rate.

What killed the format was Sony's aggressive policy of forcing you to use their software.

I had an MD player, but I only used it to play blank MDs on which I had made mix tapes from my CDs. Many MD players had write ability, and (though it was a fairly little-known fact) many portable CD players had optical-out. You just needed to buy an optical cable and connect it between your CD player and the MD player.

Thats funny to hear, I had a minidisc player as a young tech neophyte in North America and never had compatibility issues, or even until now knew there were variants of md.

The variants came along a good few years after MD hardware went on sale in the US - the first MiniDisc player went on sale in the US in September 1992, while NetMD wasn't introduced until 2001 and Hi-MD in 2004.

With the original iPod also introduced in 2001, and MD's high media cost and lack of pre-recorded releases having kept it firmly in its original niche, I think probably most MD adopters in the US didn't have compatibility problems for the simple reason that, by the time those problems became possible, we weren't really bothering with MiniDisc any more anyway.

That said, NetMD was just a different format on the same media, and a line of players capable of transferring audio from a computer digitally via USB. You can't use a NetMD-formatted disc in a non-NetMD player, but you can still reformat and use the disc in an older player, and a NetMD player will play back discs using the older format. The real compatibility barrier is Hi-MD, which uses a totally different media formulation in order to reach its ~1GB capacity; as far as I know, Hi-MD media, however formatted, can't be used in any non Hi-MD player.

(Even for latter-day MiniDisc aficionados such as myself, that's still not a huge barrier, because not much Hi-MD media was ever made, and you can expect to pay $60 or more for a single disc today. Hi-MD players are likewise rare and pricey, so I suspect most folks who get into the medium for hobby reasons end up sticking with NetMD.)

You forgot MD Data, and MD Data2, and their assorted list of supported file formats.

Some played MP3, some did different incompatible versions of ATRAC, some did raw PCM packed in two different containers.

And there was even a digital videocamera using Data2.

Panasonic MD was also barely compatible with Sony's one. Record in one, but not play in other.

I don't think MD-Data ever made it to consumer availability in the US, but you're not entirely wrong with regard to fragmentation. That said, Sony seemed to do a pretty good job of keeping it under control in the US prior to the release of NetMD in 2001, but I suspect "seemed" is the operative word there, and that it had less to do with effective management of the medium on Sony's part and more with the whole thing being an incredibly tiny niche in the US for its entire lifespan.

Sony certainly doesn't have a good enough record on avoiding media fragmentation generally, that any benefit of the doubt seems warranted here...

Well, I spend my childhood in Far East Russia. Vladivostok, and Blagoveschensk primarily.

Japan was all over that place.

I also remember DAT players. People say they were a commercial failure in Japan.

Players themselves were a frequent sight on sale, but tapes were near impossible to find, let alone ones with pre-recorded music.

And they were prone to tearing in humid climate. They were scotch taped, and superglued 100 times over, that's how rare they were.

I still have a Sony minidisc player. I haven’t used it in years. Exquisite piece of mechanical engineering.

Then came the iPods and the rest is history.

i'm still stumped that a rewritable 50MB+ thing was available before win95 .. if Sony pushed hard on the computer data it could have been something

I'm still using my MD player. It will work forever.