nasonic, Sharp, and others were releasing their own MD units, both recorders and stand-alone players. To further the integration of MD as the replacement medium for cassette, Sony offered the first home MD deck, MDS-101, and the first in-dash car unit, C670RDS, in The MiniDisc (MD) was first introduced to the market by Sony in 1992 as a replacement to the audio cassette. Developed during the late 1980's, MD used a magneto-optical system to store data recorded in real-time on a rewriteable medium. The data could be randomly accessed allowing for quick seek-time and easy editing relative to the linear access of cassette mediums. The data was encoded and stored in a compressed format called Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding (ATRAC). The ATRAC compression rate of 292kbps, called SP, allowed for 60, 74, and 80 minutes of music to be stored on a disc that could hold 20, 25, and 28 minutes of music in CDaudio quality, .WAV format.

The first MD machine was the MZ-1 recorder, which retailed for approximately 750 usd. It had line-inputs for optical, RCA audio single-line, and microphone. It's line-outputs were for headphone and optical, but the optical line-out was an option that was discontinued from later releases of portable MD units. Sony licensed MD technology to other companies and soon Kenwood, Panasonic, Sharp, and others were releasing their own MD units, both recorders and stand-alone players. To further the integration of MD as the replacement medium for cassette, Sony offered the first home MD deck, MDS-101, and the first in-dash car unit, C670RDS, in

accessed allowing for quick seek-time and easy editing relative to the linear access of cassette mediums. The data was encoded and stored in a compressed format called Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding (ATRAC). The ATRAC compression rate of 292kbps, called SP, allowed for 60, 74, and 80 minutes of music to be stored on a disc that could hold 20, 25, and 28 minutes of music in CDaudio quality, .WAV format.

The first MD machine was the MZ-1 recorder, which retailed for approximately 750 usd. It had line-inputs for optical, RCA audio single-line, and microphone. It's line-outputs were for headphone and optical, but the optical line-out was an option that was discontinued from later releases of portable MD units. Sony licensed MD technology to other companies and soon Kenwood, Panasonic, Sharp, and others were releasing their own MD units, both recorders and stand-alone players. To further the integration of MD as the replacement medium for cassette, Sony offered the first home MD deck, MDS-101, and the first in-dash car unit, C670RDS, in

lowed for 60, 74, and 80 minutes of music to be stored on a disc that could hold 20, 25, and 28 minutes of music in CDaudio quality, .WAV format.

The first MD machine was the MZ-1 recorder, which retailed for approximately 750 usd. It had line-inputs for optical, RCA audio single-line, and microphone. It's line-outputs were for headphone and optical, but the optical line-out was an option that was discontinued from later releases of portable MD units. Sony licensed MD technology to other companies and soon Kenwood, Panasonic, Sharp, and others were releasing their own MD units, both recorders and stand-alone players. To further the integration of MD as the replacement medium for cassette, Sony offered the first home MD deck, MDS-101, and the first in-dash car unit, C670RDS, in

cal, RCA audio single-line, and microphone. It's line-outputs were for headphone and optical, but the optical line-out was an option that was discontinued from later releases of portable MD units. Sony licensed MD technology to other companies and soon Kenwood, Panasonic, Sharp, and others were releasing their own MD units, both recorders and stand-alone players. To further the integration of MD as the replacement medium for cassette, Sony offered the first home MD deck, MDS-101, and the first in-dash car unit, C670RDS, in nasonic, Sharp, and others were releasing their own MD units, both recorders and stand-alone players. To further the integration of MD as the replacement medium for cassette, Sony offered the first home MD deck, MDS-101, and the first in-dash car unit, C670RDS, in 1994. Throughout the 90's and into the next decade, MD ruled supreme as the medium for portable audio and recording in East Asia but never developed a mainstream following in North America and Europe.

In 2000, Sony introduced a new encoding method, MiniDisc Long Play (MDLP), that had two formats LP2 and LP4. LP2 extended the capacity of an 80 minute disc to 160 minutes by recording data at a compression rate of 132kbps and LP4 extended the capacity of an 80 minute disc to 320 minutes using 66kbps. Both SP and LP2 used separate stereo coding with discrete left and right channels while LP4 used joint stereo coding.

In 2002, Sony introduced NetMD, which allowed for the transfer of music files from computer to MD via USB connection. The software, SonicStage (SS), quickly developed a bad reputation for freezing systems, the occurrence of errors with operations successfully performed minutes earlier, restrictions on the number of times a file could be checked out, and requiring large amounts of system resources for operation. While SS,