Sony new portables

John Alvarez · 09-10-2004, 06:19 AM

Does anyone have any personal info on these?

Network Walkman™ Digital Music Player
NW-HD1
VAIO Pocket™ Digital Music Player
VGF-AP1L

I'm looking between these and an Ipod. Any help would be appreciated.

John Alvarez · 09-13-2004, 11:17 AM

I have heard good and bad about the Ipod but I think Sony would put out a better product due to their experience.

NickSo · 09-13-2004, 11:21 AM

the new sony hard-drive based digital music player only supports sony's proprietary ATRAC ccompression codec, and not MP3.

That means if you have an MP3 collection, you'd have to convert it to ATRAC before copying it over.

John Alvarez · 09-13-2004, 01:51 PM

This from their web site.

Plays Back in ATRAC3™ Audio Format, Supports Multiple Internet Audio Formats (MP3, WMA3, WAV)6 The Network Walkman player plays back ATRAC3 and ATRAC3plus™ files and supports the most popular Internet audio formats.

Stephen Hopkins · 09-13-2004, 03:42 PM

I think what it means by "supports" is that those other formats are converted into ATRAC3 as part of the copying process. I don't think you have to do a manual conversion before copying to the device.

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John Alvarez · 09-14-2004, 09:17 AM

It says up to 30 hours playback using ATRAC3™ Audio Format.
Does that mean it would be less on another format or does it automatically convert like mp3 to this format? Also does anyone know the sound quality of this format?

Tony Kwong · 09-15-2004, 07:57 PM

Don't want to hijack the thread but are there any players that can play MP2 (mpeg audio layer 2)? In the early-mid 1990's I encoded hundred of songs about 20 CD-R's full of them (yes I paid $30-$60 for one CD-R disc!). This was way before the MP3 format came out. Even when MP3 came out it took 2x longer to encode compared to MP2 with hardly an improvement in SQ I continued using MP2 untill 1997.

Stephen Hopkins · 09-15-2004, 11:47 PM

I've had good luck just renaming mp2 filenames to the mp3 extension. I beleive the MP3 codec has backward support for MP2 encoded files built in, even when their mislabled w/ the MP3 extension.

Tony Kwong · 09-16-2004, 08:52 PM

Every portable player I've tried said it was an unreconizable format, or an error even if I rename them to MP3. On most software players, mp2's work unmodified..., I guess it's just the design of the hardware decoder chip not liking it.