Michael St. Clair

Sony blows it with new portable music player

Sony challenges Apple with new 20GB music player

No native MP3 support? You have got to be kidding me. I wasn't surprised when Hi-MD didn't support MP3, but now they've finally got a hard-drive player and MP3 has to have another lossy conversion to ATRAC if you want to play it on this player? Do these people even realize that MP3 is the de facto personal storage standard for music?

On top of all this, it won't play protected AAC or WMA, so you're stuck with Sony's proprietary music store, resulting in three formats for purchased downloaded music (two was bad enough).

The insider scoop on what’s so very wrong with Sony



Old article still relevant:

The Civil War Inside Sony

Sony needs to sell their record label and focus on Consumer Electronics without conflict. No wonder Playstation 2 is where they make their money.

Rich Malloy

I hope this isn't a threadfart (don't really care about MP3 players), but I sure dig your new signature line! Do you happen to have the Au20 of "One Size Fits All" (or "Apostrophe", for that matter)? If not, let me just say they are wonderfully mastered, not at all like the usual substandard Au20s. If you're ever interested in trading for copies, let me know (these discs are sadly too hard to come by these days).

Jack Briggs

Where the heck have you been, Rich Malloy?

Love Michael's sig image, too. I bought Freak Out! when it was first released by Verve in 1966. Everybody calls Sgt. Pepper rock's first "concept album," but we know better!

Nearly moved this thread to A/V Sources but thought, hey, what the hell.

Angelo.M

Tim Markley

Typical Sony. They always try to force people to use their proprietary format. Not supporting the industry standard is just stupid and I hope it fails miserably.

Michael St. Clair

Rich, I've got both Au20 discs and they are prized posessions. Spence Chrislu has done some great remastering where Zappa (and the ZFT) has permitted him. I still need to pick up the 'secret 1998 remasters' of You Are What You Is and Tinsel-Town Rebellion, these were mastered the same way as the Au20 discs (and fix poor mastering in the 1990 and 1995 CDs).



I use it every day at work, and some around the house when doing chores. I wouldn't do without it. I also use it when hiking and speed walking on a waist tunebelt with no skips (bad knees, can't run). I dropped it three feet onto concrete once and it still works perfectly. Glad your iPod is serving you well.



It seems portables get the most discussion and responses here. I too wouldn't mind a sub-area for 'Portable and Compressed Audio', which would not just cover players but also ripping and encoding issues.

Marc Colella

Heard about this the other day.

Doesn't surprise me one bit.

Sony's insistance on using proprietary formats is moronic, and clearly shows they have no idea what consumers want (or just don't care).

Looks like another dead format from Sony. Or as Sony-followers will eventually refer to it - a "niche format".

Rob Gardiner

Sony can be so maddening at times! I guess they're not satisfied with the format wars in hi-res audio or hi-def DVD.

In any case, I have no intention of buying an MP3 player that doesn't feature gapless playback.





During the recording of Sgt. Pepper, Paul McCartney was known to repeatedly say, "This is going to be our Freak Out."

Garrett Lundy

So, SONY thinks it can compete with Apple iPod by using a device that doesn't work as well, use an audio compression technology that isn't as good (so I hear), has the worse music store, AND arrive a year too late.

For a bunch of engineering genius's they're pretty thick they are.

"Did you know that more people are murdered at 92 degrees Fahrenheit than any other temperature? I read an article once. Lower temperatures, people are easy-going, over 92 and it's too hot to move, but just 92, people get irritable."

Angelo.M