Way back in the day we were promised millions of singles released on those little three-inch CDs. But it seems like whatever singles do get released these days come on the standard five-inch variety, even if they contain only 20 or 30 minutes of music. What’s the deal with that? I want a bunch of tiny little CDs. They’re cute!
Buy Gamecube games.
I’ve seen a few. Most notably, Garbage released all their singles from their album Version 2.0 as 3" CDs.
Possibly one of the reasons they’re not as common as the 5" variety is that many CD players, especially non-tray loaders such as those found in car stereos, can’t handle them.
They’re still out there; you can get recordable and rewritable versions of the format, but they only hold a small amount of data - about 200MB for the mini-CD format and 70MB or less for the various business-card sized ones.
Commercial production is simply geared up for the standard sized discs on a massive scale though - this means that non-standard sizes are typically more costly to produce; more money for less space is hard to justify - sometimes it will prevail on the basis of novelty, but usually, it’s just easier to plump for the standard and either leave some empty space on the disc or pack it with promotional junk (or spyware).
Oh, and the non-standard sized media are difficult to get working in slot-loading drives - another (admittedly rather small) point against their popularity.
One of my ex-girlfriends had a minidisc player, and regularly burned mix CDs for it.
Last I checked, you could still get the blank discs at the major office-supply places.
Nitpick: ‘minidisc’ is the name of an entirely separate format - I think I understand that you mean mini CD, but the potential for confusion exists by use of the term ‘minidisc player’, which usually refers to one of these
I think those are mini DVDs, and recordable home versions aren’t, to my knowledge, available.
Recordable mini-DVDs are available (although I’m not sure if they’re the same as those used by the GameCube) - some camcorders record directly to mini-DVD.
Actually, I think that is the exact player she had. I was under the impression that ‘minidisc’ was the same as the small 3-inch CDs.
:smack:
The “don’t work in some CD players” factor, combined with the fact that there’s not much cost savings in making them versus standard-sized CDs, probably account for the near total disappearance of the small-sized CD singles. There are plastic adapters you can get that I believe will let them work just fine in a front-loading CD player, but who wants to be fiddling with all that crap?
Anyway, CDs are a dead medium. It’s all about the iTunes, baby.
When Compact Cassettes finally bite the dust, I might be inclined to believe you, but I think there’s a bit of life left in the format yet.
Gamecube uses proprietary optical media similar to but not compatible with the DVD format (mini or otherwise). Their discs hold (IIRC) 1.5GB of data.
You can still buy mini CDs (and business card CDs) as well as mini DVDs, but AFAIK primarily as blank media. Other than Garbage (the band, not the rubbish – though they may be the same thing depending on your musical bent) I’m not aware of anyone else releasing anything on 3" CD media.
I would imagine the incompatibility with slot-loading CD players probably contributed largely to their lack of popularity. I’d probably also say that the desire to make jewelcases to fit them snugly (without simply slapping them unceremoniously in a standard CD jewelcase tray) was probably fairly low on the list of priorities, too.
Nah, it’s Sony’s replacement for the Audio Cassette. Basically looks like a cross between a floppy disk and a CD. You can see the disc itself inside the protective case, and it’s slightly smaller than the 3" CDs, not to mention being a different, (rewritable) format.
I have one of the basic NetMD Minidisc players, and it’s pretty fun. The minidiscs are damn near invincible it seems, and people have done all sorts of unkind things to them (including running them over with cars) to see how durable they are. Worse I’ve done is to have my minidisc player fall out of my pocket while riding a bike. The player hit the sidewalk just as I turned around (I felt it fall) and the impact apparantly caused the door of the player to pop open, ejecting the disc with enough force for it to land about 3 feet away. I thought that was pretty cool to watch. 
The basic MDs (which sell for about $2 each) can store up to 5 hours of music, depending on compression, and the newer versions, the HI-MDs can store… uhm… I don’t remember, but it’s a lot more. They (and the players for them) are more expensive than the basic NetMD players.
I’d say that’s more than a small point. Mini CDs wouldn’t work in my current computer, my last computer, nor my car. If my old stereo still worked, it’d play a small CD, and my DVD player might, but basically, I have nothing that could play it conveniently.
When it looked like 3" CDs were going to be the new next best thing, companies did release tons of singles and EPs on them. For instance, The Beatles’ 45 RPM singles were reissued in 3" format, and MCA released countless oldies CDs, including much of the Chess catalogue, with 4 tracks apiece; Arista put out a whole series of their artists; Atlantic put out hundreds of them, including a Led Zeppelin issue with “Stairway To Heaven”, which was never a single. As it turned out, they didn’t catch on, and the projects were abandoned. The discs wound up in the delete bins, and are highly collectible now.
Here at the radio station, we use them all the time. When someone requests a recording of a news story they heard, we make them a 3" CD, because the files are a lot smaller than the 185 MB the discs hold. They can be played on any computer or most home CD players that have a drawer, because after a certain year they were all manufactured with a 3" indent for holding the discs. People seem to like them. Many are unaware that they even exist. I’ve actually heard them described as “cute.”
I have a few of the 8-cm mini CDs. I had put Damn Small Linux on one; it came in handy when my Windows boot partition got mangled and I used it to boot my PC so I could connect to the SDMB, er, I mean, ‘check my email’. 
I have exactly one pressed music CD in the 8-cm format; it was a demo with three tracks by a band called the Dregs. I got it at a music store in Oshawa back in the eighties: it was part of a promotion advertising a synthesiser.