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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.
"We're growing up," and with any luck future devices won't be crippled with silly formats no one uses.
:(
why did the end quotes have to be there
Sony admits MP3 error
Yuri Kageyama in Tokyo
January 21, 2005
SONY missed out on potential sales from MP3 players and other gadgets because it was overly proprietary about music and entertainment content, the head of the company's video-game unit said.
Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment, said he and other Sony employees had been frustrated for years with management's reluctance to introduce products like Apple's iPod, mainly because the Sony had music and movie units that were worried about content rights.
But Sony's divisions were finally beginning to work together and share a common agenda, Mr Kutaragi said at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo.
"It's just starting," he said. "We are growing up."
Sony officials have rarely publicly said the company's proprietary stance was mistaken.
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Mr Kutaragi, who has long been viewed as a candidate to lead Sony, was unusually direct in acknowledging Sony had made an error.
Sony's music players did not initially support MP3 files and only played Sony's own Atrac format.
Sony's technology innovation had been "diluted", Mr Kutaragi said
"We have to concentrate on our original nature - challenging and creating," he said.
Once the powerhouse of global electronics, with success exemplified by its Walkman, Sony has lost some of its glamour lately, losing out in profitability and market share to cheaper Asian rivals.
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.
The Associated Press
give consumers what consumers want, not what you want consumers to want (to make the most money)
If I had to do it all over again, I would never have bought that MiniDisc player.
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.
Alright, Sony, now let's talk about this Memory Stick...
What's your damage, Heather?
I hope it was choosing MP3 instead of the superior Xiphophorus Helleri Ogg Vorbis sound format. I am really sick of that unpronounceable "MP3"--seriously, what were they thinking?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
The boneheaded move of 2004?
"...and with any luck future devices won't be crippled with silly formats no one uses."
Sooo, no Ogg Vorbis players from Sony.
Zing!
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.
why should they? AAC and WMV are plenty popular, probably more so than OGG.
-mkb
will they play .ogg files??? :)
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
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.
Their hard disk "mp3 players" don't support MP3. Not this generation, at least.
I mean, they would have to commit Harakiri and all...
OGG!? I've never even heard of that... I can't see a small format gaining popularity in a world ran by mp3s and AACs.
~ Mooga
I hope they do make a move to more compatable hardware and I hope they realine their pricing too.
Sony have been trading on their brand for too long and the higher prices are hardly every justified.
I simply avoid Sony because I know it work very well with other manufacturers products and I'll be paying a higher price for the same product.
----
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.
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 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.
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...
Is it April 1st already?
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Vor-bis is a simple word. Em-pee-three is a cryptic abbreviation.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
. . . 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.
And even when they did bring out players (Net Walkman NW-E95/99) which supposedly play MP3 natively (rather than the download software converting to Atrac), they require Windows(tm) software to download the MP3s to the player. None of the adverts, neither the online retailers nor the product description on the Sony site, mention the need for Windows. Linux can mount the flash as a USB storage device and can download files, but no way will the player play them.
Ok, Bill Gates, your turn to admit how your products suck.
Yes, nobody uses iPods with AAC drm in them. No one at all, except for all of the iPod users. Both of them! Last thing I heard, Apple is about to go out of business, and profits are plunging because of the miserable failure of the iPod.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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
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
with any luck future devices won't be crippled with silly formats no one uses.
Going by the summary alone, I'd think that sony had supported MP3 and were now taking the intelligent route of dropping it (no other format was mentioned)... Curse you, editors; making me RTFM to find out what it was about >:(
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Ba-doom-tcsh!
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Apple's AAC has DRM in it.
my iPod mounts as a removable hard drive and is full of mp3s.
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.
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...
See. The different here is the iPod supports MP3 *AND* AAC. Most other media players support MP3 *AND* WMV. If you don't like the DRM, you don't have to use it.
Sony's Walkman ONLY support ATRAC and the client software had to encode everything on the fly to ATRAC causing a loss in quality from repeated encodings, long transfer times, and you were left with files you couldn't do anything with other than play them on your Walkman.
The walkman was a failure that everyone could predict out at the same level as the N-Gage. Now they should do the same as Nokia and redesign it to be open, usable, and of a superior build quality.
When you're competing against a massive leader in the industry you don't gain market share by releasing a product that has less features than the leader.
Now get out of the computer room and go to your maths class this instant! :-)
And they weild their mod points like drunken sailors.
(Expect to see GWB stood in front of an iPod with a "Mission Accomplished" banner any time now.)
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Amusing how you posted anonymously. I think original poster is a 15 year old Linux geek...
Good start. Now they should implement mp3 gapless playback as in the Rio Karma. They're working on it, according to rumours. Sadly, at least the new flash player doesn't do gapless mp3.
Why the hell is this guy modded troll?
/. is filled with Apple zealots, he gets modded down.
Oh, wait, it's because he said something negative about Apple, and since
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
Great! Now maybe they'll change their mind on DRM in general, and be the first company with a practical technology for ebooks that isn't a) a piece of shit, b) locked in with DRM, and c) proprietary formats.
So, how about it, Sony? Will you release a new version of the Libre, sans DRM?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Sony, Philips, Samsung, Matsushita/Panasonic and Intertrust are pushing for DRM , perhaps if they listen to Sony they will realise that people will not buy their crippled products.
Before you read on, read this article by Steve Albini (one of the best known producers in the world) about the reality of the economics of the music industry. If anything it understates the degree to which the music industry is broken.
I'm a musician as are many of my friends. Musicians, or the vast majority of them anyway, do not make music to make money but to make music. Historically of course, it was ever thus. Before the means of recording music, there WAS no recording industry. The vast majority of great music in history was written without the RIAA's help and without the 'protection' of copyright. It didn't seem to bother Beethoven.
The small minority of professional musicians mostly make their money from live performances (cruise ships, bars etc). A small minority of the small minority of professional musicians make money from recording, but a large part of this is non-consumer oriented such as film soundtracks, game scores, stings, jingles, ads and so on.
The current inflection of the recorded music industry benefits only the major corporations and a few bands who have enough leverage to make deals that actually result in money. The vast majority of bands who record make little or no money.
If we were drowning in a sea of great music produced by the members of the RIAA I would be the first to defend them, but we aren't. We're drowning in garbage, and thousands of good bands languish unsigned and unproduced. You only have to watch American Idol to see how the process works.
Fortunately now the innards of a pro recording studio can reside on your home PC or Mac, and raison d'etre of the major studios no longer exists. Musicians can go back to doing what they have always done -- making music. Once the recording industry finally dies, those who make great music will earn lots of money from live performances and direct-pay-downloads spread by viral word-of-mouth.
If you think I'm wrong, consider this: poetry. Pretty much nobody makes any money out of poetry. But it still gets written. The same is true of music. The sooner the industry dies, the better.
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
That would be the Apple iPod that had MP3 from day 1, Mr Thicky.
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.
The Bush administration admits there were no WMDs and that W only wanted war because he's a religious fanatic.
Microsoft admits that Win9x was NOT a real 32-bit OS.
And IBM finally admits that OS/2 Warp never actually helped even one nun surf the net!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Popular? Just because a lot of people are forced to use them does not mean they are "popular". Using this definition, traffic tickets are popular too!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I seem to have plenty of non-encumbered AAC and MP3 files on my iPod. The Sony players required DRM enabled ATRAC only. You don't have to buy songs from the iTunes Music Store if you don't want to and your iPod will work fine. No, the iPod won't play .ogg files, but that is a very small loss compared to playing ATRAC only.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
Maybe they will add OGG-support now, just to be sure they don't make the same mistake twice and miss the boat again.
Well, it probably won't happen.
But I DO think that if there ever wasa time for users to let Sony know they want OGG support, it is NOW!
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...
---------------
Meanwhile in hell, Satan dons his mittens.
To date portable recordable Sony players to not support MP3 playback. MP3's are converted via software to a proprietary format which is a painstakingly long process.
The iPod will play MP3's with no strings attached.
Actually, most music businesses seem to use WMA. Although OGG beats MP3, some tests show that WMA beats OGG. I've heard the opposite as well, though, in A/B listening tests published here on Slashdot a while ago. Many of my aquaintances are using WMA, because normal people don't know what OGG is. The über marketing skills of GNU geeks has also blesed us the ugliest codec name this side of the galaxy.
But the lurkers agree with him in e-mail!
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
You mean the Apple iPod that has had DRM it from day 1?
The files from the iTunes Music Store have DRM. The iPod is able to play these files. Apart from that, the iPod lets you play any AAC or MP3 file you happen to have lying around on your hard disk.
As good a format as it is, AAC is only used by most users (in some cases, against their will) when iTunes burns their CDs. Bottom line, as some people have said, is that mp3 has won. It would make far more sense for Apple to concentrate on support for that format (& for God's sake, whoever can make this happen, let WMAs play on iPods!!).
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.
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.
You mean day 545?
John Carmack fan, browsing at +5 since 1999.
Noa re
body
apart
from
a
few
slashdot
geeks
c
about
OGG
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.
As stupid as it is, the MPAA will pull out all stops to prevent region encoding from disappearing. They view it as a copyright issue. To their minds, getting rid of region encoding is the same as removing all copy protection or the RIAA allowing free copying of CDs and distribution of mp3s.
What exactly do you call compact discs then? I'm pretty sure they aren't going away any time soon.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
If you have an old one, well, thinking about it, the $300 ones should have optical inputs. My friend's old MD player did and it was under $300 and before NetMD. For their time they were way better than one would get out of the later introduced 32MB flash players for $100+.
I'm hoping they grow up and make some decent software for the NetMD and HiMD now, instead of the crapfest they've been including previously. Those players will record at 32x or so, but the software to do so with is terrible.
If not now, when?
Sure.. SONY loves their MemoryStick format.
And to be honest, it's not a bad format.
However, even they realize that a lot of customers are looking at non-memorystick solutions such as CompactFlash.
And lo-and-behold, they have various digital cameras that take a CompactFlash (type-1) card.
My CyberShot DSC-V3 being one of them.
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
when iTunes burns their CDs
I guess you mean "rip their CDs". Even then, you have a choice. You are only forced to use AAC if you by from the iTunes Music Store... if you are forced to buy from there, that is.
mp3 has won. It would make far more sense for Apple to concentrate on support for that format
What do you mean, "concentrate on support of MP3"? You can use MP3, what else do you want? Will MP3s suddenly start to sound clearer if Apple stops support for AAC (which will be part of the new Quicktime7, by the way) and "concentrates" on MP3?
That would be the Apple iPod that had MP3 from day 1, Mr Thicky.
Thats yoshi_mon to you Mr. Basil Brush.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
If iTMS added the option of downloading MP3's for 99 cents alongside AAC for 99 cents, most would choose MP3.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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!
I for one, welcome our new unencumbered, wrong-admitting leadership. .
"You have liberated me from thought."
"We're growing up," and with any luck future devices won't be crippled with silly formats no one uses.
Does this mean no ogg vorbis?
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
One of the problems with Ogg is that its kinda just there. mp3 is the standard that works everywhere.
If your hardware started making a lot of money with ogg there is a good chance some companies will come after you with the patent stick. You already are paying for the mp3/wma/aac/ or whatever format you support and thats a know cost. Companies hate the unknown.
Someone needs to sit this guy in front of the US President...
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
2) I suppose all I was trying to say was that it would be better if Apple stopped pushing the format and had mp3 as the default in iTunes etc.
Sorry, it's been a long day already
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.
Because if they didn't include mp3 support on their mp3 player, it couldn't play mp3s. Would you buy an mp3 player that didn't play mp3s? If you would, can I interest you in a cd player that doesn't play cds?
OGG is not so good for power consumption, it takes 3/4 hours off the battery life of my iRiver ifp390, and I hear there are similar results for other ogg supporting players (mostly iRiver).
Theres the problem that the implementations Ive seen dont support <48kbs bitrates, so quite a few of my -q3 encodings failed to play. Coding at -q6 or whatever makes the files bigger than the standard MP3s I use.
The ogg battery life problem may have been solved, but I had a similar on my ifp device.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
Drunken sailors have mod points?
Does that make sense?
Oh, not only geeks care about the Ogg framework. Ogg is like MPEG4, just a container system.
Professional musicians use Ogg FLAC and to some extent Ogg Vorbis. Audiophiles use it. And I have hopes for Ogg Theora for video too.
It is open source, patent free. If you encode your CDs as Ogg FLAC today, you can still play them in 40 years. If you can only play DRM'ed MP3 in 40 years and your old CDs are destroyed.... you are screwed. I love the music I got now and I want to keep it with me for as long as I live. How many of you MP3 sillies think about that?
//TheToon
Bill, you're on next...
That's all fine and dandy, but I kinda expected a few cool geeks to hack the whole NetMD thing and let me access my mz-n505 as a drive or something. Didn't happen. Maybe the geeks should admit they're not perfect either... oh shight, no I have to go into hiding!
At least on the ARM CPUs that many of the players use (like the fabulous Rio Karma), the Ogg decoder have a larger footprint so it does not fit in the L1 cache on the CPU. The extra memory requirements leads to extra power usage, and it might need extra CPU cycles too.
The older ARM chips (as used in iPods) also have a bug that introduce an extra waitstate on memory access, slowing it down and increasing power usage even more... this is a technical reason why the iPods could not implement Ogg. iPod Mini got a new and better CPU, so they could run it -- technically speaking.
//TheToon
The fact that they have content producing divisions give them a serious conflict of interest. My first stationary dvd player was a Sony. It doesn't play anything but original dvds. No burned dvdrs, no burned music cds. And it costs 150$ to mod it anyways. I've been extremely dissapointed with it, and it made me decide never to buy any such things from Sony again.
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.
Ken Kutaragi puts it best when he says, "We're growing up,"
I just wish that other companies pushing proprietary formats would "grow up" too.
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
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
Gee, you THINK??? And this is coming from the owner of a minidisc player (and an iPod). Sony's garbage ass software and ridiculously long wait to convert to ATRAC is what has relegated my minidisc player to excersize duty rather than daily music player. The minidisc players are great in terms of hardware and features, but not supporting MP3 natively was assinine.
Superior in a Sony Betamax way. It's technically better, but most do not recognize it (it is not "the standard"). AAC is to MP3 as Beta is to VHS. There's a wide variety of digital music player devices from many vendors. The vast majority play MP3. Few play AAC. These manufacturers are not obligated to play music files from another branch of their company that sells music, so they tend to serve the market (instead of the other way around).
One of MP3's relative flaws (file size) is basically solving itself over time as storage gets bigger and cheaper.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Sony's technology innovation had been "diluted", Mr Kutaragi said
Diluted or deluded?
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
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.
The major point of a game console is that they are all the same (every PS2 has an identical controller). If you remove the custom plug and make it standard USB (say), then this uniformity is lost and some games may not work or play awkward because you're missing buttons or triggers.
I do agree with your point about proprietary formats, but the game console analogy is wrong...
gcc: no input sig
It's ATRAC (ATRAC3 specifically).
As for DRM - it wouldn't surprise me if their software isn't riddled with DRM and DRM-like limitations. If you've ever tried interfacing a MD player with your computer you've enjoyed horrible software that limits a songs transfers to the player at a whopping 3 (e.g. you can have a mp3 on 3 MD's before you can no longer). The best part is - you have to 'check it back in' - which consists of confirming that you wish to delete it and letting it delete through the software.
I once made a disk and the software crapped out towards the end of the transfer - because there wasn't enough space (gee, could we have tried calculating that beforehand? Nah!) - lo and behold, I couldn't delete it. Even an older player was still aware of their shitty DRM feature and refused to erase the disk. FOR NO REASON. The software utterly refused to remove it, because as far as it saw - it hadn't written it. The player wouldn't remove it, because it saw that it was 'special'.
I imagine you'd run into the same problem if you had to do a reinstall. Good one Sony.
(and yes, I bought an ipod and am much happier for it. Sony could make an ipod killer - but they sure as hell haven't tried yet.)
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
Wondering if this is true, that most iTunes users have iPods. I would doubt it, as all you need to use iTunes is to buy a recent Mac and put in a CD. The iPod step involves another expense that is not trivial. I am guessing (but do not know) that there are a lot of Mac users happy to use iTunes and play music out of their desktops, and have not yet purchased the 'pod yet.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Yeah, but in this case they're admitting it was a colossal mistake since people didn't buy players from Sony.
Nobody disputes that the companies view proprietary like that. But they're starting to realize that the customers have no interest in proprietary stuff. Especially in the portable music player market.
Sony tried to pretend MP3 didn't exist and it wouldn't be an issue. They were wrong.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
My wife just bought a Canon Powershot camera this week. One of the considerations was that it used a CF card, just like the other card camera we already own. I was looking at cameras last summer, and stayed clear of the Sony offerings solely because of that memory stick nonsense. How long has Sony been shooting themselves in the foot over this?
(open/shared) > (proprietary/closed)
fred
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.
Not that one was offered, but the market forces will take care of themselves. If Sony doesn't offer what the consumers want, someone will.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
I try not to get worked up over common spelling errors, but one thing that drives me insane is people typing "Would of." It should be "Would've", a contraction of "Would have."
"If I would have known" or "If I would've known" is fine. "If I would of known" is incorrect. Yes, "Would of" and "Would've" are pronounced almost identically. It's an easy mistake to make.
This is Grammar Nazi Union Member 34821, signing off.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
Does ZIP have a recovery record option yet?
I've been using RAR because it usually nets me a few extra % reduction, which I can reallocate to placing a recovery record.
I started doing this when I pulled some old CDs out that I had trouble reading. Typically, if a ZIP had an error, I was screwed. RAR has allowed me to repair files, etc.
I also like PAR files! Call me names now please.
Sony's Minidisc players are fabulous little machines. Great form factor, cheap media etc...
If Sony had native support for MP3s a few years ago, I would not own an iPod right now.
-S
"Dave, I stand still--the conclusions jump to me!" - Bill McNeal, NewsRadio
go read parent post again.
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.
it would be a little difficult, i suspect, to issue a firmware update to all sony digital music player buyers this late in the game.
they will probably make the change to allow the mp3, wmv, ogg, or other formats on later versions.
Is it 5:30 yet?
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)
No, I've never owned one. But to say it plays mp3s when it doesn't, sounds like deceptive advertising. Did they include some fine print on the packaging?
Vor-bis is a simple word
Much like vor-pal. Surprisingly they both mean exactly the same thing.
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.
How about us that still have a MD player or two.. Will they perhaps offer a upgrade to support mp3, or is this just yet another scam to get us to buy new hardware...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Apple, in just four years has made us look silly in an industry we've owned since the 80s. We need to get our shit together.
"It'll destroy you if you try to make it mean anything to anyone but yourself." - Henry Rollins
Whereas one of the reasons that I bought a Sony camera last time was the fact that I had owned a Sony camera previously (which I managed to lose on the way to the airport) and therefore already had a collection of Memory Sticks (which I didn't lose). When I got to the airport, I had a choice of buying a Sony camera, or a non Sony camera and replacement Non-Memory stick cards.
2) I suppose all I was trying to say was that it would be better if Apple stopped pushing the format and had mp3 as the default in iTunes etc.
:) )which intents to bring Stereo quality to AM radio, it will be used by the next DVD standard, regardless whether it will be the Blu ray Disc or HD-DVD
:)
I do not really see the benefit of that. I'm not an audio encoding expert, but from all what I have heard AAC is better than MP3. It's basically next generation MP3, considering its developers includes at least part of the groups that developed MP3. So why should Apple stop using (and prefering) the better format? It's good that they include MP3 support, no question about that. But just because MP3 is the defacto standard right now, it is not wrong to look to more modern alternatives. AAC is part of MPEG-4, it is used for the new digital radio standard (Digital Radio Mondiale, with an unfortunate abbreviation...
So it is really not some exotic standard used by Apple. Why drop it?
Sorry, it's been a long day already
I still have my Sony Walkmans. They are good products and I'd have loved to buy more Sony products but the proprietary nature of their electronic goods makes those products unsuitable for my use. Using my home stereo I'd make running tapes for use in my Walkmans. It was a tedious and long process but that was what the technology allowed for at the time. When the MP3 players started coming out I expected to be able to use a MP3 player the same way I used my Walkman. Did Sony have a device that was as easy and open as the Walkman? No. I end up buying a Gateway DMP 310 USB player which I can plug into my computer via the usb port and using the windows file system I can happily import/export any mp3 files I want. Simple, works and I love it. Got a Rio player because it was inexpensive and seemed easy enough. It's not USB, requires it's own proprietary software, it's own cable, and it does not allow me to move mp3 back from the device to the computer. Much more difficult and much more unnecessary work. I can't treat my own files as my own files since apparently once they are on the mp3 player they apparently don't belong to me any longer. Outrageous. Guess how many more Rio devices I'm going to buy? Yup the same zero number of Sony devices I'll buy. If I can't use it the way I want to use it then why on earth would I want to support a company that treats me like a subject in a feudal kingdom with no rights to the things I buy? Nope. Sorry Sony, you were good once and no matter how good your products I'm not buying from a company that locks up, constrains or otherwise keeps the product from my ability to use it. It's nice that they at last understand why they've lost market share but it'll take a long time and some pretty good nonproprietary electronic devices before I even begin to look at Sony again.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
O my dear god!
The radiator in hell has finally broke
and snow has started to pour down!
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver.
And while you're at it - REAL media too.
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
He shouldn't be modded troll, he should be modded overrated because there is no -1, doesn't get it mod. The reason the iPod is so successful is iTunes, the iTunes Music Store and the iPod's small form factor. The iPod's ease of use is why it's so successful, not some kind of magical Apple marketing. Since he doesn't get that factor and doesn't address it in his post, he doesn't deserved to be highly moderated.
They :-)
are
not
going
to
listen
to
you.
200 million legally sold songs says they can't drop AAC support.
.. easily..
one million songs in their online music store says that they can't switch from AAC now.
BUT, they could start offering WMA DRM'ed files as an alternative
Wasn't a firmware update required to support the protected AAC files when iTMS first opened? Looking around at the old updaters, AAC support was added in iPod updater 1.3.
So, continuing from the grandparent, the iPod did NOT have DRM on day 1, since the DRM is tied into the AAC support.
There is/was a plugin for OGG and the iPod. Google is your friend.
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.
------
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.
To be fair, Sony was pushing memory sticks bigtime for awhile (they still push them now, but less so) and including them in anything that needed memory. Cameras, music devices, etc. The laptops came with a memory stick and either a built-in stick reader or a PCMCIA card with stick reader.
This was quite a time before it became popular to include MMC/SD/CF cardreaders in printers/laptops/PC's. So Sony wasn't format-friendly with out types of media, but definately ahead of the game with their own.
I wonder though, how do the sticks measure up for speed/etc compared to other formats?
Windows?
You might want to try IzArc
I've been using it for quite awhile now, supports not only zip/rar, but a whackload of others including tar.gz, tar.bz2, etc
Doesn't seem to have any hidden surprises in it either, just very useful (and free) software.
Sony isn't a single entity that makes decisions, it's multiple businesses with sometimes conflicting goals. This article isn't the Sony that brought you ATRAC saying "I made a mistake." This is other divisions from Sony, who were against ATRAC from the start, continuing to complain about it.
See, Sony has a huge content-producing media business, and they also have a huge media-device business. The former wants all media-devices in the world equipped with DRM and copyright-protection mechanisms, while the latter wants to make devices that do exactly what the customer wants, easily and openly. But the media divisions got to force their restrictions on the device divisions, via what the article refers to as "management".
Read the article again. It's not a guy saying "I'm sorry, I made a mistake." It's a guy saying "My stupid bosses made me do something I didn't like."
I find it a bit freaky to have a television that can display pictures from Sony Memory Sticks.
In addition to supporting Mp3, the new players will go up to "11".
from the first paragraph in the article (but edited):
SONY missed out on potential sales from and other because it was overly proprietary about , the head of the company's unit said.
insert: mini disk / beta / media stick / atrac / SACD / (hopefully blu-ray does not end up on this list)
the original was this:
SONY missed out on potential sales from MP3 players and other gadgets because it was overly proprietary about music and entertainment content, the head of the company's video-game unit said.
the preview let me down ... trying again:
from the first paragraph in the article (but edited):
SONY missed out on potential sales from _____ and other ______ because it was overly proprietary about ______, the head of the company's unit said.
insert: mini disk / beta / media stick / atrac / SACD / (hopefully blu-ray does not end up on this list)
the original was this:
SONY missed out on potential sales from MP3 players and other gadgets because it was overly proprietary about music and entertainment content, the head of the company's video-game unit said.
For the past few years since I read reviews about sony's DRM type MP3 players, I've found myself almost unconciously boycotting all Sony products. That's weird huh? It's an easy company to boycott because there's always another brand right next to it, and usually cheaper too.
I also find myself explaining to friends shopping for mp3 players about Sony's "conflict of interest" in making good Mp3 players.
Does anyone else boycott Sony for this reason, or try to avoid their products when possible?
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 also dislike the memory stick.
But far more annoying than the memory stick, is the fact that the PS2 does not use it!! They could at least be consistant. Really everything should have just used CF or some other standard form of memory. But no, Sony had to totally lock down that format so that no-one else could make memory cards for the PS2 (despite being CF form factor cards).
It's even odder when you consider that they used standard USB and Firewire ports, the lack of which I found annoying on the XBox.
I sure hope the PS3 is a little more standards based in ths regard, and doesn't decidde to de-standardize ports as well as memory - I think though too many people have headsets and eyetoys for Sony to change the USB port.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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
After all, SanDisk has done something mildly clever with their flash memory offering. While I don't use the Sony MS myself, the size and shape looks like they could do something similar on the other end of their product, giving something reminiscent of these USB flash drives.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
The plugin wasn't for Ogg on the iPod. Instead, it was a Quicktime plugin that allowed iTunes to play Ogg-encoded files, albeit with less than perfect tag editing and a noticeable delay in beginning to play the file. I have it on my computer for the few Ogg files I have remaining, but I don't think I've actually added any Ogg songs in a year or so. Simply put, I don't see any point in doing so in my case, when AAC and MP3 work just fine for what I do.
Want Slashdot headlines on your site? Try SlashHead
Even Canon has given up on CompactFlash for tiny cameras. The first "digital elphs" used CF, but the SDxxx and Axxx cameras all use SD. The Sxxx, Axx and Sxx cameras still use CF, but only the Sxx (fast & >4mpix higher-end) and Axx (AA-powered bulky low-end) lines are getting new models with CF slots.
S410 and S500 are 3.43 x 2.24 x 1.09 in.
SD200 and SD300 are 3.38 x 2.10 x 0.83 in.
CF cards are 36.4mm x 42.8mm x 3.3mm or 1.43 inches tall, so it would seem the SDxxx-sized cameras (2.10 inches tall) could fit a CF card, but looking a picture of an S400, it's getting pretty tight.
6- and 8- in 1 card readers are cheap now- there's one built-in to my HP 8450 printer so I don't mind a couple of card types floating around the house, but while SD cards use fewer, faster signal lines than CF (a good idea), they waste part of their storage on secure key storage for DRM.
You can't use that space for ordinary storage even if you don't use DRM and though the spec doesn't require secure storage, no one's built a card without it yet.
Are you sure? I didn't know the audio format had anything to do with the lifetime of the media. I though it was the actual material making up the media itself that determined how long it would last before it starts decaying.
Nope, wrong. AAC is an open standard. FairPlay is a rights-management system that's got nothing to do with AAC. It's implemented as a component of QuickTime.
There's no reason, if you had access to the encryption software, that you couldn't produce a FairPlay-protected AIFF file, or a FairPlay-protected MPEG-4 movie.
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.
If Sony had tried to make their stuff only work with their speakers (through funky plugs, say) and other Sony products, I would not have bought their stuff at all.
Their marketing team's wet dream is that they can trap people into only buying Sony stuff. But reality has set in (maybe), and they realize any attempts toward a proprietary system will just kill the product.
However, I suppose they felt they had to at least have a try at it before giving it up.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
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.
ACC is the default format for ripping songs under iTunes, but it can be switched in Preferences to various flavors of MP3.
"with any luck future devices won't be crippled with silly formats no one uses."
CowboyNeal, why do you hate Ogg Vorbis?
They loused up the Memory Stick format... For a while they floundered, but then finally admitted, "we screwed up: we can't make a MS bigger than 128MB... Here's Memory Stick Pro."
Karma: Chameleon (Mostly affected by the 1980s)
Japanese companies NEVER admit their mistakes. Significant number of heads must have been cut off before they admitted they were wrong.
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
Ogg is already popular enough that many handhelds do include it. The round-up of handhelds posted to Slashdot just before Xmas listed a large number of devices with built-in Ogg support. It's not just the geeks that want Ogg (as someone else in the thread suggested) -- Ogg has growing recognition and support in the audiophile community as well. And the recent release of several ogg-on-a-chip decoders can only help.
According to the Xiph Wiki, "[t]here are currently more than 40 different companies offering a total of more than a hundred [hardware] products that support decoding Ogg Vorbis." I'd say that's a sign of an already-popular format. Maybe not mp3-level popular, but popular nonetheless.
Now I admit, I have my doubts whether Sony, in particular, will be foresighted enough to include Ogg support. I suspect it depends on whether or not they want to use "flexibility" and "versatility" as marketing slogans. But if any of their new devices support more than three formats (a pretty big "if", I admit), I'll betcha that Ogg is one.
Does anybody have any insights into why Apple wouldn't allow the iPod to support .ogg?
.mp3 because it had the mindshare upfront and also because it produces bigger files than Apple's proprietary format, and as such is a worse solution.
.AAC. Is that the problem? Are they afraid that users would prefer .ogg to AAC? If so, why is that a problem? Just because they don't control it?
Seems like they support
Ogg is probably much more comparable to
Surely the success of the iPod isn't due to Apple's control over the file formats. If anything, it's been in spite of that. I'd think Apple would have more to gain from anything that discourages WMA from becoming another de-facto Microsoft-controlled standard.
Would a world with multi-vendor ogg-supporting iPod-like devices be a worse competitive environment for Apple than a world where everyone *except* Apple supports the other 'standard' (i.e. WMA)?
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
I agree. I've seen dozens of MP3 players from a dozen or so different companies, all on the shalves. However, when it comes to the iPod, the only thing I've seen in a store is a cardboard picture of one on a shelf, and you were supposed to order it. Sure, they've sold a lot of them (10 million +) but the distribution is rather spotty and it is clear that they are one of many players in the field.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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 : )
Reality TV, for better or worse, means something between a prime-time game show, and an unusual challenge game show. Judge shows do not count, as well as the venerable home-rebuilding sector that goes back at least as far as "This Old House".
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Stuffit Expander can expand pretty much anything. www.stuffit.com
Circumcision is child abuse.
There has yet to be an instance of anything being stolen through p2p because it is technically impossible. p2p duplicates files, so no theft can take place. Just because something is wrong/immoral/illegal/etc does not make it "theft".
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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.
Speaking of silly file formats nobody uses...
Yes, I know many people here on Slashdot use it, but in the larger world, it's pretty much nonexistent. It's certainly not popular or interesting enough for a major manufacturer like Sony to spend a lot of time and money supporting it. The number of sales Ogg support would generate would be trivial.
Basically, it's a format that has no reason to exist. The mere fact that MP3 is, or was, "encumbered" by patents hasn't had any effect on anything. Who has been sued, shut down, or threatened for writing or selling MP3 players? There is no noticeable quality improvement or filesize decrease to Ogg that would make it worth the trouble, or else the industry would have already moved to it.
MP3 is "good enough". Therefore, it's going to remain the dominant standard for non-DRM audio for the forseeable future. Ogg is a great format, and for all I know may be technically superior, but so was Betamax. QED.
Java: the bastard demon spawn of C++ and Ada
You muppet.
Boom Boom!
The plug might fit and the device might not work ... that's no better/worse than the plug just not fitting in the first place.
Sure, but if the plug doesn't fit, you know ahead of time. I prefer that to, say, being greeted by some "unsupported controller" error message in a game...
And if the memory cards were all, say, CF, what would be the problem? It's a known spec, and easy to accomodate.
Agreed. But then you open the door to generalized cheating by tweaking savegames because the card can be read/written everywhere (unless the game encrypts everything)...
It's also a back door into the system (f.e. XboxLinux).
gcc: no input sig
In Australia you can buy Sony DVD players that are multi-region, they are labelled as Region 4, but play all regions. Of course when their legal team now hears of this, maybe they will fix that......
Yeah, didn't think so. That one's making money even if it is wrong.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
Well, that's not quite so fair when you're talking about digital cameras because Sony do have the Mavica line that takes floppy disks or CDs. If I were travelling extensively I'd seriously consider something that uses readily available media like this -- particulary given that once a CD-R is recorded, an x-ray machine is not going to be able to nuke the photos. Although 8cm CDs are not as available as I'd like.
Well, methinks there is still hope for Sony yet. It was only a few years ago when Steve Jobs had to step up onto the MacWorld Expo keynote stage and admit that Apple totally 'missed the boat' with regards to CD-RW drives. He promised that the error would be corrected, and today they're a major contender in online music and portable music players. Perhaps Jobs didn't have this all planned out, but it's still not a bad comeback. The playstation proved that Sony had very good marketing people, so they should bounce back from this bad decision well enough.
Moof.
That episode was one of the best/most painful. "Trumpy can do stupid things!" "It's called evil, kid."
I moderate "-1, Fool"
I used to think it mattered.
When I got my first digital camera it used a PCMCIA memory card. I bought a Minolta SCSI reader and transferred my pictures.
When I got my next one it had an SD slot. I got a USB reader and transferred my pictures.
When I got my latest camera I wanted a Sony T1 but hesitated due to memory stick. Then I saw a $14 USB2 reader and that SanDisk had a 512 card for $79 and went for it. I transfer my pictures, it doesn't matter.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
You mean the Apple iPod that has had DRM it from day 1?
huh? There was no DRM until the store came out and then it needed a firmware update for my iPod (5GB) to handle store files.
Which DRM were you talking about?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Xbox is kinda funny. As I recall the reason to use the funky plug was to increase endurance.
Oddly enough the usb adapter MS gave away can be used with any usb device you like. One thing I did was plug a lexar usb flash device into it - and you can save games to it. You can also connect joysticks to it as well.
Never said that, but it looks like WMA is winning out.
Infact I'm pretty sure DVDs use MP3 for the soundtrack.
I'm pretty sure you're misinformed. DVDs have multiple standards for audio, ranging from PCM to Dolby Digital and DTS 6.1 encoding - but none of them are so much as based on MP3. (What you're likely thinking of is all the DVD rips you used to download from Suprnova, where the original AC3 audio had been remuxed and recompressed into MP3 to shrink the total file size.)
In additon, the realtime ATRAC encoders in MiniDisc recorders are known to be quite good, while it wouldn't be surprising in the least if the realtime MP3 encoders in portable players wasn't all that great. Yes, it's not the the format or the bitrate but the encoder itself that really dictates the quality of your output.
± 29 dB
And it only took about 6.5 hours between the posting of this story and the posting of a new story Consumer Electronics Companies Plan Common DRM Standard in which Sony is once again an evil corporation hell-bent on ensuring that every media device sold is sold with inbuilt DRM.
At least I know what 'format' means :)
No, they don't. MMC cards use a 1-bit interface and SD can be 4-bit and run much much faster.
The iPod shipped DRM free Day 1. It actually wasn't until the 3rd generation of iPod they were updated with DRM.
I don't own one, but IIRC, the PS2 doesn't even take memory stick. There's tons of money to be made on a custom format for their console than for all the other products they make...
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You didn't miss the point, you made it up. The parent didn't even mention buying music online. He was talking of the library management/hardware interface aspect.