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The Sony/MP3 Saga Continues
Renegade Lisp writes "Sony's rolling out their new line of flash-based music players to the
market these days. More stylish than ever, they surely look like a
serious attempt to regain territory lost to the iPod, and perhaps even
to create the Walkman of the 21st century. And it looks like Sony has
finally given in to consumer pressure: these new "MP3 players" can
finally play MP3 natively, not just Sony's proprietary ATRAC format.
But wait -- you cannot just put your MP3s onto the device, you have to
run them through Sony's obfuscation software first. The obfuscated
files, when installed properly on the device, can be played. But you
can't just move them around, share them with your friends, whatever.
Well, of course the obfuscation scheme has already been broken by a
brave hacker. But is this really the way to create the "Network
Walkman" of the 21st century? Sony, please wake up!"
Their CD based MP3 players require no such obfuscation scheme.
Sony is notorious for coming up with useful, and often superior technology, while at the same time ignoring the actual markets demands that they are targeting.
See betamax and minidiscs
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
You ignore the cases where the manufacturer / service provider ceases to exist (or ceases doing business with you, a la BitMover) and you lose access to the content (either slowly as hardware dies and software succumbs to entropy, or quickly if something like Steam goes away)
Open content formats are the only way to be sure you can access your content, period. Anything else requires trust, and I don't trust corporations because our interests are always in conflict.
Doesn't seem odd to me to want to be sure you can access your content, so it seems reasonable to demand open formats.
"Illegal Activity" is a red herring, and something of the Godwin's Law of copyright arguments.
I bet their internal board meetings are a riot. On one side you've got their hardware guys who don't want to spend their R&D money and waste time/resources on redesigning and rebuilding playback devices that have worked just fine for years to respect the mandated DRM that the RIAA is trying to get into the law books.
Then you've got the label people pushing Sony's attorneys and reps at the RIAA to get this legislation done!
You've got Sony's legal department sending letters to people using Sony's laptops to rip MP3s of songs owned by a Sony label from their Sony DiscMan. And people becoming felons by violating the DMCA when they bypass the copy protection included on Sony CDs. They're violating the copy protection by using hardware produced by ... Sony. It's like a weird hybrid of a Kevin Smith movie and the Twilight Zone.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
I personally have a Rio MP3 player. Called the Rio Karma. It's small, functional and does something most MP3 players don't. Supports the Open Source OGG format. When comparison shopping OGG was a requirement, since I didn't want to re-rip most of my music collection. iPod, Sony, RCA, and Creative MP3 players don't support OGG/Vorbis, Rio and iRiver do, and Rio has more features on the player, such as the DJ which can play your favorite (most played) songs from any Genre you want. Or have it select songs for you from all genres. It even *Attempts* to go from heavy music, to slightly "lighter" music and then build back up so you're not going from Slayer to Goo Goo Dolls back to back.
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
You'd be surprised how many free, legal songs there are on the net. Oh, but you'd know this if you were doing stuff other than downloading RIAA Stuff, right?
For instance, my Overclocked Remix folder is 4.88 gig. These are mostly 128kbps mp3s.
My backups folder of CDs I own is 6.81 gig.
Also, it just so happens that having a larger player allows one to encode stuff in higher than 128kbps quality.
Anyhow, I'd like to type more, but morons like you have already cost me enough of my life and regret even firing off this response. :/
Poor, poor you. My heart goes out to you :P
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
This article talks about the demotion of the hardware guy Ken Kutaragi. People thought he might be the next CEO. Instead he was demoted (lost his seat on the board) and one of the reasons is he had the gall to say "Sony also has been hurt by its insistence on making its content proprietary"
More links to same story
Very very sad. Explains what happened to the MD which could have been a great format...
I promptly returned the device to the dealer. And I got so angry about it that I submitted a Slashdot story. It got accepted. And rightly so!
Coincidentally, Sony and Apple were two of the leaders of the Firewire/iLink push even though the 1394 market was less obvious than the digital music market, which puts both adversaries in the same boat. Nobody can rationally doubt that Apple has beaten it's 1394 partner this time around since Sony is poorly playing catchup in a market that Apple has defined. I also have to say that FP guy is going a bit overboard on his judgment of the iPod. For one, the iPod shuffle has an auto-fill option that does exactly what it says, removing any replay action. And even if you don't have an iPod shuffle with its auto-fill trick there are plenty of ways to make up for it using smart playlists which happen to be database queries based against the iTunes Music Database. (You didn't think iTunes and the iPod were simply music players did you?) There is even a site dedicated to techniques for effective smart-playlist usage (though that's no surprise since there are sites for anything) which directly correlates to heightened iPod enjoyability since you have the ability to sync certain playlists to your iPod automatically. The iPod is a very good front-end to a music databasing system which is robust, easy to use, and works well for the majority of people who want to listen to their music and who do not have esoteric or clandestine old-school technology fetishes or a passionate desire for a dumb (as in feature-poor), manual-update drag-and-drop music player. Even though Sony and Apple pioneered 1394 together it looks as though Sony is only partially (not at all?) clued in as to what makes a whole Digital Music Player solution. It's not just the player.