New Walkman-Branded Hard Disk Player 433
Darian writes "Following on the heels of Commodore's introduction of portable digital music players Sony has stepped up to the plate with their first Walkman branded product. Reuters has the story and The Register has a couple more photos. Gizmodo has an anonymous tip from a Sony insider. The NW-HD1 is a 'credit card-sized' 8.9m x 6.2 x 1.4cm unit fitted with a 20GB 1.8in hard drive. There's enough RAM on board to provide 25 minutes of skip-free playback. There's a seven-line LCD for track information and player status data. "We couldn't come up with something using the Walkman brand until it survived the 1 meter (3 ft 3.37 in) drop test," said Robert Ashcroft, senior vice president of Sony network services Europe. So digital music rights had nothing to do with it? Right. The unit is planned to undercut the iPod price point. Apple lawyers do have the upper hand with the scroll wheel." Update: 07/01 21:34 GMT by T : It's also the Walkman's 25th birthday; read on for more.
Player Blog writes "The Sony Walkman, icon of the 80s and direct ancestor of the iPod and its ilk, first hit the streets 25 years ago. I don't know if July 1, 1979 was the actual first day for the Walkman, but Sony is celebrating it today. I had one, I loved it and I thought it was the greatest invention ever. Take a trip down memory lane with the history and photos at the Walkman Museum."
too bad it doesnt do MP3 (Score:5, Interesting)
Loss of quality? (Score:5, Interesting)
The NW-HD1's primary format is Sony's own ATRAC 3 Plus - other formats are converted to that mode when they're transferred over to the player.
So... If I transfer parts of my existing collection (MP3 and OGG Vorbis), it'll get "re-encoded" into the ATRAC format? Will this lead to a loss of sound quality?
Craig
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:too bad it doesnt do MP3 (Score:1, Interesting)
The money is the brand, and everything else is second. While Apple may have a current spike in popularity, Sony is and always has been THE name for portable music. As soon as this hits the shelves, it's going to change the world for Apple, and for the worse.
There are still millions of people who know "Sony Walkman" as the only way to listen to portable music, and its their money that counts. Cheaper than the iPod, and since any other music format can be converted easily to ATRAC, to me that's a revolution right there.
Surprised (Score:2, Interesting)
I remember reading an article on Wired about the civil war going on inside sony. The hardware side wants to build music devices giving consumers the features they want, while the entertainment (music/movies) side wants to restrict what consumers can do with their content.
quoting from the article, Keiji Kimura the vice VP at Sony headquarters in Japan, said this on the ipod "We do not have any plans for such a product," says Kimura, the smile fading. "But we are studying it."
I for one am excited about this product. More competition in the HD based protbles can only be good for consumers
Skipping? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmmm... (Score:2, Interesting)
*font=sarcasm* Who are the marketing geniuses at Sony?!? */font*
Re:Music technology (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Atrac-3 a mistake (Score:5, Interesting)
Legal contradiction... (Score:3, Interesting)
Furthermore, it appears that it cannot be used as a portable hard drive.
Thus, the ONLY way this new device could be useful to consumers is if they infringe copyrights and download music illegally. If that's the obvious intent of the product, then why does Sony even bother with its ATRAC 3 Plus format and give the people what they want?!
What does it look like to the computer? (Score:5, Interesting)
If not, this is just a hard-disk MiniDisc, with the same stupid music-only restriction that killed the MiniDisc players.
Re:Prior art (Score:5, Interesting)
Lobotomized interface to the PC? (Score:4, Interesting)
So that means apart from the fact that i have to rely on Sonys proprietary Formats for the audio and i need Windows just to interface with the thing i can't even use the thing as an external HD? How silly is that?
When i buy what is in effect a 20GB HD with headphones i want to be able to carry some data on that. Now my mobile doubles as digital camera, organizer, handheld game and whatnot, but that sony thing serves only as a walkman just because they lobotomized the PC-Interface?
Re:too bad it doesnt do MP3 (Score:2, Interesting)
iPod or iRiver for me, and just put up with the fact that I can't get quite as much on in a lossless format.
Why no IEEE 1394 support? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Legal contradiction... (Score:3, Interesting)
Its the same thing with the whole webmail shake-up that is going on at the moment with GMail - they offer 1Gb of storage, other places offer 2Gb and so on. Hardly anyone will actually use all that, but hey, isn't 2Gb better?!
Besides, you are also forgetting that most people don't start from scratch with their music. Sure, your maths works if they don't have any music, but most people who are willing to drop large amounts of cash on digital players are likely to have tons of CD's and things already which they can put on.
Re:too bad it doesnt do MP3 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Music technology (Score:5, Interesting)
I know everyone would have loved to have a MD-RW drive in their computer at the time, and even now their high capacity drives would make a good contender, because they are dirt cheap, in a caddy so they can't really get damaged, and they can be re-written millions of times, unlike CD-RWs while like to crap-out after a dozen or so.
Sony dropped the ball on MiniDiscs. They had every opportunity to take over, but their hard-cord DRM plans prevented them from ever making anything most of the public wanted.
Re:Music technology (Score:2, Interesting)
*cough*MuVo2 [creative.com]*cough*
sorry, did you say something?
Re:too bad it doesnt do MP3 (Score:3, Interesting)
ATRAC sounds PERFECT at the bitrates it was originally designed for (namely, about 1/7th the bitrate of CDs).
It's their forey into the range around 128Kbps that sounds like crap.
On MiniDiscs, they went out of their way to say those rates were only for speech, and similarly low-quality material. They contradict themselves, I'm afraid, by using the lowest bitrates in marketing when they want to list the highest "number of songs".
I don't think there's a better high-bitrate codec than ATRAC, although I'm sure there's some MPC fanatics that would be happy to argue the point...
subjected to DRM Hell... (Score:5, Interesting)
For this reason alone, Apple should welcome the low-cost competitions that don't play MP3. [They should, however, not be as blatently and embarrassingly arrogant as they were when the welcomed the IBM PC.]
MP3 is the world standard for digital music files. Every other digital music format is rightly seen as just a corporate scam to suck money out of customers. OGG is an exception, but OGG will never amount to anything until its files are transparently interchangable with MP3 files and work on players that only play MP3. When I say 'only' play MP3, I mean it plays MP3 along with whatever proprietary worthless corporate format that the unit was bundled with (such as whatever Apple has on the iPod along with MP3).
A corporate digital music player that only plays the corporate recordings that customers purchased from the corporation in a propropietary format is nothing more that an overpaid marketing executive's 'wet dream' (or, a sexual fantasy sleep dream that results in nocturnal orgasm, for those who are not familiar with this American expression when used as metaphor. We are an international audience here on Slashdot.) Such a product will flop in the real world regardless of its price or tech specs, as Sony is about to find out.
Sometimes I almost feel sorry for these guys that are so caught up in a corporate groupfuck that they have to blow away hundreds of millions of dollars in obviously stupid products before they finally release something successful. Especially when they could have had it right the first time if they had just asked us what we wanted to buy in the first place and taken our answers seriously.
News.com: Unit plays MP3s, WAVs, WMAs (Score:4, Interesting)
"Both devices use Sony's ATRAC3 music format and also play back MP3, WAV and WMA audio formats."
Sloppy reporting on news.com.com, or an error for the Register?
Re:too bad it doesnt do MP3 (Score:3, Interesting)
This thing looks great, but after owning a NetMD MiniDisc player, I would NEVER buy another Sony portable if it involves using Sony software. The device is, in the end, only as good as the software and only as hassle-free as the DRM system.
Whisper down the alley -- so what? (Score:3, Interesting)
Nobody seems to think much of ATRAC3 itself, but that's not the truly awful part anyway.
The awful part is that they're talking about taking data that's already been mutilated by an MP3 encoder, and then mutilating what's left by encoding it again. MP3 gives you an approximation of the CD. Sony's player will give you an approximation of the approximation.
But this is why Sony's not crazy: The users can't hear the difference. Most users insist that 128k MP3s "sound just like the CD". These are the same people who think that the brown things at McDonald's "taste just like a hamburger". You can call them idiots all you like, but they won't listen. That's because they think you "sound just like their neurotic Aunt Mamie who checks her lampshades for dust every ten minutes".
I'm not kidding. 128k MP3s clobbered CDs in the marketplace, and 128k MP3s are pure crap. They sound worse than lacquer 78s. They're worse than cassette tapes, the previous record-holder for "shittiest sound available anywhere". Sound quality is not a selling point, period. LPs survived alongside cassettes because you could access them randomly, not because they sounded better (in fact, after a few years on some idiot's floor gathering gouges and dog hair, they sounded worse than cassettes anyway).
Few of the technical deficiencies of this product are relevant. The time spent re-encoding all the files may well piss customers off, but I guarantee you that few if any of them will care that their music sounds like a water balloon in a garbage disposal.
Re:too bad it doesnt do MP3 (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry, I couldn't help myself as that is the required slashdot response when someone says "mp3" and "standard" in the same sense. I agree with you though, mp3s will always dominate because they have no DRM and they sound damn good enough to just about everyone. And all this paranoia about people thinking some day their "closed music collection" will be inaccessable is BS because every music player worth a download plays mp3. I'll bet there were a lot of people in sony complaining about the ATRAC format. Nothing like a PHB and idiot marketting majors to fuck up the walkman
Re:here's the article with listening tests (Score:3, Interesting)