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."
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
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.
"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
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.
... 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.
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!
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.
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."
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.
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.
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
No, they're just the only big electronics company thats also a big music/movie business company, with an obvious huge conflict of interest which is crippling many of their electronics gadgets (this has been happening with the minidisc for years).
"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??!!
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.
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
For me the killer is size and battery power. I would have bought an iPod had it been equipped with something that approximated a modern battery - instead of the feeble piece of crap they decided to use (thus ruining an otherwise excellent product). Sony's new machine is small and has a twenty-hour battery life. If past experience is anything to go by it will also age well; my little Minidisc player is barely bigger than the media and after two years of daily use can still run for eighty hours between charges.
Sony are no more, or less 'evil' than any other large company. Both Apple and Nintendo have acted with utter contempt towards their customers (and employees) in the past yet seem to be forgiven. The only difference between Sony and Apple in terms of behaviour, is that Sony is a thousand times bigger and has fingers in many pies. Only a liar or an idiot would suggest that if Apple had a music publishing division they'd shun all attempts at DRM.
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?
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?!
It's still pretty fun.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
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
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
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.
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 Rio Karma comes with a 30 day warranty. The iPod comes with a 1 year warranty. That should've told you something right off the bat.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable