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Sony's New Bookshelf MP3 Player -- Audio TiVo?
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.
Alright, so I buy one of these, and it rips my CDs, thats alright.
My friend comes over w/ her CDs and we play them in MY player, and it rips those too. Now what? I just pirated music w/o intent, but I still did 'steal' the music. Oye.
--sig fault--
Hmm... well, I would say that remains to be seen...
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
Will it play the copy protected CD's From Sony Music?
The lack of this key feature renders the machine dead in the water. Next.
Isn't this the same company that released a Celion Deion CD that would crash some Macs?
Have you hugged your Karma Whore today?
This is Sony we're talking about, a company with interests in record labels as well as making hardware... wonder how they've crippled it?
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
From the article:
(The L7HD stores audio in Sony's own Atrac3 format rather than the more common MP3 format. But since you can copy music only onto the hard drive, never off it, the storage format makes no practical difference.)
This is an excellent point, which is totally correct! Almost all independent record labels give away mp3s. This proprietary system is doomed to fail.
This guy's post should be modded up.
If this thing were an am/fm radio that let you record/scrub a live radio broadcast or something, that would be cool. Not that this isn't cool, but that's what I though it was when I read that phrase.
Would be useful for those Saturday night DJ mixes you hear, or I suppose if there was some talk radio segment you like, or a really funny morning-radio skit.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
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
What part of this paragraph didn't you understand?
"Indeed, you can program the timer to record certain radio shows automatically, including on a daily or weekly schedule, so that they are ready to play whenever you feel like listening to them (or pausing, rewinding or fast-forwarding them). If you've ever used a TiVo or ReplayTV digital video recorder, you're no doubt smacking your forehead in recognition: In effect, Sony has created the world's first TiVo for radio."
(And somebody modded that up?)
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
otherwise you'll be reading about them next week when some evil 4 letter acronym is sueing the pants off of them.
Why buy this expensive CD player with a hard drive, when Sony is one of the very same companies that is busy putting things on the CD to keep them from being read in this way? It will likely be unable to read Sony CD's if they have their way. And even if it can, do you want to support a system where it's OK for a Sony CD player to rip Sony CD's, but no other brand of CD player or your own computer can? Will you buy one of each brand CD player for each music company that publishes CD's? Get a clue people, Sony should get the word loud and clear that people are going to stop buying all of their products until they stop screwing with the redbook standards to screw the consumer. Unless this happens their copy protection games will continue.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
This seems to be Sony's motif with regard to compressed audio; it goes in, but it never comes out. Do they view themselves as singlehandedly holding back the P2P flood? A bit irritating, because I've got news for them: the shit's out of the horse already, folks, and there's no way I'm gonna dump this kind of cash on a device like this if they're going to cut off what would be its biggest convenience -- autoripping MP3s off of the CDs I play in my stereo so that I can play them at my computer later.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Will the pinheaded moron that modded this as "Insightful" please proceed immediately to the Slashdot preferences page, and uncheck "Willing to Moderate"? It's bad enough that posters don't read the articles...
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
For $1000 you could get a cheap Shuttle PC with a CD drive and a 180 GB drive (and more). Put in a good sound card and buy speakers, and it'll sound as good. Plus, you can rip to OGG, MP3, whatever.
Fortran programmer...oh yeah. Array math for life!
Let me see if I understand this...
I pay for a CD player that automatically writes my music to a hard drive, and then automatically retrieves the album information from the Internet. I can thus play the music off of the hard drive, instead of using the CD.
Why even bother buying a CD if its sole purpose is as a transfer medium? This portends the obsolesence of the compact disc...
Does this mean that Sony will sue itself for creating an circumvention device?
You COULD run WinCE on the DC, but it wasn't on the console (the OS never is) it was on the game disc. And MOST (90%) of the games used Katana, the Sega OS, NOT CE. The CE games sucked. :)
"The L7HD stores audio in Sony's own Atrac3 format rather than the more common MP3 format."
This is not 'Sony's new bookshelf MP3 player' it's Sony's new bookshelf Atrac3 player.
The NY Times has a story about a story new bookshelf...
Huh? Is this some sort of meta-story? Did you mean to say a 'starry new bookshelf...' or more like just 'a story about a new...'
- It doesn't use MP3, it uses some Sony proprietary format.
Every time you play a CD, the machine automatically copies its tracks onto its built-in 20-gigabyte hard drive.
- Unless it's a Sony CD, probably
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."
- Sony have CD-Text, but made it so proprietary that it hasn't caught on. So what a waste of time. Needless to say, if you have a spare $1000 you'd be better buying a PC in a small case to do the job for you. If you don't want a PC but want one of these boxes, this functionality will be pretty bloody useless.
As the article puts it, they've come up with "the world's first TiVo for radio."
- It's got nothing to do with radio.
Long overdue --
- Since when has some proprietary crap been "long overdue"?
I only wish it used a format that was closer to standard,
- Closer to standard? Either it IS standard, or it isn't.
and let you pull tracks to other media.
- OK well we can let this pass. No doubt of course it will be hackable to pull to other media, but you might not be able to hack the proprietary format.
And to think, all those submissions which are made, and this is the best they have? Puhlease.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Encoding CDs to mp3? My computer will start encoding any audio CD I feed it.
Radio? Most radios I listen to are online. There are many programs I can use to record them. If a local radio broadcasts something I want to keep, I can buy a cheap cable and record it too.
Sharing? My computer automatically stores them on my server, which I mount with nfs and let some friends access via FTP.
I really can't see how Sony is going to make people pay $1000 for something unefficient they can get for half the price.
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
Apparently it's OK for Sony to do this, but if you were to start a company and make a similar device, Sony would be one of the first companies lining up to sue you for violating the laws they bought. Does anyone else see a problem with this?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
The title is misleading. This is not an MP3 player. The songs are stored in Sony's own format.
Also, this device can copy from any audio source, digital or analog. That means CDs, tapes, radio and even your PC (when it is playing music).
Sony has not attempted to build CD to MP3 ripper/player. This is a digital jukebox very similar in concept to TiVo.
All your favorite sites in one place!
This Sony products sounds very similar to the RioCentral from SonicBlue. The RioCentral rips a CD that you insert, grabs cd track info from cddb, and stores on 40GB drive in mp3 format. It has USB ports for connecting your portable MP3 player, and you can connect it to the rest of your network with the ethernet port. A feature it has over the Sony model is that it can also burn CDs that you mix. You can also transfer files to and from the unit over the network. The only feature sony seems to have on this guy is the ability to tune to radio stations.
See:
Escient Fireball
Audieorequest ARQ2 Pro
-Andrew
did I leave anything out?
Yeah, "Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of..."
Other than that, you got most of them.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
from the article
"It can just as easily store the music on your tapes or even vinyl records, thanks to the analog and digital audio inputs on the back, or even from the built-in radio."
Hrmm...so I guess a person could hook their computer's digital out on their sound card directly to the digital in on the Sony unit and copy the entire contents in one big stream over a few days. Not ideal, and certainly not what they intended.
Of course the $1000 price tag makes absolutely no sense. One could build a new micro-atx mini system that would sit in about the same footprint for less than that, and it would do a whole lot more.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
I wish someone would make something like this for the car. There are multi-disc changers, but they hold, at most, 10 cds and are often mounted in the trunk. I'd love the versatility of a large range of music, without...
- having to juggle which cds are in my car and are in my house
- the mess of many cds sitting around in the car
- not being able to play a cd because it wouldn't be safe drive while trying to find it
- the chance that my cds will be stolen/damaged
MP3 cd players are nice, but I still have to select a playlist and keep the cd up-to-date with my favorites.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
it also doesn't save them to MP3 format, it uses sony's own ALTRAC3 format.
Xaotik Designs
so where is the ability to schedule recording of radio shows??
I dont care about auto-cd-ripping.. I can rip cd's just fine and with a decent encoder (I guarentee that this toy doesnt have a top-class encoder)
Hey sony, why not make products that people actually want! encode from radio or line-in.... or better yet ethernet on the back so I can play my 95,354,232.12 songs I have already encoded...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Here in Sweden digital radio broadcasting MP2 music has already been cut down to a minimum. There were no killer application like this, not even any players for sale. Whenever they plan for the next technical standard with a lifespan of 50+ years they'd better get support from the industry first.
I predict that the next big thing will be suffocated by licencing costs.
I'm not sure the 10GB iPod can hold 300 CDs worth of music of comparable quality.
Easy enough to figure out. Assume the average CD holds 50 minutes of music. That's 900k seconds of music. So, to fit it in 10GB you'd need an average rate of 11kB/s or 88kb/s. I'd prefer to have about double that bitrate minimum. Incidentally, I'm about halfway through ripping all my CDs, and have used 20GB for 3,267 tracks on 257 CDs.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
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
This unit only has regular analog audio out, like any other piece of audio equipment. So there is no way to take the digital music back out. That is the kind of copying they can support, one-way and in a proprietary format.
I'll wager that it is an ordinary audio CD player in there too(rather than a CD-ROM player), so that it can play their copy-protected CDs, which means that the audio goes from digital to analog before encoded back to digital.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
I, personally, would reserve judgement on calling this device a "Tivo for music" until I get a little more info on how expandable it is. Half the reason Tivo has such a great community of supporters is the fact that you can mod them out and do so many things with them that the designers didn't fill in themselves (network cards, bigger drives, new software to run it, etc). If Sony can give those same capabilities with this device, then they might actually earn the honor of being compared with the Tivo line.
This tagline is umop apisdn.
I only wish it used a format that was closer to standard, and let you pull tracks to other media
With the SDMI comliant^h^h^h^h^h lawsuit avoiding players out there, it ain't gonna happen. A copy of a copy is a no-no. Get used to this. The only way it will die is if nobody buys this. Unfortunately nobody will release anything else due to the attack lawyers awaiting a target. Ya gotta walk a very tightrope to put out a player that the public will buy and will keep you out of the court system.
Current standards are not going to be supported anymore except by write and erease players.
An player that will serial copy from one player to another is a device that will be soon under legal attack.
The truth shall set you free!
If you use Linux or Windows, you have a TiVo for the radio now. See Linux Radio Timeshift HOWTO.
If you use Windows, try: Nowhere Man - Messer's Home Page.
There is probably something for the Mac, but I wouldn't know.
Both solutions require that you have an external radio tuned to the station that you want or a Radio Card you can control from your OS. Unfortunately neither Windows or Linux is capable of waking up from a deep sleep via the computer's clock (this is ridiculous, somebody should fix this and offer a smarter computer/BIOS), so it isn't exactly the same as a VCR for the radio. But if you leave your computer on all the time anyway, it doesn't matter.
Dara Parsavand
...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.
Unless you count on-board video [as] "normal PC s"
The original Macintosh computer had on-board video. So did the Fat Mac, Plus, SE, Classic, and SE30. So did the IIsi, IIci, IIvx, Performa, and LC models. So did the old iMac and the G4 Cube. So do the current eMac and iMac machines. So do all laptop and tablet computers. In fact, the only Apple computers not to have on-board video were the too-expensive-for-most-home-users models: II, IIx, IIcx, IIfx, some Macintosh Quadra models, and the desktop and tower Power Macintosh computers.
win-modems
The first internal modem for a PowerBook computer was a winmodem. Some winmodems are actually real modems that use a language other than Hayes AT to talk to the CPU; others (the HSP models) are in essence glorified sound cards.
The top of the line G4 with a 17" studio display is: $4,548.00
Yes, but families wanting an entry-level computer often don't have $1,099 for Apple's bottom of the line computer, the eMac. (Please, no extensible editor jokes.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
You know how some people resent Microsoft for its size and ambition? Well, here's a conversation starter: Why don't people resent Sony?
Moderators: you're going to be tempted to hit "Offtopic" here, but keep in mind the above is a direct quote from the article and I'm commenting on it.
I don't know ANYONE who resents Microsoft for its size and success. But somehow, when the topic of conversation turns to Microsoft and the people with whom I'm conversing with are dazzled by Microsoft's phenomenal position in the industry, concerns about Microsoft get answered with "You're just jealous!"
That ain't it. We're disturbed by Microsoft's apparent ambition of total control over the desktop computing experience (or computing experience in general). About the prospect of not being able to work with a computer w/o HAVING to use a piece of Microsoft's software.
Size and success have nothing to do with it.
Maybe being an Apple advocate for many years does turn your brain to mush. David Pogue should know better.
(I use and love a Powerbook, Apple fans, just in case you want to flame).
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Note that when you buy a new Sony Minidisc recorder to record music on you minidisc....you can't upload that music to a different machine than the one used to record it.
SOny is doing everything to lock you down. Don't buy this ting. I have their Minidisc recorder, which is cool, but I can't transfer files from my work pc to my home one using the MD.
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...
When I read the part about it using an 8-track format, I knew it was sorry.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Take the Minidisc. Beautful piece of kit. Small, light, long battery life, very cheap digital media, feature packed. Lovely. Ideal for sticking your MP3's on there. LP2 compression and two albums (22 odd tracks for 3 UKP). Pretty good going.
But nooooo. Sony come up with a one way device, with flakey software that requires you to check in and check out your songs. That is, they place restrictions on the music that YOU own. Once the music is on the minidisc, you can't do anything with it, but check it back out again (yep, the MD won't let you delete it).
Oh yes, and you have to convert it to Sony's music format (ATRAC) - so now you have two music formats floating about on your HD.
So, in short, what could have been a pretty damn good MP3 app, gets absolutely shafted and restricted up to the hilt because on one hand Sony wants to capitalise on the MP3 boon but on the other wants to kill it dead and replace it with something more controlling.
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