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New Walkman-Branded Hard Disk Player
Darian writes "Following on the heels of Commodore's introduction of portable digital music players Sony has stepped up to the plate with their first Walkman branded product. Reuters has the story and The Register has a couple more photos. Gizmodo has an anonymous tip from a Sony insider. The NW-HD1 is a 'credit card-sized' 8.9m x 6.2 x 1.4cm unit fitted with a 20GB 1.8in hard drive. There's enough RAM on board to provide 25 minutes of skip-free playback. There's a seven-line LCD for track information and player status data. "We couldn't come up with something using the Walkman brand until it survived the 1 meter (3 ft 3.37 in) drop test," said Robert Ashcroft, senior vice president of Sony network services Europe. So digital music rights had nothing to do with it? Right. The unit is planned to undercut the iPod price point. Apple lawyers do have the upper hand with the scroll wheel." Update: 07/01 21:34 GMT by T : It's also the Walkman's 25th birthday; read on for more.
Player Blog writes "The Sony Walkman, icon of the 80s and direct ancestor of the iPod and its ilk, first hit the streets 25 years ago. I don't know if July 1, 1979 was the actual first day for the Walkman, but Sony is celebrating it today. I had one, I loved it and I thought it was the greatest invention ever. Take a trip down memory lane with the history and photos at the Walkman Museum."
Doesn't Atari's paddle controller count as prior art?
Responsibility is the punishment for compentenc
It only plays the ATRAC format, which sounds like garbage. I'll dig up the listening test article later. The Ipod does so well because Apple prefers that people use the AAC format, but supports MP3, because that's where the money is.
i use linux and windows oh god how can i have an opinion
now if they cut the price of this to less than 200 dollars, I might consider it. As of now, I'll stick with my giant 200 Gig harddrive based computer-mp3 player in my car.
Looks very slick but my concerns are:
1. The jog wheel, looks AWFULLY small. Look at the guy's thumb on that!
2. That green-lit color screen doesn't look too friendly on the eyes.
8.9 metres? And that's a portable walkman is it? What will these wacky foreigners think of next? :)
This is not a sig
I was wondering when this would come about. A lot of other compnaies, notably Creative, have ventured onto the HDD walkman market already. But with a big player like Sony involved, maybe we could see a little competition in this market.
Although in exchange for cheaper walkmen we could be subjected to DRM Hell.
P.S.
What happened that other story?
May the Maths Be with you!
From The Register:
The NW-HD1's primary format is Sony's own ATRAC 3 Plus - other formats are converted to that mode when they're transferred over to the player.
So... If I transfer parts of my existing collection (MP3 and OGG Vorbis), it'll get "re-encoded" into the ATRAC format? Will this lead to a loss of sound quality?
Craig
Still, it give me a reason to ignore their latest music player, just as I have their earlier efforts for the same reason. And the price no doubt.
Sony must be clearly flush with cash if they can afford to put people off their products so readily.
How can Sony expect this to take off using their own "special" format that can't be shared, transferred or otherwise used with other players and music stores? What's Sony thinking? Where's the logic behind this?!
- other formats are converted to that mode when they're transferred over to the player.
When will Sony ever learn ?
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
Reg Kit Watch Sony today announced yet another attempt to displace the iPod from the top of the digital music hardware charts.
But unlike the clunky-looking players launched in the Japanese market, the European model appears a serious challenger for Apple's market leadership.
The NW-HD1 is a "credit card-sized" 8.9 x 6.2 x 1.4cm unit fitted with a 20GB 1.8in hard drive. There's enough RAM on board to provide 25 minutes of skip-free playback. There's a seven-line LCD for track information and player status data.
The device uses USB 2.0 to hook up to a PC running Sony's own SonicStage software, from which consumers will soon be able to download songs from the European Sony Connect online store - which appears to have entirely failed to launch in June, as promised.
The NW-HD1's primary format is Sony's own ATRAC 3 Plus - other formats are converted to that mode when they're transferred over to the player.
In addition to the NW-HD1, Sony will also release the Vaio Pocket Music Player VGF-AP1, which recently debuted in Japan, though Europe will get two models - 20GB and 40GB - rather that just one.
The player sports a 2.2in, 320 x 256 26,000-colour LCD - "designed to be viewed in daylight without difficulty", Sony claims - and can download photography from a digital camera, Sony said. In that respect, it's pitched more at next Christmas' Microsoft Personal Media Center devices than the iPod, a fact confirmed by its October 2004 availability. It will ship with earphones and a USB 2.0 connection cradle that doubles as its battery recharge unit. Sony claims the Lithium Ion battery will provide 20 hours' playback time.
The device sports Sony's G-Sense interface which maps sectors of the display onto a series of 25 buttons. The handheld unit measures 11.5 x 6.3 x 1.7cm, but the right-hand side rear bulges out to 2.7cm thanks to the battery. The VGF-AP1 weighs 195g.
The NW-HD1 is scheduled to ship in Europe in August. Before then, early this month, Sony will ship a pair of Flash-based players, the NW-E55 and NWE75. Just over 2.5cm in length and 40g in weight, they offer up to 256MB of storage capacity and are each powered by a AAA battery - enough, says Sony, for 70 hours' playback. Both have a backlit LCD and a colour silver (NW-E75), or blue, red or pearl (NW-E55).
Prices were not disclosed.
Sony's been in the portable digital music player for some time, but it's lack of support for the MP3 format has hindered its success, as has its preference for its own MiniDisc format. That has kept it away from the hard drive-based player segment, which has allowed Apple and others, like iRiver and Creative, to build up strong market share.
Sony will have to work hard to counter the brand awareness Apple has in the digital music player and store sector, but its established presence in the portable music hardware market will take it a long way. Early indications suggest Connect isn't much good, but the Walkman brand certainly is and we expect Sony's players to be too. Sony's kludgy MP3 support may hinder it, but if Apple can get away with what is essentially its own music format, so can Sony. ®
The NW-HD1's primary format is Sony's own ATRAC 3 Plus - other formats are converted to that mode when they're transferred over to the player.
Anyone know if the conversion is done on the walkman or by the host computer? Sounds like it'll slow down the transfer rates, and reduce audio quality (transferring between formats multiple times can't be good)...
No Norm, those are your safety glasses; I'll wear my own thanks...
"We couldn't come up with something using the Walkman brand until it survived the 1 meter (3 ft 3.37 in) drop test,"
Damn it, I'm over 1 meter tall, guess I'll have to wait for the next model..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
This shows how nasty their format sounds compared to Ogg, mp3, aac, wma, and mpc. The test is done with multiple listeners ranking them from 1-5. Pretty well done, and now I'm probably going to be making the move to ogg once I start ripping my own stuff. Well, that, and moving my home pc to gentoo.
i use linux and windows oh god how can i have an opinion
According to the Yahoo article, it'll ship at about $400, undercutting Apple's 40GB iPod which retails for $499. Am I the only one here who noticed that it's not really undercutting? I mean.. I'm no Apple junkie, but $99 more for double the capacity, are we really fair saying Sony is undercutting?
I'm always right and I can prove it, because to the best of my knowledge, I've never been wrong.
Yes, definitely. It's one of the most stupid moves Sony could make. Even if there was no loss in quality who wants to have to convert their whole collection?
If you want a hard drive music player that supports OGG then have a look at the iriver hp140 also includes an FM Tuner
"The NW-HD1's primary format is Sony's own ATRAC 3 Plus - other formats are converted to that mode when they're transferred over to the player."
.. I have a feeling this won't be much different (ok I conceed nothing but iTunes syncs with the iPod out of the box - but at least it handles things in standard mp3/4 rather than realaudio)
Afaik that is the same format as they use in their newer Minidisc's - and it's a BIG mistake in my opinion and not just because it needs to do on-the-fly conversions.
Simplicity would be nice.
The 'NetMD' minidiscs sucked because nothing but realplayer (still haven't forgiven them) could sync with them
Jon - TheSpork
Satan must be investing in a nice down parka at this moment.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
I don't see why MiniDisc hasn't been a bigger format than it is. Sony is pretty much jumping the competition by releasing High-Capacity MD recorders in the near future, with MDs that hold 1 GB as opposed to 180 MB on the current MDs (don't quote me on those specs). Why would you limit yourself to the size of a hard disk when you can carry around a few tiny discs that have hours upon hours of high-quality music on them (in ATRAC format). Speaking of ATRAC format, I believe that it sounds pretty swell. If I'm correct, the current spec is ATRAC3. ATRAC is similar to the way MP3s are encoded -- simply shed the ultra-low and ultra-high end frequencies that the human ear supposedly can't hear and save space (obviously more goes into compression than just this). I think MP3 sounds really good when done in high-quality VBR, but ATRAC3 sounds pretty decent too when encoded at highger bit-rates. Nothing will ever beat the warmth of vinyl or the superiority of DVD-Audio, however!
Two freaks, no foes. It takes absolutely nothing to make some people angry.
As with Sony's other players, the NW-HD1 plays songs in the company's proprietary ATRAC format only, meaning it is not compatible with other online stores and cannot play tunes in the popular MP3 format.
This product will fail!
Conserve Oil, Recycle, Boycott Walmart
Like microsoft, Sony as grown stupid, and believe that their approach will always be right. Just Like Beta.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
surprised yet glad to see Sony finally embracing new(er) technology for delivering music.
I remember reading an article on Wired about the civil war going on inside sony. The hardware side wants to build music devices giving consumers the features they want, while the entertainment (music/movies) side wants to restrict what consumers can do with their content.
quoting from the article, Keiji Kimura the vice VP at Sony headquarters in Japan, said this on the ipod "We do not have any plans for such a product," says Kimura, the smile fading. "But we are studying it."
I for one am excited about this product. More competition in the HD based protbles can only be good for consumers
... Does anyone else think that if your hard drive player is skipping, you've got more problems than your music being interrupted? Don't hard drives hate getting knocked around? Don't heads smash into platters when you bounce them around? Sure, it's got a long-ass skip buffer, but what good is it when the hard drive is trashed from you jumping up and down?
So, I can get an iPod for $499 and store 40GB of songs, or spend $100 less and get *half* the storage. *shaking head*
*font=sarcasm* Who are the marketing geniuses at Sony?!? */font*
...consumers will soon be able to download songs from the European Sony Connect online store - which appears to have entirely failed to launch in June, as promised.
Nice of them to promise it will fail to launch, I think. Saves us the trouble of griping and complaining about it after the fact.
You don't walk around with your portable music player on your head, do you?
"You should never doubt what nobody is sure about." -- Willy Wonka
Sorry Dave I cant do that
Mmm... Sony is making a portable music device which uses a proprietary music format to cut down on piracy. However, the portable device is 40 gigs, so it will hold about 10,000 songs. At a buck a song, that's 10,000 bucks. The product will last three years, tops before it dies. Who in the fuck is going to spend $10,000 on music in three fucking years?!?! That's buying 9 songs per day, everyday, for three years!
Furthermore, it appears that it cannot be used as a portable hard drive.
Thus, the ONLY way this new device could be useful to consumers is if they infringe copyrights and download music illegally. If that's the obvious intent of the product, then why does Sony even bother with its ATRAC 3 Plus format and give the people what they want?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Now if i could only eat enough mcdonald's meals to get 13,000 free sony connect songs!
here is another link to the story, if the first one craps out, as they usually do.
i use linux and windows oh god how can i have an opinion
Who modded this insightful?
It's 25 minutes of memory is used for antiskip. It has a 20GB harddrive for storage.
-Reid
Imagine if all your credit cards actually *were* the size of this "credit card sized" device... Your wallet would be more like a laptop case and would weigh about 30lbs. I wish they wouldn't keep exaggerating the sizes of products...
SO why didn't they name this device the HardMan?
This account has been seized by the GNAA. That is all.
Is the only way to move data onto this device through Sony's proprietary SonicStage application, or does it do the sensible thing and give you file system access to the box as a USB storage device?
If not, this is just a hard-disk MiniDisc, with the same stupid music-only restriction that killed the MiniDisc players.
You don't even have to read the article to understand that the 25 minutes are the amount of music that can be kept in RAM, not on the HD. WTF do you get an 'Insightful' for?
the test unit had a 40GB disk coupled with enough RAM to hold 25 minutes of music
The 25 minute storage is just a RAM buffer. It has a 20GB hard drive as the main storage.
This product will fail!
:-P
"Who cares", said the music companies, applauding the fact that it at least didn't support formats without DRM.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I've been researching MP3 players and found the Neuros. It has an extensive list of different formats, including Ogg as well as the others.
The key features of the Neuros that are motivating me to buy one are the "record stream from FM" (as well as record from any audio input or onbord mic) to MP3 or WAV, and the "broadcast low power FM" (so I can listen through my car stereo on an unused frequency.)
To be balanced, though: there were some user complaints about the power level of the FM broadcast not being sufficient, but these were not universal. The Neuros II, which seems to have come out in the past couple of days, is supposed to help fix some of the version 1 drawbacks.
Frankly, about the only thing the Neuros lacks now are 100bT with on board Apache, 802.11[abg] interfaces (it has USB 2.0), but there don't seem to be many player/recorders out there with those right now.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
its Ogg not OGG
Assuming, of course, that you decide to dump all your songs to the player's RAM instead of the 20gig hard drive. Which would be pretty stupid, if you ask me.
25 minutes is how long it will play while you're jogging. If you're training for a marathon, these things suck. I'm out there for four hours. And yes, while you're jogging, it doesn't get one good read in from the hd for the whole 25 minutes. This applies to iPod as well.
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
ok?! why not compare it to the 20G iPod, being as it is that the Sony one is a 20G player as well?
the 20G iPod costs $399 as of now (and probably less when the sony is launched...).
Sure, back when tapes were all the rage, "Walkman" was the generic term for portable music. Sony has already missed the boat. These days, it's "iPod". Everybody knows what an iPod is, and what it looks like. It has become as generic as "Xerox" or "Kleenex".
Also, people who buy portable digital music players (especially expensive ones) ALREADY have thousands of songs in whatever format they like, most likely mp3. Given the choice between one that plays mp3s and one that converts to ATRAC, they will choose the mp3 player.
Wow! It's just like your own personal radio station. Just add payola!
The device uses USB 2.0 to hook up to a PC running Sony's own SonicStage software
So that means apart from the fact that i have to rely on Sonys proprietary Formats for the audio and i need Windows just to interface with the thing i can't even use the thing as an external HD? How silly is that?
When i buy what is in effect a 20GB HD with headphones i want to be able to carry some data on that. Now my mobile doubles as digital camera, organizer, handheld game and whatnot, but that sony thing serves only as a walkman just because they lobotomized the PC-Interface?
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Volumes (in cubic centimeters)
iPod mini: 59
Walkman HD: 77
iPod: 100
Pretty good for a 20GB unit, though! I'll probably stick with iPod for myself.
If your hard drive is skipping, the playback of your music is probably the least of your concern.
You would think the cradle this thing uses would support FireWire/i.Link as well as USB 2.0. Sony helped to develop the technology, and they use it in their Vaio PCs to boot. If they are already using their own tech for the codec, why not for the connection interface?
Those who complain about affect & effect on
"credit card-sized' 8.9m x 6.2 x 1.4cm " 8.9 meters!! Holy crap, what kind of credit cards to they use in Japan??!!
I have a CD collection of over 500 CDs, throw in about 40LPs i've copied.
I've spent less than 10 bucks in an online music store.
These devices aren't for people to get into music, They are IMHO devices for people who already love and own alot of music.
I own a 40gig iPod and it's filled to the gills with my own music NOT from an online store.
granted, you have to spend the money to buy CDs and records anyways, but that's part of being a music lover.
"It'll destroy you if you try to make it mean anything to anyone but yourself." - Henry Rollins
Don't even get me started about the whole SOny DRM issue with the ATRC files on their players
..........FULL STOP.
More than this - for me part of the attraction of an HDD player is it can double as a portable hard drive. I actually own a minidisc portable - I use it for exactly one thing, as a one-button live recorder, and it works really pretty good at that (for battery life, size and ease, compared to others I've tried). But because of Sony's blinkered insistence on confounding the potential of their hardware, it is fundamentally just an analog recording device for my purposes. Post recording basically all I can do is output analog via the headphone jack - sorta stupid, IMHO. As I said, at the time I bought it it came out best comparing price point, sound quality, size/weight, battery life, media capacity, and simplicity. It beats microtape recorders hands down. I imagine HDD based recorders that write (I would hope) straight to WAV files will come around price wise.
But if I'm going to drop a fair piece of change on an HDD recorder (and I'm not yet convinced I need one) I want to be able to put data OF WHATEVER FORMAT I WANT on it. I can at least sort of justify the price then.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
No one wants to use Atrac.
I used a Sony Minidisc for about a year until I grew tired of the ultimately CRAPPY quality of the Sony Software. It literally took 6-7 minutes to import, convert, and transfer just 10 songs to the device, using a 2ghz, high-end system at the time. And that is when the program didnt crash all by itself.
And then, there is no 'one click transfer/convert'. You had to import all your mp3's into the 'library', which made another physical copy of the file, then it converts it, and saves the Atrac to your hard drive, yet again.
When will companies learn that we do not want DRM, or custom formats.
www.allofmp3.com - click the "english" link if you don't speak russian. Its the best legal music download service you can imagine.
"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated." - Voltaire
For better results, don't try running with a frickin' hard drive.
The money is the brand, and everything else is second. While Apple may have a current spike in popularity, Sony is and always has been THE name for portable music. As soon as this hits the shelves, it's going to change the world for Apple, and for the worse.
I may have to disagree with you on this. The Sony MiniDisc didn't fare so well even though it was a Sony product. Or Beta. Hell...Betamax was even BETTER than VHS, but that didn't stick. The iPod supports the major music standard right now and it may be quite a fight for Sony to try to say "hey everyone, try this new one even though it won't work with..."
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
I bought the Sony NW-E10 when it came out - a solid state player that was pretty damn swish (again, when it came out). It worked fine, was small BUT the software that came with it was appalling. Slow, prone to crashing and a resource hog.
I won't be buying a Sony product again if it involves their own software.
They have a record label. If they want to only supply tracks to their own store, they can and apple will be shut out. AOL TIME WARNER has done the same thing putting videos online exclusively for aol members. They also tried this for a while with minidiscs. Some albums came out for minidisc well before cd or cassette ( at least in Japan).
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I'll admit...it looks kinda cool, but I still think Apple has it correct with the simple design. It just works...plain and simple. And have you ever been driving down the street and have to try to find songs, adjust volume, etc? I myself like the simpler designs. That's it...no long diatribe about why one design is better than another...I just think simplicity is good and it appears that many other mp3 player users (ie, iPod owners) think so too.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
That matters.
Walkman: used industry standard cassettes
Portable CD Player: uses industry standard CD's
Sony ATRAC player: For Sony by Sony
Sony "portable music player": Uses proprietary format.
Notice a pattern here? This thing is DOA. Take it to the bank.
if the software needed to use this thing is anything like sony's mini disc players they have rendered a great looking product virtually un useable.
I thought everyone was using a Gigabeat by now. iPods are too damn big and clunky.
Everyone please take note.
My car gets 40 rods to hog's head and that's the way I likes it
" unless you are willing to spend about $10,000, that's the only way you could fill it."
Not all music which is legally obtainable costs money. Riaa isn't the only ones who make music as much as they would like it to be.
The first time that someone unfamiliar with DRM Hell finds that they can't play one of their music recordings because the manufacturer specifically designed the unit not to play a recording for corporate reasons alone (which is is DRM is), then there will be an intense anger towards the product and the company that sold it.
For this reason alone, Apple should welcome the low-cost competitions that don't play MP3. [They should, however, not be as blatently and embarrassingly arrogant as they were when the welcomed the IBM PC.]
MP3 is the world standard for digital music files. Every other digital music format is rightly seen as just a corporate scam to suck money out of customers. OGG is an exception, but OGG will never amount to anything until its files are transparently interchangable with MP3 files and work on players that only play MP3. When I say 'only' play MP3, I mean it plays MP3 along with whatever proprietary worthless corporate format that the unit was bundled with (such as whatever Apple has on the iPod along with MP3).
A corporate digital music player that only plays the corporate recordings that customers purchased from the corporation in a propropietary format is nothing more that an overpaid marketing executive's 'wet dream' (or, a sexual fantasy sleep dream that results in nocturnal orgasm, for those who are not familiar with this American expression when used as metaphor. We are an international audience here on Slashdot.) Such a product will flop in the real world regardless of its price or tech specs, as Sony is about to find out.
Sometimes I almost feel sorry for these guys that are so caught up in a corporate groupfuck that they have to blow away hundreds of millions of dollars in obviously stupid products before they finally release something successful. Especially when they could have had it right the first time if they had just asked us what we wanted to buy in the first place and taken our answers seriously.
Why bother with sony (one of the bad guy companies), when there is already a great hard drive solution on the market that is cheaper, and more compatible than the alternatives. I've had my rio karma for almost a month now (after years of searching for a viable portable music player), and I have no regrets. I can easily upload music to it from my linux environment, the "nipple" (:-D) control is easier to use than the ipod, and it plays all my ogg-vorbis (and flac also if I had any) files with no problems!
donfede
"Both devices use Sony's ATRAC3 music format and also play back MP3, WAV and WMA audio formats."
Sloppy reporting on news.com.com, or an error for the Register?
Not sure why, but this thread reminded me of the old "paddles" that we had with my old Apple II plus. These were basically hand-held wheels that spun 360% before coming to a stop.
My brother and I spent hours playing an old game called "Olympic Decathalon" that would make the XBox generation cringe. One event, the shot-put, required a complex simultaneous twist of both paddle controllers.
My brother never got the hang of this event and I would repeatedly crush him. Thanks for the memory...
slashsearch.org - slashdot search. powered by google.
Sony has stepped up to the plate with their first Walkman branded product.
Umm... no. I'm fairly sure Sony have released products under the Walkman brand before.
We know you are interested in using the Connect music store. Unfortunately SonicStage only works on Windows 98SE and above. We have no immediate plans to support other operating systems at this time. However, we believe this is an important user base and we hope to support it in the future.
Gee, thanks I say.
A quick look around for something to mimic Sonicstage comes up with zero, so forget it. I'm not going to waste hundreds of dollars for a device I have no hope of using. I'm not willing to purchase Windoze for the privilege of spending weeks of my life converting all of my music to Sony's ownership with a file format I can't use anywhere else.
As a side note, I'm still very happy with my Zaurus' performance as a music player. With a large enough CF, I get plenty of play time out of it with ogg or mp3.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
no, you're wrong ! 1 mile is longer than 1 kilometer ...
AWx
I think now that Sony has responded with a "Consumer" oriented Hard disk player branded as a "Walkman" in this way ; it beckons a new era in portable music players; Soon we will see the rest of the consumer electronics manufacturers following suit and the iPod will go down in the history books as an overly priced "design classic".
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
I can understand if poor grammar exist in the discussions with shorthand or acronyms. However, this is just bad. Any thoughts on this Commander Taco?
My frist reaction to this article was excitement - Sony does make quality products, and the size, battery life and appearance made it look mighty tempting. Sadly, its whats under the hood that counts.
I own a Sony netMD walkman, and let me tell you, that thing is a beast - surviving long drops, falling into a pool and enduring nuclear winters. However, the idiots at sony insist on using the atrac format which is their way of enforcing DRM (you can only check the song out 3 times before you have to check one of them in) and you cant check in music that you record from an external source.
Because they refuse to open source their drivers for encoding and transferring atrac to the MD player, you're stuck with their (extremely buggy) software (OpenMG Jukebox). It crashes my computer every time I attempt to transfer, which results in glitches in audio. The audio quality itself of atrac isn't too bad, but, as a result of having experienced the frustration of putting my mp3s onto my MD player, I'll pass on this and get something that isn't anal (ipod or iriver!)
Putting the 'laughter' in 'manslaughter'Its all fun and games until someone loses an eye... then its just fun.
I'm sure it will fit in nicely right behind my 1.4 cm thick Visa card. Seriously, they've played that term to death. Can't we just describe it as "smaller than an iPod"?
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
Hasn't anyone else noticed this?
Look at a Sony branded CD-R drive. It says "Make audio CDs" right on it as one of the features. What good is a mini-disc player if you can't copy music to it? (or a tape playing Walkman for that matter) Now a hard drive based music player? This is all part of the plan I think.
Sony knows the score. They want money, and they know that the type of piracy that takes place over the internet helps sales.
So for the music or game industry they create an illusion that they are tough on piracy. They make a lot of angry press releases and "Digital Rights Management," to appease the industry, but they leave their copy protected media very easy to circumvent. They would lose money if they didn't.
And if they get some money from lawsuit against a 15-year-old... BONUS!
That is what upsets me so much about Sony. They'll prosecute piracy, then reap the rewards by helping it to continue, and they don't care who pays.
Nobody seems to think much of ATRAC3 itself, but that's not the truly awful part anyway.
The awful part is that they're talking about taking data that's already been mutilated by an MP3 encoder, and then mutilating what's left by encoding it again. MP3 gives you an approximation of the CD. Sony's player will give you an approximation of the approximation.
But this is why Sony's not crazy: The users can't hear the difference. Most users insist that 128k MP3s "sound just like the CD". These are the same people who think that the brown things at McDonald's "taste just like a hamburger". You can call them idiots all you like, but they won't listen. That's because they think you "sound just like their neurotic Aunt Mamie who checks her lampshades for dust every ten minutes".
I'm not kidding. 128k MP3s clobbered CDs in the marketplace, and 128k MP3s are pure crap. They sound worse than lacquer 78s. They're worse than cassette tapes, the previous record-holder for "shittiest sound available anywhere". Sound quality is not a selling point, period. LPs survived alongside cassettes because you could access them randomly, not because they sounded better (in fact, after a few years on some idiot's floor gathering gouges and dog hair, they sounded worse than cassettes anyway).
Few of the technical deficiencies of this product are relevant. The time spent re-encoding all the files may well piss customers off, but I guarantee you that few if any of them will care that their music sounds like a water balloon in a garbage disposal.
I've never yet met anybody who'll admit to posting on Slashdot. So who are all these people?!
My car isn't 'useless' when I'm the only person in it or the boot is empty.
Something is useful for what it is doing. What it could be doing but isn't is irrelevant.
It's certainly better that the device has over-capacity rather than under-capacity especially if increased capacity doesn't shift the price point significantly. You don't have to buy music within the three year lifetime of the product. You might already have some. I have just over 4000 tracks I could stick on such a thing now.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Apple lawyers do have the upper hand with the scroll wheel.
Provided you like the scroll wheel, that is. The scroll wheel is one of the reasons I don't like the iPod (poor battery life and lack of USB charging capability being others).
"8.9m x 6.2 x 1.4cm"
That's gotta be the biggest MP3 player in history. That's longer than our house, actually, I'd need a garage just for that thing. Guess it has a huge battery life though.
The Register article noted that atrac3plus would be used, which is better-sounding than atrac3 at the same bitrate. However, Roberto's listening test compared atrac3, not atrac3plus, because a bitrate near 128 kbit/s for this codec wasn't available in Sony's software encoder, SonicStage 2.
BTW, Roberto is currently conducting a low-bitrate streaming test (32 kbit/s), and everybody is invited to participate.
ff123
I'm pretty sure ATRAC was used on minidiscs which sounded great (I have an old minidisc player/ can't tell it appart from a CD). I'm one of the few that still uses one, but they don't skip and are good on batteries.
Mini Disc is an exampple of a good idea killed by too much restrictions. (Musicians like recording on it but couldn't upload digitially./ Convert mp3->atrac to dump music digitally from a computer??)
I guess they've lowered the bit rate way too much for newer players to be able to market large number of minutes per disc. ATRAC doesn't hold up very well at low bit rates apparently.
There's simply no debate about portable MP3 players any more. Apple released 3 generations and one sub-brand of the iPod in a few years, each one achieving critical acclaim and market dominance. Review after review finds the user interface superior to any alternative out there. OGG doesn't matter to 99.99% of the users out there (and quite rightly so - being technically superior doesn't automatically guarantee universal takeup).
You can add music to iPods under any OS easily, and copy tracks off just as easily. There is absolutely no comparison. I'm not having a go, but the iPod has won hands-down across the board. Kinda like sticking your head up and calling Jesus a pimp.
"Supersize Me"
Oops... maybe that's not such a good idea.
Tim
While I don't doubt that atrac3plus sounds better than atrac3, I just want to point out that when it comes to perceptual codecs, subjective, blind listening tests of multiple samples by a panel of listeners is considered to be the gold standard of assessing sound quality.
Technical tests of a codec (such as frequency response graphs) are not nearly as important as what it actually sounds like.
ff123
Only plays atrac3 and requires special happy fun sony-brand software to work? Can you say dead on arrival?
I've noticed that the defects I do hear in the sound, guess what? THEY COME FROM THE FREAKING ORIGINAL SOURCE! ...[snip]... I was listening to the ATRAC3plus encoded tunes ...
If so, then maybe ATRAC3 doesn't suck as much as everybody's claiming (I'll believe nothing I hear from anybody until I hear the format myself). What's the bitrate? Were these tracks re-encoded from MP3s? If so, what were the MP3 bitrates? A 256k MP3 generally sounds tolerable (at least to my ears; hard-core golden-eared fanatics like Neil Young, who thinks CDs sound unacceptably bad, will no doubt find flaws everywhere). If you've got all the bitrates along the way cranked up to the point where the compression isn't mangling much audible information, why then of course the audible information won't be mangled much. But then the example is perfectly irrelevant, because the only case I was discussing was the case where naïve users leave all the settings on "default": 128kbps for MP3, the equivalent for ATRAC3. This is the only case that's commercially significant: On Kazaa or whatever, virtually all of the MP3s you see are 128k, they sound like crap, and they're wildly popular anyway. This is why improved CD formats have gained no traction: Zero demand. Zero.
If that's your case, if you're listing to an ATRAC3 (at any bitrate) re-encoded from a low-bitrate MP3, your perceptions probably aren't worth much. I've rarely heard a 128k MP3 which didn't have painfully audible compression artifact, bad enough to spoil the track. A few have been listenable, as in "the artifact is there, but it's not in my face to the point where I can't choose to ignore it." MP3 compression artifact, the "underwater sound", cannot be mistaken for conventional analog-source noise, not by anybody with any sense. It's a totally different animal. "Original CD"? Yes, I've compared the two.
All you're really saying is that you can't tell good sound from bad, so you don't much care. Right! That's my point. Most customers don't care if their MP3s sound like crap, so they won't care if their ATRAC3s sound like crap either.
I've never yet met anybody who'll admit to posting on Slashdot. So who are all these people?!
But, No MP3 = No Sale !
These dimensions describe the padding necessary to pass the "... 1 meter (3 ft 3.37 in) drop test,"
and just to disprove an earlier assertion, I'll be moving my home pc to gentoo.
In the Heise Article on http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/48768
(no idea how to create a link)
it says that the player will play without conversion:
Atrac3, MP3, WAV and WMA
ATRAC... 8-track... sound pretty similar, don't they? And the former will probably end up in the same market position as the latter!
There are adapters to use USB for charging - it just charges at 3/4th the rate.
And it's not like you couldn't EASILY convert something like this
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Sure, but the period over which that $10k is spent is potentially much longer: I'm 24 years old, and I've been buying CDs for 16 years. $10k over 16 years is an average of $625 per year. At an average of $10/CD (which might even be high, in my case--I got quite a few cheap CDs from those BMG or Columbia House deals, and then there are the the various CDs that I've bought for $~6 at Borders or Newbury Comics--some were used, some of them were just cheap), that's about 62 CDs per year, which sounds high at first consideration..., but ends up being reasonable. Five CDs every month? Ten CDs every two months? A thousand CDs after 16 years? I don't have quite that many CDs--I've got only about three hundred--but I've gone for many months without buying CDs, anbut I have several friends, younger than I, who do have thousands of them.
Of course, at $10/CD, I'm assuming an average of 10 tracks per CD to meet your figure of $1/track, and I'm not sure if that's accurate....
Now, if we've got to the point where we can accept twenty-somethings having $10k CD-collections, let's consider the thirty-somethings who've had another ten years to accumulate vinyl and cassettes....
-rozzin.
There are adapters to use USB for charging - it just charges at 3/4th the rate.
I see: so I should pay more, spend time tracking down some kind of USB charger from some third party, and accept a shorter battery life--for what? To look "cool"?
What will SONY give as an excuse for their next job 'restructuring'.
.mp3 .wma & Atrac3 players work quite well, I'm the owner of a SONY D-NE715.
SONY have been hawking God-awful ATRAC memory players for a while, always careful *not* to mention the little lock-in's (format) and woeful software.
Having said that, their range of CD Portable based
why do you have to pay more?
Sell your firewire cable on eBay - use those funds to buy the cable.
The parent said this was reason they didn't buy - nothing about cost.
I found a bunch of pictures of the walkman-branded hard-disk MP3 player. I think Sony's designers should go back and try a little harder.
I like your sig - I have another Radio Shack phrase:
"Yesterday's technology at tomorrow's prices." (from when they sold Tandy computers (which to the untrained mind were more expensive and less capable than other hardware).
I think it's fair to say that Cupertino used their legendary "copy machines" on many of Sony's ideas!
I was mildly dissapointed in my Dell-Pod, not because it doesn't work well (it gets 2x the battery life of my iPod and was $100 cheper!), but because it wasn't very stylish! I suspect Sony will make something stylish and useful.
Best Buy can have you arrested
Yep, totally stupid product.
I guess we know the content people at Sony won out over the hardware design team.
Do they have any idea how bad mp3 will sound after it's been converted to another lossless format?
This thing's dead in the water, with Sony not far behind.
Justice dept may be lax in policing an american software borg, but you better believe they would jump on a foreign company.
Even if Steve Jobs isn't a republican.
Sorry to bust your bubble, but according to http://www.macnn.com/news/24855 the iPod has 8% to 10% of the portable music player marketshare. Even the Apple claimed 25% would make it far from "no debate about portable MP3 players any more".
...is that it uses the ATRAC format, which sounds too much like eight-track, and we all know how well that one did.
nitpick: i think you meant "lossy", not "lossless"
Apple's players transcode other formats -- mp3 included -- to AAC.*
From that, how do you arrive at the conclusion that the iPod supports mp3 while Sony's players do not?
* I don't have an iPod, but this is my understanding. If it is not correct, please point me to a link. Thanks!
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
It looks incredibly hard to hold and operate with one hand. Why landscape? Why ATRAC? Sony has lost its way. I worry about PS3.
--Len
You're right, it's worse. Try to load an mp3, and it converts it into Atrac3Plus. By definition, it MUST sound worse after this, because you've compressed/decompressed it twice using lossy methods. It's akin to opening saving a TIFF as a JPEG, and saving it back to JPEG again.
Also, every comparison I've seen rates Atrac(and all its variants) well below AAC, or doesn't bother to rate it at all, given how only Sony uses it, and only sony seems insistent on forcing it on customers who really don't want it- virtually every Sony product to use it has been a dismal failure(witness MiniDisc).
Please help metamoderate.
...iPods play both mp3 and AAC natively. There is no transcoding. Obviously the iPod can play any format in existence (including ogg) if it is first transcoded to mp3/aac/wav.
Sony are hard headed. They have their own technology and they will use it no matter how sucky it is compared to the mainstream format (mp3, and the growing ogg).
...they only support Compact Flash on their very high-end cameras, because CF *is* the high-end camera standard, and they simply wouldn't sell/be taken seriously if they were Memory Stick only. (MS isn't available in high capacities like CF is.) Everything else is bloody Memory Stick (would love a SD/MMC slot on my Vaio laptop.)
They support compact-flash on most Sony devices now (especially cameras). The days of memory-sticks-only are over.
I have to think that ATRAC gives Sony an artificial sense of security. As we all know, DRM, by its very nature, will not work (as outlined by a previous /. thread).
I haven't done much digging on ATRAC as to how 'secure' it is, but I would suspect that if there isn't a crack already out there, then it's not because it is 'safe' but because no one is using it, there is no incentive to break the key. (Unlike, say iTunes, which was cracked in 24 hours of a new update).
This somewhat plays into my other suspicion (i know this could start a flame war) that the limited number of linux virus' isn't due to much better security (though I know a linux box IS more secure - primarily because linux isn't built for the 'lowest common denominator'), but can be more attributed to the lack of the penetration of linux into the market (versus 95+% of desktop machines running winblows and Outlook).
Back to the original subject - Converting MP3's to ATRAC can be described nicely as inconvenient, to painfully time consuming. I have an Sony NetMD minidisc player which would be great if I didn't have to convert all of my MP3's to ATRAC, and therefore have to keep duplicate folders of files (or else have to wait 18 seconds / song to convert each time I want to listen to it). If Sony would have allowed me to just 'drag and drop' an MP3 to the MiniDisc (like, say, an external hard drive...), they'd be golden.
Until then, people should stay FAR AWAY from Sony products.... Which i REALLY hate to say, since i own stock in their company :-(
But does it play Pitfall?
I returned it, and spent a few extra bucks for a 20GB iPod. Despite the shorter charge time on the iPod, the build quality is INSANELY good. It's practically all metal, still weighs light as heck, and the interface is godlike. Overall, I'd easily rate the iPod a 9/10 .. It would be a 10/10 if it supported Ogg. (FLAC isnt an issue, as the iPod has its own lossless format) I'd rate the Karma a 6/10 in the end. It just breaks too easy, and I was CAREFUL with it because I had read of other people having the same problems. It should have been a sign to just not buy it to begin with.
That said, if the next Karma is mostly metal, and VERY STURDY, i'd probably like to buy one.
I just bought a Karma too and aside from the crappy linux java transfer software, it's great.
If the Karma, with a nice form factor and all the formats it supports, can't get more mindshare, I don't see how Sony has a chance of gaining any marketshare with their unique format....
The Atari paddle is an orange to the iPod control wheel's apple... (Apple pun intended)
The Atari's paddle is IIRC, a potentiometer, like a volume control, (or it might be a rheostat...) a very simple variable-resistance device. Apple's controller is a solid-state device... really.
If there's prior art, it might belong to the touchpad pointing device most commonly found in laptops. Only round. The only truly novel thing about Apple's version is how touching the "wheel" is interpreted by the device, like a finger motion at the top to the right is interpreted as the same as a finger motion at the bottom to the left, or at the left up, etc., all the way around. The tap control long predates Apple's iPod.
Apple may however, have a case for preventing others from prefixing an English word with the lowercase letter "i". So Apple might be able to sue the Campbell's Soup Company for injunctive relief, and/or damages, if they ever come out with iMinistone, or iChicken Noodle.
iMMmmmmm....
Ok, 'default luser' put quotes around the phrase "CD Quality", so don't think I'm bitching at him, but...
... Now we're going to take all this stuff out... Now it is
What is CD quality? CD QUALITY IS CD QUALITY.
Lossy compression of CD QUALITY is NOT CD QUALITY.
Here's a CD
a) CD Quality
b) Less than CD Quality
c) I'm Deaf, you insensative clod!
The Correct answer is that CD Quality minus a bunch of information is LESS THAN CD QUALITY! Lossy compression is freakin lossy compression! There's no way around it! You can talk about how it sounds if you want (I say that on a good stereo the difference can be heard), but thats not really even the issue. It's an amount of information issue.
CD QUALITY = 16 bits, 44.1 kHz sampling rate, in stereo.
Something else is something else.
Lossy codecs are all DREAMING when they talk about 'cd quality'. FUCKEM!
Well, that and moving my home PC to Gentoo.
What a colossally stupid idea. Some managers should be canned for approving this. A portable player that doesn't play mp3s is nothing but an expression of hostility toward the customer -- and a useless device.
While the Neuros seems to have a lot of cool features, it would appear that Mac users need not apply. Here are the system requirements as taken from their website, for those who care:
OS: Microsoft® Windows 98SE/Me/2000/XP
CPU: Pentium 233MHz or higher
Memory: 64MB minimum
Hard Drive: 160MB
USB Port
Theoretically, yes. A lossy encoder (like MP3) works by throwing away parts of the original audio which a normal human wouldn't hear, using something called a psychoacoustic model. Re-encoding such lossy material, with ANOTHER lossy encoder, may result in the new encoder throwing away useful stuff that you could hear with the original. Three scenarios where the perceptible quality probably wouldn't change: 1. Low bitrate MP3 -> High bitrate (256 kbps ATRAC3 was "CD-quality" according to the Japanese review in an earlier post). Bloating 128 kbps MP3s to 256 kbps ATRAC will probably sound transparent. 2. Very high bitrate MP3 -> ATRAC3. If your source is a 256/320 kbps MP3, ATRAC3 should make a reasonably transparent conversion. Of course, if you use some shitty bitrate for ATRAC3, it'll show up in the results. 3. Garbage In, Garbage Out: If your source content is crap (Britney Spears, et al), you probably won't notice that the ATRAC3 version is somewhat crappier. Of course, 256 kbps is VERY high for "CD-quality" lossy encoding. LAME (MP3 encoder) achieves this very nicely for most music using VBR (variable bit rate) at around 192 kbps. Newer encoders such as Ogg Vorbis and AAC (MP4) do this at even lower bitrates, around 140-160 kbps. Sony could easily have designed an ATRAC3 container for MP3s, instead of this whole re-encoding rigmarole. The container could add whatever DRM and other crap they wanted to force on the user, maybe even encypting the original MP3 or something. Any portable that does NOT natively support MP3s (and soon, AAC/MP4s) is still-born. Sony are shooting themselves in the foot, as has become usual with their increasingly proprietary electronic devices.
I haven't read the specs for the Neuros II yet, but the problems with the Neuros 1 which stopped me buying one for the UK were:
... it's heavy, a little flaky and I can empty the batteries with one hard day at work, but it's great for the price!)
1) The FM transmitter is illegal in the UK
2) The FM tuner could only (IIRC) get "odd" frequencies (like 102.3, 102.5, 102.7 etc.) and in the UK we have stations like 100.0 and 102.2 which it wouldn't be able to tune in
3) It only had USB1.0/1.1 (Neuros II fixes that) and transferring 20Gb (or 80Gb) on USB1 is something that I would only do ONCE!
4) With the hard disk backpack it was bigger than the iPod and similar
5) The 128Mb base unit could be used separately but if you then put the backpack on it, it erased the 128Mb of files in RAM to use it for the HD buffer (or so the forum stated).
But it was definitely on my "top 5" list when I was looking a few months back, but I ended up buying a cheap Archos on Amazon (180 bucks with a 50 dollar rebate bringing it down to 130, for the 20Gb V2 Recorder
So I am supposed to use the most popular product? Is the most popular product, by definition, the best?
MiniDisc has been a dismal failure in the United States. Elsewhere its success has been fair to high (in Japan, they replaced cassette years ago.) Nevertheless, I agree, as long as they refuse to support MP3 they're doomed versus other MP3 players.
One thing I'd really appreciate from everyone, is if you could please encode your rare out of print material to 320 mp3 or lossless flac and put it up for archival purposes (ok, maybe it technically violates copyrights, but if you can't buy it any where any more, I think of it as a public service).
Sing it, brother!
We need to recognize that stuff like Viva Saturn's back catalog is more endangered than the giant panda, and way more useful in the car on a long drive. Somebody has to preserve these things.
I've never yet met anybody who'll admit to posting on Slashdot. So who are all these people?!
There re more than 10 different MP3 players out there, so 8% to 10% of the market is still phenomenal. The iPod, no matter how staunchly anyone else believes, is the player. Everyone else targets it if they want to release an MP3 player. It's the spec to beat. Those facts speak for themselves. I mean, when was the last MP3-player article you read that compared the player in question to the rio karma and no other MP3 player? Exactly. Oh, maybe on rio-karma-fanboy.com :-P
You haven't presented any fact, just bold statements and the usual Apple hype.
Sorry to disrupt your RDF, but the iPod, although a very good product, only has a minority of the marketshare and no presence in the lower (light, RAM only) and higher (networked jukebox) segments. These are facts.
Not just anti-skip (which would only need a matter of seconds) - the idea is to read the music in 25 minute bursts, powering the HDD down for the other 24+ minutes. (This should also slash the risk of damage from shocks - the drive will be powered down nearly all the time the unit's playing.)
It actually looks pretty good. Windows only, which is not so good, but par for the course right now. Can't seem to manage a Clie device, which is somewhat disappointing. Easy to make CD's and rip CD's. Also as ATRAC3plus format with a 256k bitrate option. Might that help the sound quality that's supposed to be so lacking? Sony Connect seems about as easy to use as the Apple music store.
Will be scoping for one of their HD players, if nothing else just to look at. I don't really have the music to justify it.
One thing iTunes has all over the Sony software is the internet radio!! I would miss that dearly.
-m
http://www.invisik.com
But a Kilogram is heavier than a pound !
--- Back to the trees, back to the trees !
Just how many of you slackjaw'd yokels actually listened to or used the new ATRAC3plus codec? Uh... I'd say probably 3 of you. So, does presumed suckage of a product that doesn't please you or your open-sore audio format automatically qualify a product as a piece of crap? Without having using one itoa of the said item? How does that work? Whee! Runaway like a Coward that I am!