Today Sony said it was cancelling sales of its last MiniDisc player, the MZ-RH1. It would “complete” shipments of the five-years-old player in September 2011. The recordable 1GB Hi-MD discs it can use will phase out a year later.
The company explained outright that “demand has decreased” for MiniDisc and that flash-based media players had taken over. Older style MiniDiscs would still be on sale for the foreseeable future.
Sony first launched MiniDiscs in 1992 at the height of its popularity for portable music. The format eventually, however, represented the company’s sluggishness to adapt to the digital shift and an insistence on proprietary formats that had little reason to exist. Sony was still selling MiniDisc devices as serious competitors when the iPod was at its peak. Until late in their life, MiniDisc Players often required loading files using Sony’s ATRAC format rather than more popular AAC and MP3 tracks.
The format was very popular in Japan and amoing the press for recording interviews.
