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Sony, Walkmans And The iPod
yootje writes "A long story about Sony, and how Sony developed: from the first walkman, until the latest competition against the iPod. "
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From the article...
"Customers who look to the iPod as the only advanced styling and fashion statement out there are going to take more than a second look at the Walkman.''
Possibly so, but most of the folks I know who have iPod's (including the Mini) don't just like the way it looks, but also like the fact that "it just works" in iTunes for both Windows and PC. Not to mention, of course, the hardware interface itself. It's simple enough that even my non-techie friends have figured how to use 90% of the functionality within 5 minutes. That's impressive design.
Perhaps Sony could make one that looks better...but can they make works better???
It's "no one," not "noone." Who the hell is noone anyway?
I like everything I see about the Sony products including their attitude on the long-haul. Everything but one ... they still use their nasty-sounding ATRAC format (the same one used for minidiscs).
Sorry, but if you can't play MP3 OR Ogg Vorbis OR AAC, you're dead in the water. Yes, they bundle software to convert those formats (not sure about Ogg Vorbis, which is what I use) for loading onto the player as ATRAC files, but this is seriously not something that interests me.
Give me the same basic form factor, a higher price (but still under iPod), and the ability to natively play MP3, Ogg Vorbis and AAC (yes, all 3 ... I actually would be happy with OV but I'm not the mass-market ... I'll even admit that you could probably get away without including OV for the next couple of years with no significant market loss) and you've got me hook, line and tweeter.
Until then I'm sticking with my rather huge but very flexible Neuros. A shame, because until I found the blurbs about the ATRAC (that verbally sounds too much like 8-track :) file format I was seriously drooling.
And while you're at it, allow me to load files via USB Mass-storage so that I don't need a bunch of flaky software to load the player. Right now this and size are the only detractors keeping the Neuros from being the best thing out there. An Ogg player with USB Mass-storage loading (Neuros supports USB mass-storage, but won't play songs loaded that way because they are not in the database) that is small with a significant battery life and good corporate support ... is it so much to ask? Yeah *laugh* I guess so.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
I bought my very first Sony Walkman when I was about 13, after I had saved money for over a year. I was so proud of it, although it was big, bulky and made an awful whirring noise while playing. Still it survived water, dust, various people sitting on it and even being dropped the 4 fourth floor of a building. Actually, it works to this very day.
I prefer more fragile stuff.
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
Perhaps more importantly (seeing as this conversion will be pretty much invisible to the user) the loss of quality in the conversion won't be popular. It's not just audiophiles with perfect pitch who can hear the compression artifacts in a tune subjected to two different compressions.
As long as magazines point this out, the Walkman is doomed to failure unless Sony do a U-turn and rewrite their ROMs to handle native MP3.
[That said, I feel obliged to point out that I quite like ATRAC. The time-based compression saves all the guessing over how big any given MP3 will turn out and the sound quality is better than most -- if not all -- of the MP3s that I've heard.]
HAL
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Oh the heady days of auto-reverse and conserving battery life: rewinding manually by twirling the tape around with a ball point pen through the take-up reel.
I still have a lingering desire for tiny black rectangles with Dolby's DD symbol embossing the side.
A Partial Walkman History
I once bought a Sony Network Walkman - one of my bigger mistakes.
ATRAC exists to facilitate DRM - you can only "check out" your songs to the player a limited number of times before you need to check them in to allow you to check them out again.
If that sounds confusing, it is because it is confusing.
Don't buy Sony music players - it appears the record label has too much power over the people who make the consumer electronics.
Sony (whose name comes from a combination of the words - 'Sound Nippon') seems to be going after the wrong market. They should be pursuing the young and NOT rich, and leave the rich to Apple.
Approximately 75% of the world's people are under the age of 25 and don't have a whole lot of money. This is the market that Sony should be targeting. Instead they are using DRM, proprietary formats, and tie-ins to product from other Sony divisions to capture a chunk of the world's recorded music marketplace. Stupid, because the vast majority of people who would be buying Sony products won't because they can't afford them.
Myself, for example. I get CD audio recordings from the public library. Then I rip them using open source software onto a $20 5 gig hard drive on a $150 PC. The recordings that I would want to hear again at some point in the future I write to a $0.09 CD-R blank (that holds 100 songs in 192kbps MP3 format) using a $25 CDRW. Then I play them outside through a $20 CDR/RW capable MP3 CD player. Every device in the process costs less than an order-of-magnitude of the price that Sony (and Apple) charges for the same utility. If someone can make the equipment profitable for this price then Sony certainly can. And I live in the wealthy western first-world. Outside the US, the EU, Japan, and Canada, people have to work ten times as many hours for the money to buy the same level of equipment.
Sony needs to relearn that innovation is as much a process of getting new equipment affordable as it is a process of designing new toys.
By the way, am I stealing music? No, almost all of the stuff that I listen to I bought many years ago in different formats (45 RPM vinyl, or 33RPM LP). I bought it, I can listen to it.
Or, I listened to the songs so many times on the radio and listened to the commercials so many times that I own the right to have a copy of the song by having listened to the hundreds of radio commercials. That concept of ownership may seem unusual but it is no more strange than the various types of music ownership devised by the media companies. I absolutely, totally, and completely refuse to accept the legitimacy of the laws regarding music copyright because those laws were written by RIAA lobbyists specifically for the sole benefit of the media companies. When the media companies recognize the principle of fair use and limited copyright periods, I will negotiate the concept of music ownership with them. But they never will recognize these principles, so I feel no obligation to honor the legitimacy of the laws that they wrote to enrich themselves.