future

The Future (seen mid-1999)

• 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.

  Winner:	Mike Worrell
  Honorable Mention:	Gary Bingner Andrea Winchester Richard Reid

• 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.

Conclusion (Apology?)

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.

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