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[pops619]

I'll admit, this is the best looking mp3 player I've seen yet. Something that small and thin would be awesome to have. I'm happy enough with my Karma, though.

 

[aoi tsuki]

What the fuck is Sony's problem? They won't use a format unless they had a hand in developing it or have massive control over it.

This stupid minidisc bullshit, no one else uses. MEMORY STICK. BETAMAX. Atrac. Blueray (Only decent one out of the bunch).

How about just accepting the industry standards, damnit.

Sony has it's hand in a lot of arenas. On one hand, Sony Electronics wants to make device that plays music. But Sony Music wants to make sure people are buying the CD and not just downloading the music. If i can find it, i'll post a link to the Wired article a year or so ago about the civil war within Sony Ltd. Ironically, we're just now seeing the products that they talk about in the article.

Minidisc is one of the most versatile, inexpensive formats for recording/playing music in the past decade or so. It was originally meant to be a replacement for tape, not CD or MP3 players. The fact that it's still a viable format today says a lot about it's flexibility. Sony had to develop MD. There just wasn't another format out there that could match the rewritability, durability, size, and low power consumption (in the device) at the time.

Sony developed the ATRAC codec to be used with MD, and it's constantly improved over the years. Despite recent tests "proving" the latest iteration to be inferior to other lossy codecs, it's up there with AAC with me.

Memory Stick is finally taking off, and we're seeing it used in more devices and produced by more companies at lower prices. They really need to be more forwardminded when it comes to developing new kinds of MSs though. There's like six or seven different MS formats, and not all are compatible with all MS devices.

i don't know much about Betamax personally, but it's i know several people in the video industry still use it. The video production company my uncle works with uses them, and one of the employees just bought a deck a few days ago.

i do agree that UMD is a bit much. i'd much rather have HiMD compatibility, but for obvious reasons (piracy being the main one), they created a new format specifically for PSP.

 

[dskillzhtown]

Sorry for bumping an old thread, but any confirmed US release date and price for this item?

 

[DaCocoBrova]

why doesn't Sony bite the bullet and embrace the mp3-mp4 format

Uhh...

Maybe because Sony is in the music publishing business?

 

[aoi tsuki]

Actually, they've got ATRAC3 Plus for music encoding, and they're not gonna drop their own codec. ATRAC3 sounded better than MP3 to me, but i don't think ATRAC3 Plus beats MP4 audio.

 

[xsarien]

It's not even a matter of Sony wanting to use ATRAC. If they want to hey, more power to them. It's their format. No, the issue is them *forcing* it onto any file you throw at the device. "Hey, you wanna listen to that? Awesome. Oh, sorry, it's an mp3. Hang on while I transcode that for you..."

And people give Apple shit for not supporting OGG.