My 4-year love affair with Minidisc unfortunately ended this week as I sold my old (pre-LP) minidisc hi-fi. Well, not ended so much as we're just having some "time apart." ;-)
I love the cartridge format, but I just don't see Hi-MD taking off. The advertising emphasis seems to be on portable audio. For years I carried an MD Walkman around with several MDs and that was fine but this was before the advent of affordable iPod clones. More recently I had an MP3-playing personal CD player (after my MD walkman went out of service) and swapping discs all the time, carrying tons of them - it was a pain. So it's beaten on convenience already, since each disc will only hold ~300MB on top of the capacity of a CD-ROM. It's just not enough, considering there's little price gap now.
I got a 60GB Creative MP3 player just recently for £200. Now while that's obviously finite, I haven't come close to filling it. 725 albums on there @192kbps and there's still 20GB left.
The move to support MP3 also worries me slightly. I haven't heard of a single player that can seamlessly play one MP3 after another. A limitation in the way they're encoded means there will always be a gap, which I guess could theoretically be buffered (?) but it's interesting to note that as yet it hasn't been implemented. ATRAC of course allowed for tracks to flow into each other seamlessly. It's almost like Sony's announcement in the late 80s that they were to start manufacturing VHS decks. It's like seeing Betamax die all over again.
