Sony Admits MP3 Error 587
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.
Article. (Score:4, Informative)
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
Even their MP3 players need Windows (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Do what? (Score:3, Informative)
my iPod mounts as a removable hard drive and is full of mp3s.
Re:Ogg (Score:2, Informative)
Mainly lack of support in players and software - also the increase in compression is good but not so huge as to be compelling. I know that you can find both players and software that handle it very easily if you know what you are doing - but that lets most people out.
I only heard of it/began using it myself when I got an iRiver player. Pretty impressed with it so far - great sound and somewhat smaller file sizes than mp3.
The music industry must die and be reborn (Score:5, Informative)
Before you read on, read this article by Steve Albini [negativland.com] (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.
Re:Do what? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Ogg (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Do what? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:pretty simple, really... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Ogg (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Good (Score:4, Informative)
They had been pushing mini disc since the mid 90's as the replacement for the walkman, a few years before the mp3 format surfaced.
They also own a lot of music labels as well as being a publisher themselves. The implied link with piracy that mp3 has always had (and still does) meant it would be very difficult for sony to get behind it. Imagine a sony owned label suing a pirate for having an illegal mp3 on their sony mp3 player, not that there is anything technically wrong with that scenario, it just looks like sony are sending out mixed messages.
Sony is whats known as a vertically integrated company, they make music and films, they also make the hifi's and televisions that you listen and watch with.
Considering how wide sony's product line is I am surprised the company doesn't run into more of these problems. It reminds me of fox news suing the fox channel for alledgedly slandering them in an episode of the simpsons. It was eventually stopped by rupert murdock himself, he quite sensibly decided it was silly for two companies he owns to sue each other. I am surprised this doesn't happen more often in the world of multi national conglomerates.
Grammar Nazi taking control ... can't resist. (Score:2, Informative)
"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.
RAR Files (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
I think the GP was referring to that Sony does not make any multi-region DVD players, and is just about the only manufacturer who doesn't. And for the very same reason Sony had for not making MP3 players: the interests of Sony's music and film products were allowed to take precedence over the interests of electronics consumers.
Re:pretty simple, really... (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunatly the software made it nearly impossible to put music from MP3's on the player, even though there was a big MP3 label on the box. Both buggy and with a horrible user interface. Putting a batch of MP3's on is a two-stage process with lots of individual steps requiring user interaction, lots of time and a good chance it would crash before you were done. If that part was easier, I'd have bought several more players, but as is nobody wants to use the one we have.
Re:Do what? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:pretty simple, really... (Score:2, Informative)
Individually, each subsidiary actually has some pretty good ideas, and they're still very creative and well doing. They're a developer company, not a marketing company, although their ads are pretty nice. (Again, they don't do thoes in houes.)
The problem is that each individual subsidiary has to try and work with the others. Which really isn't working too well at all. I can't go into much detail, but trying to work between a Japanese Sony subsidiary, and an office overseas is LIVING HELL. Trying to get the consumer electronics division to work with the entertainment face is also hell, and I agree that this is one area that Sony really should have never ventured into. It's costing them more than they can afford.
So, Sony is still Sony, the good guys are still there, and I really do like their products (although a lot of Japanese refer to the "Sony Timer", the mythical logic-bomb set to destroy any device approx. 1 month after the warranty ends), they have a lot of kinks to iron out, and they know it. Big time. Their own people were moaning about ATRAC when their music player was released. They knew it would fail, big time, and although no one around me said it outloud, "BETA" was what was on everyone's mind. It's like a curse they can't shake off.
For those wondering, the Sony Playstation is doing rather well, but it's also true that this division has sort of refused to play by the rules. There are a few internal "collaboration" systems which in a sense are ankle shackles, which they have refused to use. There are some things they just need to go with, but a lot of the success is in staying out of the rest of the bureaucratic processes.
They've got great ideas and awesome quality, if you ask me, but I'd do my research before ever buying one of their products. Internally crippled is quite frequent there. (And yes, a lot of the people at Sony I know, have iPods. It's an open secret, really.)
Re:If I would of known... (Score:4, Informative)
Ever wonder why they aren't here in the US? Ever wonder why you can rent movies, console video games, heck even music videos, but not music?
Because the industry got it coded into law [nyls.edu], forbidding "rental, lease or lending". Japan has no such law, which is why CD rental stores are common there. Note the same law is also why you can rent console video games, but not PC video games.
Libraries were fortunate enough to have been given and excemption, which is why you can borrow music CDs from your local public library.
Re:A curious thing happened at MacWorld (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Do what? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ogg (Score:1, Informative)
Integer MP3 decoders also exist. I've seen it claimed that Vorbis decoding is slightly easier than MP3 in theory, but I don't think it's been demonstrated. IIRC, existing Vorbis decoders also require more memory.
On some hardware, MP3 decoding is offloaded to an MP3 decoder chip, and Vorbis requires more CPU power simply because MP3 doesn't require any.
Re:Ogg (Score:3, Informative)
In MP3, frames are always 1152 samples. Frames have a maximum size, and the amount of previous data they can depend upon is limited to a fixed amount. Some other buffering is needed to extract the compressed data into the uncompressed spectra, and then the MDCT and polyphase filter turns it into time domain. Half the previous frame's decoded data is needed to overlap with the next. RAM required is minimal (buffer input, hold one 1152 sample frame, store 1/2 of last one).
In Vorbis, frames can range from 64 to 8192 bytes (only two sizes are actually used in any particular vorbis stream, but a compliant decoded needs to be able to hanle 8192 byte frames if the stream is encoded with them). Vorbis frames don't depend on previous frame data (though the audio samples from the last 1/2 frame overlap, similar to mp3's iMDCT overlap), but frame size is unlimited in vorbis. So basic decoding needs up to a 8192 sample buffer, plus storing 1/2 the previous, and a potentially large compressed frame input buffer. So far, similar to mp3 if the encoder only outputs reasonable frames, only about 7x more due to the 8192 sample frame maximum.
If that were the whole story, it wouldn't be so bad. Saddly, it isn't.
Where other codecs use lots of fixed tables (called codebooks in the vorbis spec), vorbis uses no hard-coded tables. They're all provided in a header at the beginning of the stream. Vorbis places no upper limit on the size of this header, but the spec strongly suggests the compressed size be kept around 4k or less. That's with compression... not gzip-like compression, mind you. When expanded to a useful table in memory, these are quite large.
Similar tables exist in MP3, but because they are fixed and not included in the bitstream, they can be encoded into ROM, which is cheap. For Vorbis, they need to be in RAM. With lots of RAM, it's no problem. Just expand them all and use them. With limited RAM, the (hopefully) 4k header is kept and a lot of work is done to compress them on demand.
The other vorbis issue is the need for 64 bit math. At least to be fully compliant with the spec (using only 32 bits may lose quality). Vorbis frames, once unpacked, basically consist of two vectors... with you can think of as representing the spectrum of that frame's audio in course and fine resolution. You compute the dot product of these vectors to get the spectrum, and the spec says to use 64 bit precision. Then you do an inverse DCT (using 64 bit math) to get the time domain audio. At this point, you can go back to normal integers, apply the windows and overlapping (with the previous 1/2 frame) and output the audio samples. The kicker is doing that inverse DCT with 64 bit numbers. If you have a 32x32->64 multiply, that's 4X the number of multiplies, plus a bunch of adds and extra housekeeping.
I suspect that some embedded devices with vorbis support probably truncate to 32 bits after the dot product of those vectors and do the inverse DCT with only 32 bit precision. Apparantly this works most of the time, but loses some quality and won't necessarily be fully compliant with future improvements in vorbis encoding.
Re:If I would of known... (Score:3, Informative)
Because your Playstation/Xbox/etc is a "Limited purpose" computer, rather than a "general purpose" machine, you can have game rentals.