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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--
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.
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.)
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
If you read down in the article it does say 'CD and Radio'. No more missing your talk radio show!
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
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.
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!
Does this mean that Sony will sue itself for creating an circumvention device?
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.
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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.
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
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.
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...