Cassettes and vinyl are cool again, so what about MiniDisc? Sony’s pint-sized digital format hit the market in 1992, but failed to make much of a splash until around a decade later.

Despite ultimately losing market shares to flash-based MP3 players, MiniDisc has seen something of a revival. Transferring music from your computer to a MiniDisc recorder is also now easier than ever.
What Is MiniDisc?

Sony came up with the MiniDisc after the Digital Audio Tape (DAT) format failed to take off with consumers. The company went head-to-head with Philips’ Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) and won the initial battle (the DCC was discontinued in 1996).

MiniDisc was first conceived in the mid-1980s but wasn’t commercially available until a decade later. It took even longer for the format to see mainstream adoption outside of Japan. After Sony relaunched the format on the U.S. market in 1998, it finally became profitable around 2000.