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."

Comments

Prior art

[neomac]

Doesn't Atari's paddle controller count as prior art?

Re:Prior art

[afidel]

Even better would be the Intellivision controller. In fact when I first saw the iPod that's EXACTLY what I thought of =)

Re:Prior art

[beakerMeep]

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.

too bad it doesnt do MP3

[nadadogg]

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.

Re:too bad it doesnt do MP3

[Boone^]

This is going to flop pretty hard. I hope Sony doesn't invest too much in it. I'm all for players being cheaper than my iPod, but not if the quality/features suffer.

Re:too bad it doesnt do MP3

[dave1791]

This is a blatant attempt by Sony to get more people to use its online music service. I see a potential pitfall here. No, I actually see a white elephant for Sony. If it only plays ATRAC and every other player (IPOD included) supports the de-facto standard (MP3), it will fail in the market. Period. Are all of Sony's players ATRAC only? Why are they attaching their most recognized product name to this dud?

Proprietary standards work in segmented markets still in infancy. Like it or not people have MP3 collections and will not be keen on converting to use the device. Prediction - In 2005, Sony will release a walkman that also supports MP3.

Re:too bad it doesnt do MP3

[nagora]

There are still millions of people who know "Sony Walkman" as the only way to listen to portable music, and its their money that counts.

There's a lot more now that know "MP3" as the only way to listen to downloaded or ripped music - that's why iPod supports it.

Cheaper than the iPod,

80% of the price for 50% of the capacity?

This product is a dead duck.

TWW

Re:too bad it doesnt do MP3

[mblase]

MP3 support isn't a problem, exactly -- the Register article says that Sony's connection software will convert MP3s to the ATRAC format, which has a smaller file size (and no royalties) and thus makes sense for Sony to use.

It's a shame that it won't play MP3s natively, though, because that would doubtless save a lot of time on converting a large library. Users and reviewers will decide for themselves if the sound quality is worth the price and package.

As for the Sony online store, a year ago it might not have made any difference -- Apple's iTunes was just getting off the ground and most people were using iPods to listen to their own CD collections, not music they bought online. Now that Apple's got iTunes Music Store working well under Windows, it's a real advantage for them -- but by no means an unconquerable one. However, IMO the iTMS is so darned easy-to-use -- and often enjoyable, with the improvements they've made over the past year-- it'll take some truly hard work to overtake it.

Apple doesn't have this market locked up by any means, but they know they have to keep pushing to stay ahead. Sony will catch them if given the chance.

Re:too bad it doesnt do MP3

[WoodenRobot]

When I saw the thing featured on the BBC website, I was tempted. But there's no way in hell I'm going to buy a product that will make me use some lame format such as Atrac3, especially if I need to run the conversion software on Windows, where presumably it's going to be all 'user friendly', and therefore a nightmare to use. I've copied 100's of my CDs to my hardrive, and I've not got the patience to convert them all to another format. Although it's far from perfect, MP3 is the universal standard of music encoding, so excluding the posibility of using it is commercial suicide.

There has to be some twisted logic behind this move, either an attempt to make Atrac the format of choice for digital music storage (won't ever happen) or to rigidly enforce DRM, which will just piss everyone off, especially /. types, who are also presumably early adopters of new gadgets such as this.

Re:too bad it doesnt do MP3

[Des Herriott]

Nah. "Walkman" was big in the 80's and 90's. iPod has the mindshare now (and I'm admitting this as a Rio Karma owner :-)

Someone else said it, and it's true: this thing doesn't play MP3, so what's the point? It's just a glorified Minidisc player.

Re:too bad it doesnt do MP3

[Pivot]

Sony suffers from the NIH syndrome. They insist on using ATRAC and they insist on using Memory Sticks. In the end it is the consumer who is suffering. My advice: stay away.

Re:too bad it doesnt do MP3

[Chatterton]

MP3 is a lossy format, Atrac is a lossy format. Converting from lossy to lossy is equal to losse more data and a worst audio sample. Add to it that ATRAC is the worst of all lossy format and then you have a sure looser :( Too bad, the format and the design of the player is cool.

Re:too bad it doesnt do MP3

[Bellyflop]

I agree that Sony really missed the boat. If it played MP3s, I could see them reminding parents of the Walkman and relating to kids with a nice story about some old technology. I'd bet that most kids today don't even know what a walkman is. They grew up with CDs and then MP3s. And they have a lot of disposable income. They also have a lot of influence into what their parents buy as parents generally don't know the technology and often turn to their children. So that leaves them with the 20s-30s crowd who also have a lot of MP3s...I just don't think the nostalgia factor is that strong.

Re:too bad it doesnt do MP3

[Anonymous Coward]

you make a good point about Sony products being trashed by their own obsession with DRM and proprietary formats. Take the NetMD Walkman (the MiniDisc player/recorder with the supposedly 32x USB transfer port). I bought one as soon as I could, as I have lots of music on vinyl and nothing beats being able to just plug-n-dub vinyl to a portable that can also take MP3s. It did record quite well from analog sources, but the Sony software for transfer to the device via USB set a new nadir for terrible software. Not only is it windows only, it's unbelievably unstable in the ATRAC conversion process, and it uses a DRM system so convoluted and silly that the software manages to confuse itself, crashing or insisting that a MP3 it has never seen before has been transfered more then the DRM scheme allows. It's so bad that I actually to this day record MP3s to the device in realtime analog via a 1/8th cable. The software and associated DRM is so terrifically bad that this is actually faster when you factor in the time it takes to switch from my Mac to my PC and then deal with the DRM and bluescreens.

This thing looks great, but after owning a NetMD MiniDisc player, I would NEVER buy another Sony portable if it involves using Sony software. The device is, in the end, only as good as the software and only as hassle-free as the DRM system.

Re:too bad it doesnt do MP3

[switcha]

There are still millions of people who know "Sony Walkman" as the only way to listen to portable music, and its their money that counts.

Boy, I'd defer to the market on that one. As for me, you say "Walkman" and I think of being 8 and listening to a Footloose soundtrack cassette on a 'portable' brick that defied physics with it's belt-loop creaking weight.

Looks pretty slick...

[_PimpDaddy7_]

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.

Dimensions?!

[delibes]

8.9m x 6.2 x 1.4cm

8.9 metres? And that's a portable walkman is it? What will these wacky foreigners think of next? :)

Re:Dimensions?!

[Dogtanian]

8.9 metres? And that's a portable walkman is it? What will these wacky foreigners think of next? :)

(Says nothing, but picks up oddly-shaped stick-Walkman and starts beating Delibes about the head with it).

Loss of quality?

[craigmarshall]

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

Not goin' anywhere!

[darth_maul25]

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?!

Damn..

[adeyadey]

"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..

here's the article with listening tests

[nadadogg]

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.

Re:here's the article with listening tests

[swv3752]

It was a blind listening test. Each track was listened to on the same hardware. This was more of a real world test than testing these in a clean room. If you don't know which track was in which format, it hardly matters over equipement settings. I find it doubtful someone was actually monkeying around with thier sound settings between tracks.

Re:here's the article with listening tests

[blackmonday]

Attention Slashdot Newbs: If you feel the need to be modded up, the secret is to add the phrase "Well, that and moving my home PC to Gentoo" at the end of your post. Some examples:

"Well, I myself can't wait to go through the Saturn rings one day. How Cool Would that be? Well, that and moving my home PC to Gentoo."

Or maybe:

"I think it's unfortunate that they caught that guy by using Night Vision goggles. Myself, I'll be watching it on DVD. Well, that and moving my home PC to Gentoo."

Re:here's the article with listening tests

[sita]

It was a blind listening test.

Since blind, as we know, have more acute hearing.

Re:here's the article with listening tests

[doctor_no]

This player uses Atrac3Plus as its primary format, with support for other Atrac formats. It's default format isn't the one used in this comparison

So the comparison isn't really valid, or up to date.

In fact, Watch Impress a respectable Japanese news site reviewed the Atrac3Plus recently, a more technical review and less subjective than blind listening test. The review was largely positive, with the 256kbps Atrac3plus competiting favorably against WAV (CD-Quality).

Watchimpress Atrac3Plus Comparison in Japanese

They also have an article with pictures of the this walkman device;

Re:here's the article with listening tests

[silicon not in the v]

Wow, that's a great suggestion. I think that's the best idea I've heard all week. Well, that and moving my home PC to Gentoo.

Undercutting Apple?

[Azrael Newtype]

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?

Re:Undercutting Apple?

[Paisley Phrog]

They're claiming undercutting because the Sony can store 13,000 songs (as opposed to 10,000 on the Apple) for $99 less. Plus, they're anticipating price drops in the future whent Sony ramps up HD usage. ...Nevermind that it's 13,000 ATRAC songs. *shrug*

Atrac-3 a mistake

[SirFlakey]

"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."

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 .. 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)

Re:Atrac-3 a mistake

[argent]

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?

Music technology

[Guitar Wizard]

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!

Re:Music technology

[boobert]

I use to have an MD player and currently have an ipod mini. Sony's main problem was transfer speed. The older MD players you had to record to at normal speeds. When they finally came out with higher transfer rates it was only in the exspensive units and only worked in windows. Also i really like the interface on my ipod and the fact tthat it has a date book and a few games on it. Also I'm pretty sure the newed HDMD disks or whatever they are called are going to be just as exspensive as MD disks were when they first came out.

Re:Music technology

[thparker]

High-Capacity MD recorders in the near future, with MDs that hold 1 GB.... Why would you limit yourself to the size of a hard disk when you can carry around a few tiny discs...

I think you misspelled forty. At least, that's how many "tiny" discs I'd need to replace my iPod. (Forget that the hard disk IS the player, where you'd be carrying the tiny discs AND the player with MD.)

Even with the iPod mini, there's a distinct advantage (imo) to having it all in one place, where I can shuffle through my all favorites using iTunes smart playlists. I'm just not interested in breaking my music into 1 GB chunks to accomodate the limitations of MD.

BTW, you got a price on those 1 GB blank minidiscs yet? I think that'll make this deal a little less attractive, also. It's great if this solution works for you, but it doesn't make sense to me.

And you're right -- I really miss the sound of LPs. Especially brand-new ones. You just can't beat virgin vinyl.

Re:Music technology

[evilviper]

MiniDiscs haven't caught on simply because Sony is dedicated to DRM. SCMS prevents you from making a copy of a copy (eg. you can't copy the MiniDisc you mixed together from several CDs), and they've really been seriously limiting the MD hardware.

I know everyone would have loved to have a MD-RW drive in their computer at the time, and even now their high capacity drives would make a good contender, because they are dirt cheap, in a caddy so they can't really get damaged, and they can be re-written millions of times, unlike CD-RWs while like to crap-out after a dozen or so.

Sony dropped the ball on MiniDiscs. They had every opportunity to take over, but their hard-cord DRM plans prevented them from ever making anything most of the public wanted.

edited or mis-edited?

[mblase]

...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.

Legal contradiction...

[Anita Coney]

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?!

Re:Legal contradiction...

[t0shstah]

You seem to think that people will actually use all this space. In fact, it boils down to the "bigger is better" mentality that consumers have in general. The average joe will usually go for a device that can store 10,000 songs over 4,000 because its MORE. It's the same process that keeps PC retailers selling high powered machines - people will tend to buy the most powerful computer they can for the smallest tasks, regardless of whether or not they will use all the power or not.

Its the same thing with the whole webmail shake-up that is going on at the moment with GMail - they offer 1Gb of storage, other places offer 2Gb and so on. Hardly anyone will actually use all that, but hey, isn't 2Gb better?!

Besides, you are also forgetting that most people don't start from scratch with their music. Sure, your maths works if they don't have any music, but most people who are willing to drop large amounts of cash on digital players are likely to have tons of CD's and things already which they can put on.

Re:Legal contradiction...

[Anita Coney]

You're right, but so am I. Of course you can use it to fill it will illegal MP3s. And as I point out, unless you are willing to spend about $10,000, that's the only way you could fill it.

So my point once again, if you CAN use it to listen to illegally obtained music. And if it's ONLY useful if you use it for illegally obtained music, THEN WHAT'S THE POINT OF USING ATRAC?!?!

Sony!!! Give the people what they want! The ability to tranfer files freely without imediments that serve no real purpose!

I'm lovin' it

[spoonani]

Now if i could only eat enough mcdonald's meals to get 13,000 free sony connect songs!

"Credit card sized"

[nmg196]

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...

Sony's portable cd player is called the Discman

[bugmenot]

SO why didn't they name this device the HardMan?

What does it look like to the computer?

[argent]

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.

Re:What does it look like to the computer?

[evilviper]

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?

Ironically, that's the same problem I found with the Rio Karma.

Yet I had nothing but a bunch of /.ers scrambling to tell me how that's not a bad thing at all...

Neuros II

[4of12]

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.

Re:Neuros II

[The Cydonian]

Interesting, they seem to be trying to develop an open source community around their product. Some very interesting ideas:- an open firmware, an XML db for the Synchronisation Manager, and oh, they seem to be using .net code in their apps. Hmmmm.

Re:Neuros II

[Adam9]

Also check out their forums and their own Bugzilla.

You'll find many happy customers who regularly give input to their CEO and developers about the Neuros.

Just recently, they added a DJ feature that lets you shift speed and other neat effects for your music.

Disclaimer: I love my Neuros and I don't work for them.

Re:Neuros II

[Unknown Lamer]

The Support is really great. When I botched a firmware upgrade they replaced my head (there is a head with the processor and a backpack with the battery and HD) for free (I just had to pay send shipping; they covered return shipping). The USB 2 upgrade, although greatly delayed, only cost $6 for shipping as well. When I dropped my Neuros while the HD was spinning they even told me the model numbers of 80G laptop drives they had tested with the unit. Even when they aren't making money they are helpful.

The backpack is simply a standard USB Mass Storage device and the database is very well documented. There are four different sync managers now (NSM, Positron, NeurosDBM, and Sorune) and the source is available to all of them (NSM isn't Free Software though; the license has a few restrictions). The only downside is the size but, honestly, what you lose in size you gain back in flexibility (e.g. when I broke my HD I just got an 80G laptop drive for $150 and swapped it into my backpack). It's the ultimate geek music player.

from the article...

[nikster]

It is expected to sell for ... less than $400 in the United States, Sony said, undercutting Apple's 40-gigabyte device, which sells for $499

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...).

You are crazy

[Heywood Yabuzof]

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.

Lobotomized interface to the PC?

[gotan]

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?

Not necessarily all that small...

[GlobalEcho]

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.

Why no IEEE 1394 support?

[DLWormwood]

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?

Re:Sony never learns

[mcbevin]

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).

Whuaa??!

[chadseld]

"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??!!

Not so ATRACtive

[nanojath]

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.

This will have no impact on iPod.

[nullvector]

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.

Re:This will have no impact on iPod.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, I bought the first MD machine in early 93. Back then, it was like I just stepped off a flying saucer when I put in a disc. People would stare. Back then, using fiber optics to record CDs, even in real-time, was cool.
But now, Sony has dropped the ball. I just bought a Hi-MD unit on impulse. (I can be that way)
Sonic Stage is an unbelievable pain. Even if I use the cracked non-DRM version, it still has to do the things you say. What's the point in having a 1GB Minidisc if I need more than that in HD storage to accomodate the weird conversion process?
But I disagree about there not being a simple one click process. Didn't you notice a program called MD Simple Burner?
But overall, yes, you have to jump through hoops to get what should be simple...

Re:This will have no impact on iPod.

[jfmerryman]

When will companies learn that we do not want DRM, or custom formats.

When we don't buy them. If there's one thing big companies can do it's count money. Look at what happened to the Circuit City "DIVX" DRM-crippled DVD rental system, or all of the DRM-heavy music rental services like PressPlay - good riddance!

subjected to DRM Hell...

[Simonetta]

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.

Go rio karma. It's both linux and ogg friendly.

[donfede]

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

News.com: Unit plays MP3s, WAVs, WMAs

[MunchMunch]

From the news.com.com story:

"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?

Re:News.com: Unit plays MP3s, WAVs, WMAs

[dcm1101]

Sounds like sloppy reporting from news.com - check out the Reuters story.

And, just to add a voice to the fugue, there is no way in hell I would consider buying this product. First off, their press release is filled with marketspeak lies: "price undercuts a 40GB iPod!!" (er, actually their unit only has half the storage but they encoded the songs at 48Kb/s and compared it against Apple's standard bitrate of 128Kb/s so they could claim that it fits more songs and hope idiot consumers won't figure that out.) "will play MP3, WMA and WAV!!" (actually, it only plays ATRAC3 and you have to use their proprietary, buggy software to make a copy of your entire collection using ATRAC3 before loading it onto the device. BTW, this process could take hours.) "ATRAC3 sounds better than MP3!!" (according to their VP of Marketing's 5 year old nephew, at least, though there are a lot nuts out there doing double-blind listening tests which show that ATRAC3 is the worst audio CODEC out there, even at 128Kb/s never mind the fact that Sony assumed 48Kb/s encoding in order to make their ridiculous capacity comparison to the 40GB iPod.)

So. To sum up: decent ergonomics, no real price advantage in an apples to apples comparison (no pun intended), only supports a crappy DRM'd Sony format. Read this Wired article on why Sony sucks, and why you shouldn't buy anything from them until they get their head out of their asses and start making things their customers actually want.

Whisper down the alley -- so what?

[Zany Paraclete]

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.

it's even worse- mp3 is recompressed into Atrac3+

[SuperBanana]

This player uses Atrac3Plus as its primary format, with support for other Atrac formats. It's default format isn't the one used in this comparison. So the comparison isn't really valid, or up to date.

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).