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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
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
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?!
"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.
...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.
Now if i could only eat enough mcdonald's meals to get 13,000 free sony connect songs!
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.
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...).
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??!!
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!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
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 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
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.