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New Walkman-Branded Hard Disk Player

Posted by timothy on from the 25-years-in dept.

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."

19 of 433 comments (clear)

  1. too bad it doesnt do MP3 by nadadogg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    i use linux and windows oh god how can i have an opinion
    1. Re:too bad it doesnt do MP3 by nagora · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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

      --
      "Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
    2. Re:too bad it doesnt do MP3 by WoodenRobot · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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.

      --
      ---
      "I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing and it was everything that I thought it could be."
    3. Re:too bad it doesnt do MP3 by Des+Herriott · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:too bad it doesnt do MP3 by Pivot · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  2. Dimensions?! by delibes · · Score: 5, Funny
    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? :)

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    This is not a sig
  3. Loss of quality? by craigmarshall · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  4. Not goin' anywhere! by darth_maul25 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?!

  5. here's the article with listening tests by nadadogg · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
    1. Re:here's the article with listening tests by silicon+not+in+the+v · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

      --
      We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
  6. Undercutting Apple? by Azrael+Newtype · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

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    I'm always right and I can prove it, because to the best of my knowledge, I've never been wrong.
  7. Atrac-3 a mistake by SirFlakey · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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)

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    Jon - TheSpork
  8. Music technology by Guitar+Wizard · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Music technology by evilviper · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
  9. Sony's portable cd player is called the Discman by bugmenot · · Score: 5, Funny

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

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  10. Not necessarily all that small... by GlobalEcho · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  11. Whuaa??! by chadseld · · Score: 5, Funny

    "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??!!

  12. This will have no impact on iPod. by nullvector · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  13. Go rio karma. It's both linux and ogg friendly. by donfede · · Score: 5, Informative

    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