are the minidisc and DAT...

- Mini-Disc (still got a Mini-Disc Player, but rarely use it)
- DAT (Only ever saw New Orders Substance on this format)
- Flexi-Single (never a true format, often had to weight down both the disc and arm to prevent slippage. Often contained unreleased tracks & interviews - usually free with magazines)

All failed roughly the same time.

Mind you, did they ever really look like they were going to take off?
Much of the great British Record Buying Public had recently been persuaded to replace their vinyl with CD, and were unimpressed with invitations to do the same again.

Mat Lucas
Mat Munroe
Mat Bianco

an eight-track copy of Rick Wakeman's Journey to the Centre of the Earth the other day in an Oxford flea market. It looked decidedly unloved and I nearly bought it out of sympathy.

seems to be a bit of a novelty. I suppose if you want MP3, you download it, not buy a physical item.

Had a selector for 16 RPM. Has anyone ever seen a 16 RPM record?

Found this in my granddad's postcard collection. It's a normal size postcard with a single tune on it in this case "god bless the prince of wales" (with a title like that it's bound to be on the next Fall lp). Never played it, as I was worried it was a bit fragile. I think it's 1930's era. I think Grandad just bought them as curios as they've never been sent.
Could see a modern promotional version with a snap out miniSD card on it!

Video I know, but surely this will be overtaken by the download/on demand revolution before too long.

but the cassingle seemed like a non starter from the off. You had to carry around a dozen or so as soundtrack to a short stroll to the local shops

Not sure if memory is playing tricks but I think I can remember seeing My Fair Lady soundtracks and Beatles albums in tape-sized boxes. Can anyone confirm?

You got your Kid Creole album on on side and the other side was for you to record your own stuff on.

anyone? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_disc for them as have forgotten it already. You fickle lot...)

Picture Discs??
ANyone want to buy my pic disc of Parallel Lines? Bit scratchy mind.

3" CD's in a card sleeve in a jewel box.

(edition with Suede on the front)? Must have cost a fortune. It was easily the worst advertising campaign i've ever seen for anything to do with music. Some guy called Frank in a tracksuit and a woman talking about wallpaper. It covered about 6 A4 sides! What a phenomenal waste.

No wonder it didn't catch on.

...that Tooth Tunes were going to save the record industry - turns out I was mistaken...

We had one for a while. It was so much more compact. I can't believe it never took off.

I'm still ruing the day I bought a mini-disc Walkman.

Shaped picture discs: I've got one in the shape of an aeroplane, square ones, band logo ones, all unwieldy.

...such as the below:

...ten inch.

Bowie's Blue Jean came out like this...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bowie_JazzinForBlueJeanVHS.jpg

Big and ugly (the format, not the Dame, obviously)

Also Numb by U2...any others released like this?

BIG cassettes containing 1/4-inch tape running at 3.75ips - basically a reel-to-reel in a cassette case. Huge improvements in fidelity over standard cassettes but came onto the market just as Nakamichi revolutionised what you could do with ordinary cassette tapes.

I saw an Elcasette once, at (I think) Olympic in Barnes

are still in production - http://www.phonographcylinders.com/

There was an odd type of CD that had graphics that could be "displayed by compatible players". I recall a 10,000 Maniacs one (the one with Dust Bowl on it?) I never heard of a "compatible player" and have no idea what the content might have been.

Edit: details here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD%2BG

There was also supposed to be a CD-ROM revolution that never happened.

Digital Compact Cassette. Very short lived in the 90s but I recall them being sold in HMV. My mate spent part of his student grant on a player, you could play back normal cassette tapes in it too.

CD video. These were gold coloured Cd singles which would play back on a regular machine but also played the video if you happened to own a compatible laser disc player. This was circa 1987 pre internet and PCs with multimedia.
New Order did one for 'Touched by the Hand of God' which is v collectable although mainly for the rare tracks that were not included on any other format.

...DVD singles, yet?

They were a great development for those of us fed up with the old 2xCD single trick, but unfortunately they seem to have been quietly abandoned a year or so back.

There was a craze for Gold audiophile CDs. I have one of Thrak by King Crimson. Pretty sure a CD being gold makes no difference, but maybe someone can give the details?

For a while there were plenty of HDCDs around. These seemed to have a 16-bit layer and a 20-bit extended layer that could be read by compatible players. My copy of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is one.

Bhutan issued a stamp you could play on a record player, and appear to have tried a CD version.

http://www.bhutanpostagestamps.com/cd.htm

They seem to have wisely missed out the eight track format.

Both Jeff Mills and The Mars Volta have released singles which have vinyl on one side and a CD on the other. I can't imagine it taking off.

You can play the sleeve of my version of Dumb Waiters by The Psychedelic Furs... some may suggest trying that with all their singles.

not an home format but most concerts, tv shows etc, were recorded onto it and I believe even early CDs were mastered from this Sony device

all secondhand knowledge I may add

here's my list:
7 inch vinyl
7 inch coloured vinyl
picture discs (see above)
flexi singles
10 inch vinyl
12 inch single (45 rpm) think i have one that plays at different speeds on each side
12 inch albums
I have a copy of that magazine that came with lp somewhere name escapes me
postcard records (see above)
also found a tiny 3 inch card record with the postcards
music cassette pre-recorded and home comps
cassette singles
mini disc including a pre recorded best of Bob Dylan
cd's
various digital formats
Oh and I have a wind up gramophone and a Phonograph wax disc (at my Dad's! but I bagsied them!)
films
dvd, vhs cassette
super 8 films including 4 reel version of Dirty Dozen!
Oh and have the kit to play them all too!

Bet nobody owned one of those..?

Capacitance Electronic Disc, to give it's full name, was a short-lived video player of the 1980's. Bloody useless really because the player used a stylus, not a laser, and you had to turn the disc over halfway through the fillum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc

I only owned one because I won it in a local newspaper competition, complete with several discs. One was a Beatles release, sold to a collector when the player went the way of other obsolete devices.

I had a Psychic TV single that was released in this format. I also remember Frank Bough banging on this sonic revolution on Nationwide.

I also bought an unlabelled metal 7" single. On playing it, a man had recorded a message for his wife. Apparently (according to the man) there was a booth that allowed you to do this on the street. He had a very BBC accent and I would date it back to the 1940s.

Really hard to play unless you weighted down your stylus arm. I've got an XTC one from Smash Hits, and a Melanie one from somewhere.

I had John & Yoko's merry christmas (war is over) on bright green vinyl.

Here's a few other formats you probably won't have seen, as they were probably US only and died out about 40 years ago. The Beatles had their recordings issued on all three formats.

4-Track Tape: The precursor of the 8-track. They were the same shape and size, but with some internal mechanical differences, in particular they lacked the integrated pitch roller of the later cartridge. It was possible to adapt 4-track tapes to play on 8-track hardware.

The Playtape: Like an 8-track, but significantly smaller, with a playing time of up to around 20 minutes. They were launched in the late 1960s and died out a few years later.

The Hip Pocket-Disc: These were tiny flexi-discs with a diameter lower than that of a CD. They could be played on some standard record players, but there were also dedicated players that were designed to play them (as well as standard records). The intention was to sell them via vending machines.

I used to have a DVD recorder that could record TV programs. It seems almost quaint now. I replaced it after a couple of years with a hard disk recorder that could also record Freeview. That's now seeming very obsolete since these days it's pretty easy to stream video...

Portable vinyl. Ideal for jogging.

what happened to the View Master?
Minutes of fun watching stills from Disney's animated movies...listening to the story on a cassette recorder at the same time! Now how come that didn't last ?
( Even more fun when your parents bring back one for you that they've bought at a fleamarket, without the cassettes, just one disc... )

Polaroid developed an motion picture variant of their instant cameras, called Polarvision. The media consisted of a small cartridge of film which also contained development chemicals. To view the films you had to play them back in a dedicated viewer, which also acted as a unit for developing the films.

Unfortunately Poloaroid launched it too late, as VHS and Beta were just taking off. Polavision film cartridges were expensive, had a playback time of just a few minutes, and didn't look that great when played back. Hence the system was an abject failure.

This was dreamt up by the marketing people and the boffins had to find a way to make it work with superior but underdeveloped satellite system that BSB bid for unlike Sky who used the existing PAL system. My brother had one of these along with most of the other also ran systems listed here.

No mention of the Scopitone yet. These 16mm "video" jukeboxes were particularly big in France in the 1960's. Most of them featured pouty lolitas gasping out ye-ye frogpop hits of the day, but the odd Anglophone act made scopitone clips. There was one for "A Whiter Shade Of Pale", but I thought I'd go with Neil Sedaka because "Calendar Girl" doesn't make me want to punch an old hippie every time I hear it.

There's also a scopitone on youtube called "Pussycat A Go-Go" by someone called Stacy Adams, and it (almost) does exactly what it says on the tin.

Other spent formats include:

The Audio Magazine (Flexipop, Volume, and the one on cassette).
The Christmas fanclub flexidisc.
The Man With The Cart That Used To Yell "Bring Out Your Dead".

The format I would love to see is those talking spinning rings which featured in "Planet Of The Apes".

I had a machine from the late '40s or early '50s that actually used a steel wire to record sound. The wire was magnetized in proportion to the sound input. The wire was stored on 3- or 4-inch metal reels and wound onto a much larger drum, about 8- or 10-inches in diameter. There was a synchronized up/down cam to ensure the wire wound evenly on the reels. The fix for a broken wire was to simply tie a knot around the break. I can't imagine the read/record head lasting all that long with a steel wire running across it!

My machine came in handy when my brother came across some old college speeches archived on wire but no one had the hardware to replay it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_recording

...To get my two cents in , here where I'm at in San Francisco , a local " Advertiser " newspaper , every week , sound as a dollar ( Well...Anyway , that ought to make for enough " I'm American " disclaimers !!!!!!!!!!! ) , runs an advertisment for someone wanting:
" FLEXO Records Wtd....made...around the 30s , came in diff colors , sizes ( 3"'-16' ) . MUST SAY FLEXO . "
medusashaircut@erols.com , if you're interested .
I tended to come across flexi-discs as advertising items .
There were even flexis printed not on vinyl/plastic , but on stiff paper cardboard !
I remember a Dick CVlark 2-LP compilation set on Buddah Records that had a bonus " picture disc " cardboard...

...To get my two cents in , here where I'm at in San Francisco , a local " Advertiser " newspaper , every week , sound as a dollar ( Well...Anyway , that ought to make for enough " I'm American " disclaimers !!!!!!!!!!! ) , runs an advertisment for someone wanting:
" FLEXO Records Wtd....made...around the 30s , came in diff colors , sizes ( 3"'-16' ) . MUST SAY FLEXO . "
medusashaircut@erols.com , if you're interested .
I tended to come across flexi-discs as advertising items .
I remember a flexi advertising this " The Swing Era " mail-order Time-Life LP of stereo re-recordings of Big Band-era hits , and a stand-up comedian named Chris Rush whose LP ( titled " FIRST RUSH " ) had an excerpts flexi as an adverisment in in NATIONAL LAMPOON !
There were even flexis printed not on vinyl/plastic , but on stiff paper cardboard !
{ People other than I had real encounters with back-of-Post Cereals boxes round cardboard records of Archies and Jackson Five songs , you were supposed to cut them off of the box . ]
I remember a Dick Clark 2-LP compilation set on Buddah Records that had a bonus " picture disc " square cardboard...A highly 70s-finery*- dressed D.C. was on the front of it , and when you played it , he spoke of such new stars of the 70s as Donny Osmond and Alice Cooper !
*-Always good for an easy laugh , that sort of reference is...

...My parents had such a " Woolworth's booth " record of them and some old friends singing Woody Guthrie's " So Long , It's Been Good To Know Yuh " . I lost it long ago!:-(:-(:-(-As with the other things I've mentioned here:-(:-(!
An early video disc format in America was known as the " RCA format " in the late 70s , I presume that it was simply the American name for the vd format mentioned above .

In 1989 there was a micro trend for issuing and reissuing old hits on a "mini disc" format, this was before it was known as mini disc. I still have a few by Starship,Madonna and The Human League. I don't even no if I dare play them anymore,more of a novelty.

Before protools you could get 8 track digital cheap.

Both using the same tape - looks like vhs only with an s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT

The plastic thingy at the bottom always broke off, and at the slightest provocation the plug would be bent out of shape.

Can't say I miss the PS/2, either