Slashdot Mirror
Sony Admits MP3 Error
inflex writes "In a rare show admission of taking a wrong turn, Sony's officials have admitted that their stance on MP3 players was wrong." While this was pretty obvious to anyone who has ever shopped for a portable MP3 player, it is nice to see Sony admit their shortcoming. Ken Kutaragi puts it best when he says, "We're growing up," and with any luck future devices won't be crippled with silly formats no one uses.
give consumers what consumers want, not what you want consumers to want (to make the most money)
Sony is about one of those companies seriously capable of making a real iPod killer.
iPods are by no means a superior product. it uses dated technology and lose out in terms of features and price to other players. What makes it sell is that it has the Apple brandname behind it.
I think Sony is about one of few competitors with the sort of brand that can compete if they get their act togather.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
will they play .ogg files??? :)
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
You'd have to talk to MPEG about that. And it's a superior format (except for, I presume, some licensing issues), so I'm not sure why they'd want to.
It's tragic. Laugh.
I don't even see a necessity to make OGG the proprietary format. Bill Gates in his interview w/ Gizmodo said that they didn't put more codecs in one of their products because of the licensing of the codec.
He actually phrased it more like, "DRM issues," which is really absurd. It seems he's trying to embed it in people's skulls that licensing=copyright=DRM. Which is the same sort of semantic trickery MS and many large software companies have been using for a while to herd the masses into their 3x3 private pasture.
Anyway, my point is that I can't believe it slipped the interviewer's mind to point out FLAC, OGG, etc. have NO "DRM issues" whatsoever and would create a more robust product.
Sometimes I wonder...
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Out of all of the parent article, the most significant part of the posted article for me was this one unintentionally-included word...
>Adblock
Because the post is about a large company realizing the market isn't swayed by it's actions, this single word is profound, in a poetic justice sort of way. It says that the consumer, not the producer, has final say in what they are exposed to.
It's almost an ironic recursion. It's hard evidence of the future direction of market interests.
Remove the spamfreak to speak.
I know parent will get modded up because he mentions the words "DRM", and any paranoid rant about DRM on /. gets modded up automatically, but WTF???
Sony was apologizing for not including MP3 support on their MP3 players(they only supported Altrac) not that they are getting rid of altrac. Oh, and in case you didn't actually know, iPods support MP3, so I'm not really even sure what basis in reality your post has. Oh, and AAC is open, just the DRM on Apples music store purchases(called fairplay) is not.
Please, RTFA and know what you are talking about before your next paranoid rant.
Thank you come again.
Monstar L
Devices are only crippled when they don't include formats that everybody wants. They can include all the formats in the world as long as they include the ubiquitous ones too. If they don't, then they are indeed crippled.
And they weild their mod points like drunken sailors.
Before iPod Apple had about 3% of the U.S. personal computer market share. After iPod, Apple has about a 3% market share. iPod however has about 70% of the mobile digital audio market. iPod is just a good product. It's fashionable, it's crash proof and if people read the instruction manual with it, it's battery will last quite a long time. Also most iPod users use the Microsoft Windows platform. I doubt you'll see any iPod Killer from Sony. If you watched the MacWorld expo and have read any of the rumors on the web you'd have noticed a technology glasnost has occurred between Sony and Apple. I expect more cooperation not competition.
What do I care what sony makes, as long as someone else makes something I want. Sony or whoever can make all the silly useless gadgets they want, as long as Apple and Creative are making player that understand the MP3 format. It is not like the OGG problem, in which few players work with it, and few major market vendors are taking it seriously.
Sony needs to be honest. They took a risk based on greed and fear. The risk turned out not to work. It was not a mistake. It was a calculated risk in an effort to protect thier content based a belief that they should be paid at least for every piece of Sony IP, if not for each access to they Sony IP.
Again, I don't care. As long as there is reasonable choice, it matters not what an individual company does. It won't stop future attempts to destroy choice for consumers. Nothing ever does. And with these huge companies, such decisions, unfortunately, will not lead to bankruptcy.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
MiniDisk, El Cassette, ATRAC, Betamax, Memory Stick... not a good track record for Sony. Wonder if their support for BluRay will jinx the format...
As storage becomes more plentiful and cheaper, the improved compression matters less and less, a 10% space savings on a 5 megabyte file doesn't seem worthwhile anymore. Even when scaled up to 50 Gigabyte collection 5 gigs doesn't matter so much if storage costs $0.50 / Gig. Meanwhile there is a standard which everyone accepted that works "well enough" for 97% of consumers, and supported by nearly every audio program and device - MP3. That last point is a sticking point, I'm not going to narrow down my available choices by 95% for one obscure codec, that's like voters that vote on a single issue and that issue only.
Now, I wish people would drop RAR. ZIP works fine and I hate having to dig up an unRAR program for the occasional oddity I might download.
If Apple did make it an open format[...]
It's not Apple's format, the rights for AAC(!) are owned by a group of companies and institutes. So it's not Apple's choice to open it.
"It's nice that they finally admitted it but, in another context, they still have to get rid of DVD Region encoding otherwise it's only rethoric."
Huh? One is an incompatible format that made using Sony players an incredible chore. The other is a universally-accepted format that, while frowned upon, doesn't encrypt content (and it can very easily be avoided by using a multi-region DVD player). The two are apples and oranges.
sony really did miss a very narry window of opportunity in the mid-90's before the CD burners took off for the mini disc to succeed outside of japan. when mp3s became popular in late 90's, that sealed its fate.
in japan, mini disc succeeded for two reasons - rental CD shops are common and small profile/protected discs/recording capability were all favored by a country full of people commuting by train.
sony misread the american market, which generally do not favor new formats, don't care much about small profile or the protected discs. only musicians took up the recording capabilities. what sony should have done in america was to promote albums in mini disc format, and perhaps price it a tad below CDs. never happened...
i liked my mini disc player. i used it extensively for about 3 yeras from 1999 when i converted all of my CDs into MDs. but as soon as i switched to an iPod, my collection of about 200 MDs pretty much died instantly. ever since then, i only pull out MDs to check to see if there are any songs I'm still "missing" in my mp3 collection.
Because Ogg decompression is much more relient on CPU power which embedded devices tend not to have.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
From TFA:
Mr Kutaragi - known as the "Father of the PlayStation" for making the game machine a pillar of Sony's business - said the new PSP, or PlayStation Portable, handheld will grow into a global platform for enjoying music and movies as well as games.
Ummm, no it won't. Movies maybe, but not music. It's too big. Why don't these companies understand that people are looking for three things in music players:
1) Useful
2) Small
3) Beautiful
So far the only company (IMHO) who seems to have this figured out is apple.
obviously, you've never owned a Sony "mp3 player." i bought my fiancee one for christmas. All over the packaging it proclaimed "MP3 and WMA Compatibility" and even has MP3 in the model name. The packaging even refers to it as an MP3 player.
In reality, it includes a conversion utility in the package that converts MP3 and WMA to AAC for playback on the device. Therefore, it is an "MP3 Player" that does not natively play MP3s. When I buy an MP3 player, I want to be able to just drag and drop MP3s to it natively and have it parse and read them without any smoke and mirrors going on behind the scenes.
when you get down to the crux of it, it's very borderline to a bait and switch. but, IANAL, so i don't know how far an argument like that would go.
personally, I am very glad to see them acknowledge this faux pas. now, i wish they would release a firmware update or something to fix those old "MP3 players" so that they play back MP3s properly.
[move
Really? Well, um, maybe you should've done some research before buying into the format. Because I know that when I was transferring music digitally on and off the discs, the iPod was still five years down the line, and nothing was comparable. I won't even get into how different the two beasts are, but suffice to say, caveat emptor.
Now I love my iPod and I no longer have a reason to buy MD devices (I don't do nearly as much recording anymore), but anyone doing even CURSORY comparisons of the two types of devices should be able to pull apart which one they should purchase.
MP3 has become the standard for music to ignore it was dumb. Will Sony support Ogg and FLAC in the next device as well?
If they must ignore a format please let it be WMA.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Incorrect.
it uses dated technology and lose out in terms of features and price to other players.
Correct; by any and perhaps all of these means, there are a number of products definitely superior to the iPod.
However, if your means of comparison is file space per gram or per cc, it has few competitors; and if your means of comparison is based on quality of interface, the iPod is definitely superior to the competition. One need not use bleeding edge tech to create a superior product, you can simply put existing stuff together better than anyone else.
Apple does human-use engineering better than almost anyone else. I didn't find the cost worth the improved usability, and went with an Archos product. I also prefer a command line to a window; this may mark me as an uber-geek, but far more certainly marks me as a weirdo. (Of course, the fact that I refer to iPod users as "pod people" is more obvious evidence....) Most humans place a higher value over improved usability than on improvements to other features.
I think Sony is about one of few competitors with the sort of brand that can compete if they get their act togather.
With this, I agree completely.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Must be awful having no personal choice. Does Sony bill you automatically every time they release a new product or do they use a mind control device.
I'm not sure what this has to do with Betamax. Minidisc may certainly have been disadvantaged by failing to support MP3, but it isn't clear that is the only thing that Kutaragi is talking about. Equally, Minidisc is VERY popular in Europe and Asia, just much less so in the US.
And the PSP ? Well, it seems inevitable to me that you'll need smaller disks if they are to work in a pocketable handheld machine. Don't buy it if you don't want it.
Sony could make iPod killer a looong time ago! Even before first flash-based mp3 players like Rio.
They just needed to add mp3 decoder to MD and make MD as a USB/FireWire mass storage device. Sony liked FireWire aka iLink and they created PERFECT MD players - small, sexy and power-efficient.
no -- no fine print anywhere. we scoured the documentation and the packaging looking for anything to that effect and came up completely dry. in fact, the software doesn't even tell you that it's converting it -- it says something inane like "formatting for playback" or something like that. it takes a technophile to even realize what it's actually doing behind the scenes.
if i were joe public, i'd never even know that it's not actually playing MP3s.
[move
Yes! This is what we need to happen. Every time some company comes up with their own propietary DRM system, trying to corner an entire market, people need to not buy that product. Someone else comes along with a more open system and eats their lunch, and the company gains insight.
#define struct union
"4) Sony and Apple will jointly develop new digital lifestyle products
5) Sony will become a Mac OS X licensee(eliminates the single source argument)"
Not likely, unless Sony starts making Vaios (and desktops) that use PowerPC processors. I very much doubt Apple will easily surrender the one major advantage to buying their hardware by porting all of OS X to x86*. If anything they would work together to jointly develop software for their respective platforms.
Also, it isn't like Sony to license their electronic equipment designs from other companies (a single press release isn't enough evidence to make me believe otherwise), so they'd probably only license the firmware, or FairPlay itself for incorporation into their own firmware.
In other words, we may see a Sony iPod equivalent that can handle AAC & M4A, and Sony's media division might open an iTMS compatible service, but I don't think they'll work any closer than that.
(*This from a Mac user)
The problem for Sony is not that they lack engineering or design prowress. Sony is not just Sony, they are Sony Electronics, SCEA, Sony Disc Manufacturing, Sony Entertainment (music and movies), etc. Sony Entertainment will never let Sony Electronics design a music player that could "threaten" their profits. Sony Disc Manufacturing, which also produces memory sticks, would never let a music player going out that wouldn't benefit their company.
That's one reason why Apple's iPod has been far more successful than Sony's playuer, even though Sony has had a major foothold on CD and tape players for 20 years. The iPod's only attachments are iTunes and the Mac; and Apple learned quickly that isolating the iPod to the Mac was a mistake. Whether this kind of intracorporate meddling affects the PS3 and its dependence on Blu-Ray remains to be seen.
Eventually, the money powers that control the WTO will get open standards outlawed. If you think that it couldn't happen, you haven't been paying attention. Like a certain presi-duh-nt, the WTO works solely for business interests, not freedom.
Has Sony really learned the lesson about fighting preexisting standards to its own disadvantage? Then why virtually all Sony digicams sport _only_ Sony proprietary memory stick for flash memory? Even when memory stick costs roughly twice the compact flash equivalent?
Answer: Sony has not learned the underlying lesson and continues to commit the same betamax faux pas indefinitely. It's OK when they win a format war (Playstation*), but they're too slow to realign when they can't possibly win.
Sony still needs to learn the fundamental lesson: play nice with the prevailing standards, and don't shoot yourself in the foot with unnecessarily proprietary standards.
= Joe =
Did they learn something after Betamax?
Did they learn something after DVD Regional Encoding?
Did they learn something after Memory Stick?
Did they learn something after that ridiculous proprietary music format?
The Sony learning curve looks like a horizontal line to me. They suffer from the same desire to "own" formats that MSFT does.
Ultimately both companies will lose to open standards.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )