A compact digital audio disc from Sony that comes in read-only and rewritable versions Introduced in late 1993, the MiniDisc has been popular in Japan The read-only 2 5in disc stores 140MB compared to 650MB on a CD, but holds the same 74 minutes worth of music due to Sony's Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding (ATRAC) compression scheme, which eliminates inaudible portions of the signal
Small spinny discs that record music using amazinly complicated compression algorithms Back
{i} small disc (5 cm {2 inches} in diameter) similar to a small compact disc for recording sound or storing computer data
6cm magneto-optical re-writable disc format developed by Sony for audio and data storage MiniDiscs can store 74 minutes of compressed stereo audio
Minidisc is a relatively new digital media, out for about 8 years now It is a 2 5" square rewritable disc in a cartridge, so it's smaller than a CD, allows you to write to it many times over, and is better protected from scratches and whatnot It holds 74 minutes of audio, the same as a CDR, by way of a dynamic, psycho-acoustic compression algorithm called ATRAC ATRAC attempts to determine, in real-time, what frequencies the human ear should not be able to hear and eliminates them, making the file small enough to fit on the disc MD's use a magneto-optical phase-shift technique to make them re-writable - similar to CDRW
A compact data storage medium designed to store music MiniDiscs come in two varieties: playback only and recordable MiniDiscs can be recorded and played by MD4 See also Random Access, ATRAC, and MD DATA Disc