Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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
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.
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*
ATRAC 3 isn't the mistake. Making it ATRAC 3 only is a mistake. Their CD-based digital music players don't require ATRAC: the burner application is all ATRAC but you can burn a disc full of MP3s and it plays them perfectly. Why don't they just follow their own lead?
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.
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.
The idea of a scroll wheel has been around on synthisizers for over a decade as well. So yes, in that sense the patent is bogus. But I would assume the patent is also for the laptop-style touch sensitive scrolling.
meep
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
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
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.
"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?
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?!
Sorry, but this is totally wrong. The website in question is very anti-audiophile. Go read it some time. Maybe you were just trying to be funny. But it is exactly the opposite of the truth. The people from that website are lossy compression enthusiasts. They are interested in lossy compression as a technology and hate audiophiles who for the most part don't like and don't use lossy compression.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.