Ongoing History Daily: A selection of dead music storage formats

When it comes to buying music in physical form, there have been various formats. Vinyl, the 8-track, cassettes, and the CD are the successful ones, but have you heard of SA-CD? Blu-Ray Audio? HD-CD? They’re all variations and descendants of the compact disc.

Back in the 50s, 60s and 70s, you could get albums on reel-to-reel tape. Then, at various times, we had the MiniDisc, Digital Audio Tape, and the Digital Compact Cassette. There was something called DataPlay, which was a disc a little bigger than a quarter. It failed. There was Slotmusic, which was pre-recorded music sold as MP3s on an SD card.

And about ten years ago, they tried again with MSQ SD, which is a South Korean thing. It’s also an SD card, but it features high-resolution FLAC files instead of MP3s. It was only available in available in South Korea for a specific manufacturer, but since the announcement of MSQ SD, I haven’t heard a thing about it. Another dead physical format.