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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.
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.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
This sounds nice and all, but it is a move Sony only would have taken if they make more money out of it.
DVD region encoding, the Blueray/HD DVD wars (as they did with Betamax/VHS) and other issues where they are more bull headed will go on... until they jump the train where they will once again make more money.
It is all part of normal business, but do not for a moment think Sony has changed.
I never understood why they do this.
I was livid when they created "memory sticks" and didn't offer anything that made them more compelling than SmartMedia or CompactFlash in terms of price, capacity or both.
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.
Growing up implies some sort of learning from ones experiences. Is this not the exact same situation as the Sony Betamax debacle? How about my Minidisc NT that broke trying to load my MP3s onto it. When are they going to grow up?
For that matter, Sony is doing it again with the PSP. Please, buy all the products you have bought in the past on our new media format. The irony of Universal Media Disk should not escape anyone. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me; fool me three times, realize me for a massive, faceless electronics and media company who has had a drop in overall product quality and customer care.
Yes, I know the main goal in business is to make money and grow, but to do that, you must serve the customer as well. At least, that used to be true.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
I don't see why people haven't adopted the OGG format yet: it has better compression and it's open source. Or maybe it's open sourceness is the problem...
. . . and it was to be expected they'd behave as such (you know, "protecting their intellectual property"). What you're seeing is neat in that a company that owns gazillions in copyrighted material is finally acknowledging that mp3 is OK by building and shipping mp3-playing devices.
Will Sony start selling mp3s of their content over the web? Hell no . . . you will never see the content owners sell soft copies of their stuff without DRM . . . but this is at least a step in the right direction for those that want better portability of the content across devices and platforms.
I think that's great they can admit a an error like that, especially in this corporate day and age. I'm a huge fan of Sony products and was realy undecided about going with Sony for a portable music player on this fact alone and hadn't purchased anything yet as a result. I think I'll hold off some more as they should have something coming out fairly soon (??) that will fit the bill...
Thanks again, Sony!
-m
http://www.invisik.com
But there still is a long way... Ditch proprietary formats also on the hardware side. Bring back the good support you once had (European support is awful) Dont build machines which break down 2 days after the warranty expires and then charge huge sums for repair. And stop being assholes generally...
Good for you!
I'm very pleased with my minidisc player. Sure it's a pain to have to re-encode mp3's into Atrac but I can live with it.
If you want an MP3 player, buy an MP3 player, if you want the versatility that minidisc offers such as convenient for live recordings, changeable media (so if your player dies, at least you don't lose your music) get a minidisc player.
With the new HIMD minidiscs, each holding 1GB, minidisc has suddenly got a lot better.
Downside:- on the new HIMD's Sony stil needs to loosen up a little and allow any recordings to be uploadable, also the annoying conversions between mp3 and Atrac...
In light of the above story, I'll probably wait a year or so until Sony launch the next generation of HI-MD players before I buy one.
Check out
www.minidisc.org
Finally, IMHO, I've always thought that ATRAC sounds a hell of a lot better than MP3...
Finally, I work at an internationally known british media company, we have tried using MP3 players to record interviews etc, but have always found the quality unacceptable for broadcast, so have gone back to using minidisc recorders...
There's a reason why Sony put Memory Sticks in their devices. It's so that they can *gasp* sell more memory sticks.
Proprietary formats are the way of big business. "You've bought our system, now let us sell you accessories." Anyone who owns a console game system should be well familiar with this. Why can't I use the same memory card on my Gamecube and my PS2? Because they don't want you too. Why are all of the controller ports different and not just simple USB? This is especially glaring as the Xbox is standard USB with a funky plug. Manufactures make the big money selling add-ons or licensing fees from third partys who make add-ons.
Proprietary formats are there to create another license revenue stream for the manufacturer. It's not that OGG isn't popular, it's just that they don't control it. Sony has demonstrated that they would dump MP3 if they could. DRM is there not so that you don't pirate the media contents, but so that the format licensor can legally force it's usage and force payment for said usage.
Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment, said he and other Sony employees had been frustrated for years with management SCE are the Playstation people. The Playstation people say "Sony screwed up". The Walkman people are probably still creaming their pants over how nobody wants MP3 and would prefer ATRAC
How many times must this be said......?
The iPod is not the killer product, iTunes is. All these people hoping for an iPod killer to come along need to remember that the software you use to interface to the thing is far more important than any other factor. Previously I had a NetMD and quite apart from the fact that it didn't play MP3, the software was ghastly. Sure I could import stuff from other formats and the likes but it was so clumsy compared with iTunes. When I got my Mac I tried to use my NetMD with it but of course Sony didn't provide any software support. What little open source software existed for it was restricted to seeing the tracks and starting and stopping it. You couldn't actually record onto the thing with it. Typical Sony. So I sold it on Ebay and put the money towards an iPod. End result, much happier but also I realised just how great iTunes is, it completes the iPod.
I think for a true iPod competitor to come along it is either going to have to have some seriously nice software backed up by a great music store, or it should just work with iTunes.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
Maybe it works on other people, but when I'm looking for a device like a digital camera, if I see the word "Sony" I just keep-on-a-movin. I already own plenty of CF and SD cards, i'm not about to start buying "Sony Memory Sticks" any time soon, so I skip Sony products alltogether. Great job Sony!
> give consumers what consumers want, not what you want consumers to want
I was living/working in Japan in the early '90s, and it was common to hear how Sony took great pains to listen to students, artists, housewives, etc. as to what they wanted - in time, of course, that approach changed when Sony got into the entertainment industry. The believed the phrase 'content is king' and jumped in with both feet.
This marriage resulted in the kind of mindset within Sony that we all know and loath in the US...that of the music industry wanting to keep the 'album' as a metric - bleeding the customer again and again and again. CD's will mean lower cost...right...
Sony can try to go back, but other companies have the lead. I admired Sony until I got to Japan and found out the locals don't think much of the company, actually....too western thinking for the average Japanese consumer.
Today, the record/entertainment industry is the one bleeding, and Sony only has itself to blame for being in the same boat. Sony execs may cut those ties, but they can never wash the blood off of their hands.
Actually this is a pretty interesting comment because the first portion of the comment is kinda of the antithesis of Sony. There is some fascinating literature about how Sony went about creating the Walkman never listening to what really consumers said they wanted. The key thought being that consumers never know what they want. This kinda of flag is great to have when you busting through into a new market, witness the Walkman itself, but suicide when your going into a very mature market. This is where Sony stumbled. If this were 1998 again and Sony was facing off against the first solid-state MP3 player (the Rio from Diamond Multimedia for you history buffs) then it may well of had an excellent chance of succeeding. However, since this MP3 player came out six years after the fact it was DOA. Policy and thought must be flexible, if it is not then you risk something far worse then Sony faced, obsolences and bankruptcy.
Second, there is a reason the number of conglomerates is very small (when I say conglomerates I mean companies that have business that vary widely from each other) for instance Sony who makes tape drives but also produces feature films. Too many hands in the cookie jar and too much politics across the business units. If Sony Electronics was its own seperate entity then I would wager there would be no such thing as an iPod because Sony would have cornered the market and we would all have Sony MP3 players.
No, because even if it's USB, the device can still either be PS2-compatible (for instance) or not, and advertised as such.
... that's no better/worse than the plug just not fitting in the first place.
The plug might fit and the device might not work
And if the memory cards were all, say, CF, what would be the problem? It's a known spec, and easy to accomodate.
Did anyone else notice how much stage time the President of Sony got during the Stevenote? Not only was he up there a loooong time but he was gushing like a little school girl in love. The Reality Distortion Field was on full blast and Steve had it pointing right at Sony's president.
I suspect there was much more that went on behind the scenes that week that will unfold over the course of the year.
Despite Steve's claim that this is the year of High Definition we all know that HD is not his focus.
How long has he been telling us that Apple doesn't want to make a $500 dollar Mac while secretly designing it for the past year?
How many times did he tell us that flash based MP3 players were a waste until he had one of his own?
How many times did he badmouth PDAs which he later admitted he had developed but decided not to ship?
My intuition tells me that one or more of the following will happen this year...
1) Sony will license FairPlay
2) Sony will start selling Sony banded iPods
3) Sony will make its own music player which uses the iPod OS
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)
The iPod is not the killer product, iTunes is.
:) So how about some hard evidence, or at least a better argument than just "iTunes is good, so it is obvious that people buy iPods to get it"?
I disagree. I think that's a myth which is becoming popular simply by being repeated so often.
I doubt that people look at the software interface or the music store before buying the player. They buy the player, then see what they can use with it. Certainly this is true of mp3 players given as gifts. More generally, though, the iPod is available in any number of stores, including many which do not carry computers at all. Others don't have floor models of the iPod (e.g. to try it while it's hooked up to a computer). And of course, there are the online purchases. Yes, at a few computers stores you might be able to try out the iPod's software interface, but I don't think that this is the case very often.
Also, most people use Windows, and iTunes for Windows has recieved weaker reviews than the Mac version (though still fairly good overall).
If you really think that iTunes is the killer app, how about some supporting evidence? I've heard the argument about iTunes many times, but it's never supported. People just state that iTunes is the best, and therefore that people must be buying iPods for that reason. They also state the same thing about Macs in general, but people aren't buying those.
If they put out a dual-layer BluRay burner on the PC, and then put out a BluRay dual-layer player for HDTV. And then put out two different music players.
The video player would need to be able to handle OGM, Vorbis, MP3, AC3, Divx, Xvid. You'd have to be able to navigate sub-directories, and play by sub-directory. It'd have to have lasers capable of reading DVD's and CD's, of course.
On the players, they'll need two different types. One with a hard disk, and one that only uses flash memory. They should both run off standard AA batteries, and Sony should market a seperate Lithium Ion battery made specifically for the players. Let third-party companies make the LiON batteries, and let the consumer figure out what he/she wants.
The player with the hard disk should be able to handle Vorbis, MP3, AC3, ATRAC, MID, MOD. The flash player should be able to handle Vorbis and MP3. Both players should use either FAT32, or something like EXT2/3 for their file structures.
On top of everything else, Sony should make it's own simple little program and drivers (for the filesystems), for Win32/OSX/Linux/*BSD. Nothing fancy; just a simple exporer GUI, that lets you drag and drop and arrange things on the disk/memory. If they wanted to go the extra step, they could let you convert formats, with the full range of options that BeSweet allows you to select.
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The PC burners, the stand alone players, and the music players. They'd be king, once again.
I don't honestly expect them to do that, though. Too many choices, probably too much customer support.
It's not that Apple has made them look silly, it's that Sony has done a poor job of masking that fact. Apple has been making Windows look silly in many ways for decades... hasn't made much of a dent in Microsoft yet.
I actually owned the Music Clip at one time. The interface software accepted either audio CDs, MP3 files, or WAV files as input, and transferred songs into the device. The transfer process took as long for each song as it did to encode each song into MP3, because the interface was indeed doing encoding, to ATRAC3. I don't remember much about sound quality, mostly because back then I still thought Sony's earbuds and headphones were pretty good (insert laugh track here). I do remember that the max you could encode in ATRAC3 was 144kbps, IIRC, but then you'd lose quite a bit of space on the flash memory. I would usually encode at 128 so I'd have the space, but the transfer process took so long, I only did about one or two transfers during the short time I actively used the device.
Sony's competition back then was already well established, with Diamond's Rio line. The 32 MB PMP300 had been out for around a year, and the 64MB PMP500 was just in. They also used an interface software, but it would carry MP3 files right over to the player, without doing any intermediary re-encoding. Creative was soon to come out with a flash-based player, and later the HDD-based Nomad Jukebox. RCA also had an MP3 player come out, and much like RCA's other electronic devices, was avoided like the plague by those in the know. These non-Sony players dealt natively with MP3, used standard removable flash media without "content protection" locking, and frankly worked better than Sony's pittance of an offering, even in the infancy of the portable music player market. Sony's players were left in the dust, their only remaining market being the fanatics.
Fast-forward to today. Past the fall of Napster, the maturation of the LAME encoder, the introduction of Ogg Vorbis, the iPod, larger flash capacities and lower flash prices. For the same $300 price of the Music Clip back in 2000, one could buy a Palm Tungsten E (today's equivalent of the Vx back then), fit it with a 128 MB MMC card, install AeroPlayer, load the Palm up with a bunch of songs in Ogg format, and go. The Palm also has a bit more bang for buck, considering you can use it as a clock, calendar, day planner, flashlight, MATLAB-esque calculator, etc. Plus, many portable music players allow the user to just copy the files directly into the storage medium instead of tangling with a proprietary transfer interface with proprietary drivers. I can just throw my MMC card into a flash reader, copy what I want into the card directly, and go. I can even do it from Linux! So where's Sony in all of this? Still stuck in 1999, with their "Sonic Stage" software, which still encodes everything it receives into ATRAC3, which is all Sony's players can still handle. Their big marketing push during the years was that they had MiniDisc players that can be loaded up with MP3s (which had to be converted to ATRAC3). They even advertised that the
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Sony IMHO is going into serious trouble.
The mp3 controversy is far from the only thing. It's not even close.
Sony lacks the inovative feel that it used to have. Sony used to be much more bleeding edge. Their designs were cutting edge... but not really any more.
IMHO Apple used to trail them. Now Apple is beyond them.
Sony has been late to the game for quite a few things over the years, then failed. mp3 players, laptops, computers, etc etc.
Their Clie PDA's weren't bad. But didn't quite live up to the Sony Hype. They were just better than Palm and Handspring... like that takes much.
IMHO this isn't the fix. Sony needs to rediscover themselves.
In an age of companies being more inovative (Apple, Samsung, LG, etc.)... time to redraw the box THEN think outside of it.
I don't know much about the UMD format, but one thing I was wondering was if the UMD discs are actually small blu-ray discs. That would have been really smart on Sony's part, to let people then burn mini-bluRay discs in the future and play them on the PSP.
However cool that would be though, I am very doubtful it is the case. I thought I'd just throw a scenario out there that could explain some rational reason to go with UMD...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As an upstart webmaster/online author, this vision of a new industry reborn on the back of the Internet is something that I've thought about a lot. It's nice to picture a rosy future where the true value of art is the only merit on which it is judged, but there's a lot of aspects to work out in the meantime.
I've been running my site (short stories, "poetry", etc) 9 months now, for instance, and I still haven't had much luck cracking more than my immediate circle of friends/friends of friends. But do I even want to do that? It's like the Star Wars kid -- it could all go horribly wrong, suddenly hitting massive exposure. What's the optimum growth rate for a band/writer/whatever trying to stake a claim in cyberspace? It can be scary thinking about how you might the next site lampooned on the cover of somethingawful.com.
I also wonder if it's okay to completely ditch the physical medium entirely. I've flirted around with print-on-demand stuff (lulu.com, publish and be damned) before, and put a book or two in print; but if years down the road the opportunity arose to get picked up by a major publisher, would I be better off culminating my own little site and revelling in my independence?
I don't think I've made any points at all by now, but I did want to fire off a quick "huzzah!" to believing that we're witnessing a radical shift in the alignment of culture and art, due the onset of this digital revolution.
Good luck with your music, and see you on the other side; whatever the hell it ends up looking like.
This will sound crazy, but follow my logic here.
.m4p format apple uses to protect content.
There are tons of players that do ATRAC out there. Virtually all the Sony music stuff these days does either ATRAC and MP3 or just ATRAC. That's a lot of devices.
Here's how sony can win out over Apple in the end.
Put together and open source an implementation of ATRAC. If they did that, there would immediately be tons of proprietary and non-proprietary implementations of ATRAC for every platform. Then put the thing out there in a standards body and get it sanctioned. I know some people in Sony think they have the Holy Grail with ATRAC, but as it stands, its virtually useless. If ATRAC is out there and popular, it would be a viable option to the
Its that's simple. Seriously. Sony could go from last to first in less than a year.
They would still have to do MP3, of course, but like Apple, they could do MP3 and ATRAC, set up a music store, and then by licensing the DRM to other music stores, effectively take control of the market.
I doubt this will happen, but it really would work.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Sony minidisc format is really good. A very small RW magneto-optical disk, with 1GB capacity in its latest reincrantation, and with a standard FAT directory structure. Alas, all minidisc players/recorders are still limited to Sony's proprietory ATRAC format, and a bunch of restrictions if you want to move those files between the players and you computer (yes, Sony tries to easy them a bit, but still those are files are *not* treated as the regular disk file). By adapting standards like MP3 and AAC, Sony minidisc format will finally have a chance. Just think of it. Fairly small player. More efficient (in terms of energy consumption) than hard-drive based player. The cost of media (per GB) is about in the same ball park as hard drive based players and better than the solid state (you can get 1GB disk for $7-10). Give me MP3 and AAC as the compression options - and I'll be seriously considering those players.