In this respect it was similar to, but distinct from, the DVDplus developed in Europe by Dieter Dierks and covered by European patents.

DualDiscs first appeared in the United States in March 2004 as part of a marketing test conducted by the same five record companies who developed the product.

The test involved 13 titles being released to a limited number of retailers in the Boston, Massachusetts, and Seattle, Washington, markets.

The challenge for the designers of DualDisc was to produce a dual-sided disc which was not too thick to play reliably in slot-loading drives, while the CD side was not too thin to be tracked easily by the laser.

[5][6] Some titles such as Devils & Dust by Bruce Springsteen and Straight Outta Lynwood by "Weird Al" Yankovic have been released in the United States exclusively as DualDiscs.

Common content includes: The CD side of a DualDisc contained standard 16-bit LPCM audio sampled at 44.1 kHz.

In addition, several SonyBMG titles whose regular editions include copy protection programs (such as XCP and SunnComm) did not feature the software on the DualDisc versions.

DualDiscs and hybrid SACDs were competing solutions to the problem of providing higher-resolution audio on a disc that can still be played on conventional CD players.