From Yahoo News

TOKYO, (AFP) - Japanese consumer electronics giant Sony has developed a new MiniDisc (MD) format with a massively expanded recording capacity.

Sony Corp. will announce details of the technology on Thursday, company spokeswoman Junko Sato said, while the business daily Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported the capacity will be about 40 hours, or 30 times the current level of 80 minutes.

"Specific figures will be somewhat different," Sato said. "We cannot outline new MD specifications and related products until a presentation tomorrow."

The newspaper said Sony planned to release MD recorders and discs that support the new technology later this year.

Sony will urge Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. and other rival consumer electronics makers to adopt the technology as a new standard, the report added.

The new format uses a disc of the same size as the existing one and the new equipment is expected to play back content recorded in the existing format as well, the daily said.

It added that the new equipment would also employ copyright protection technology.

The new higher-density MD format is Sony's response to the increasingly competitive portable digital audio device market, Nihon Keizai said.

Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod has been gaining popularity in the United States and Japan for its ability to download music from personal computers and store about 10,000 songs or 600-700 hours of music, the daily added.

A total of around 80 million MD players and recorders have been shipped since the first MD devices were released in 1992, it said.

Sales of MD devices in Japan are expected to remain unchanged at about 6.7 million units in 2004 while global sales are forecast to drop five percent from 2003 to 195 million units, the report said.

It added that Japan and Europe accounted for some 75 percent and 15 percent of global sales respectively.

Looks pretty neat, I wonder how much data is actually stores? I don't even know how much the current MD disc stores so someone do the math if you know. I wonder if it incorporates DVD tech in there.

forget it Sony, start making devices which use SD memory.

i have a mini disc (sony) what a waste of money that was . if you want to go that way get a mp3 player

mini disc technology is crap, just go with a MP3 player it's at least 10000000% better than the pos sony MD crap.

are they backward compatible with older players?

Upon further investigation it seems that they will be backward compatible

I bought a MD player and like it... but now I'll need a new one

i got a MD nad it fuked up in a month. waste of my fukin money. freal guy jus go get a mp3 it cost less and holds more music. forget MDs if u wnat music then jus go get a mp3 player.

if only sony's minidisc players could read mp3's not there proprietary atrac3 crap

My son got one of the md nad for christmas. Is there any way to use this with napster to buy songs and down load them to it?

dat MD shit breaks within dat same month the buttons staarrt fuckin up it's ht though way better than a cd player.

with my mates MD player, whatever song he puts onto it, lowers to quality ( too like 96k or something ) and is hopeslss no way of turning it off >_< i know it sounds stupid, and it is! there was no way to turn it off >_

hell yeah thats nice i can't wait to check it out i got the old stuff and it's cool to.