Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Sony's New Bookshelf MP3 Player -- Audio TiVo?

Posted by timothy on from the ok-now-run-with-it dept.

Betelgeuse writes: "The NY Times has a story story about a new bookshelf MP3/CD player from Sony. Every time you play a CD, the machine automatically copies its tracks onto its built-in 20-gigabyte hard drive. It will then try to get album track information off the CD or, alternately, you can use the PC link to get titles off your favorite cddb-like site." As the article puts it, they've come up with "the world's first TiVo for radio." Long overdue -- I only wish it used a format that was closer to standard, and let you pull tracks to other media. Update: 07/11 18:17 GMT by T : Ooops -- messed up that link, now fixed.

6 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. Re:RIAA Lawsuit waiting to happen by reverius · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Ironic, considering Sony owns a huge record label (Sony Music) and is a member of the RIAA.

    In fact, all of these Sony labels are members of the RIAA, according to their Members List:

    - Sony Broadway
    - Sony Class./Sony Music Soundtrax
    - Sony Classical
    - Sony Direct
    - Sony Discos
    - Sony Masterworks
    - Sony Music Special Products
    - Sony Music US (Latin)
    - Sony Portrait
    - Sony Wonder

  2. mm Is the Right Hand Talking To The Left? by idfrsr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wonder how the Sony Music People (the music label and copyright holders) feel about this?

    It seems to me that after all they and other labels have been trying to accomplish (and doing fairly well --I might add)this could cause some problems. I suppose they are 'separate' but I can't see how on one hand they can argue for no copying, than go ahead and copy on the other hand.

    --
    "The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
  3. Re:The big problem by BdosError · · Score: 2, Interesting
    The lack of this key feature renders the machine dead in the water
    I would argue, based on history, that it won't take long for some enterprising hacker to mod this to allow MP3 copies. And, for that matter, extraction of the files stored on the hard drive.

    And they did say it had analog inputs too, so you could play MP3s into it that way. Not perfect, but functional.

    --
    Complexity is Easy. Simplicity is Hard.
  4. Be Did It First by ewhac · · Score: 5, Interesting

    About a year before we cratered, Be, Incorporated, had developed a prototype of a product very similar to what Sony's come out with.

    It was called HARP (Home Audio Reference Platform). Built on top of BeOS (naturally), the HARP prototype looked like an ordinary stereo component (principally because we bought an actual stereo component, hollowed it out, and shoved an Intel 810-based mobo in there). When you inserted a CD, HARP would begin ripping it immediately, convert it to MP3, and store it on the internal disk. But all that happened in the background; you could still play the disc immediately.

    We used the built-in database features of the BeOS filesystem to index all internally stored MP3s. And we'd send off to FreeDB.org for the tracklist. But the really cool bit was that HARP had a built-in Web server. Just fire up your PC -- or your wireless Web tablet, of which we had plenty laying around -- connect to the HARP server, and you'd get a browsable list of all the songs on the machine, viewable in any Web browser. Pick one, and it would start playing.

    We never got to finish the prototype; Be died before that could happen.

    Funny, though; I seem to remember that we had showed HARP to the Sony people when we were developing the e-Villa Web appliance for them...

    Schwab

    --
    Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
  5. WHO I'd like to jump in... by JCCyC · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...Apex. Or any other conveniently located electronics manufacturer.

    Just imagine a device like this one, same looks, same sound quality etc, but with the following subtle differences:

    1) It plays MP3 CDs in addition to audio CDs (in this case copying the files themselves into the HDD instead of encoding);

    2) It uses MP3 for encoding. Ogg Vorbis optional.

    3) It is actually a small Linux machine with an Ethernet port. You can hack it at will. All of its software is GPL. It also comes with a rescue CD in case you screw up and forget to include the sound chip and network drivers in your latest kernel compilation.

    3a.) It has a Samba/NFS server set up by default so you can browse the HDD contents.

    I'd work for minimum wage for a company planning to build this. ;)

  6. Close, but no cigar... by vanyel · · Score: 3, Interesting
    ...and too many bells. What I've been wanting for some time is a Tivo for radio. A real tivo for radio. This is a vcr for radio, as you have to program the timer. I want something that I can say "record Radio Reader" and "Weird DJs in the Morning" etc.

    Then, a recent addition to the wishlist, is to say "copy the latest recordings onto cdr" (or cdrw if my car player will read them) so I can play them in the car.

    I'd almost pay a kilobuck for that...