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Sony Digital Downloads 76

Posted by emmett from the pizzicato-five dept.
Mad Gav writes "Sony's Music Clip and Memory Stick Walkmans have been around here in Japan for months, but the software from Sony has been lacking, until now. Sony launched their first stab at a digital download service in Japan, albeit with a limited selection of tracks. A single track costs 350 Yen (just over $3) to download. It looks like Sony is finally making serious moves into this arena, and I'd predict that it's only a matter of months before their entire catalog goes online..." The link is in Japanese, but you can understand what's going on there.
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Sony Digital Downloads More

Sony Digital Downloads

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  • Leave it to Sony to turn a good thing bad. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Finally, a big company realising that people want downloadable music. Great! Right? Right???.... Or not. Great, EXCEPT at $3/song you are better off just buying the CD, and ripping the songs yourself.

    Unfortunately, this is about what we should expect from The Music Industry(tm)(r)(c). They would like to appear to be supporting online music, but really, they are going to do everything in their power to ensure that it doesn't cut in to their sales of CDs. And, of course, I suppose they are going to choose some nice 'open' format like SDMI so that once you've downloaded it, you can't make any copies. Not that I would expect anything more from the company that brought us SCMS and helped stop the consumer DAT.

    At any rate this is just another case where we need to just say no and vote with our dollars. Buy the CD instead and rip the music yourself. If you need a good MP3 encoder, may I suggest Xing [xingtech.com]. It's only $20 and you can get it for Windows, MacOS, or Linux (either Intel or PPC). Also, it's quite fast and sounds better than Opticon Producer (IMHO).

  • Remember how we laughed on various net-clueless movies like The System? How improbable the sale of illegal software seemed in Matrix?

    The SDMI protection software can be reverse-engineered like any software distributed to a hardware near you. This means that utilities to convert the downloaded music to freely copyable MP3's will be created. Will it be illegal? You bet it will, if DeCSS is any indication where the matters are heading.

    Somehow, now I have no problems imagining going to the hacker's den and paying him a couple hundred for a diskette with such a ripper.

  • No memory stick port on PS2, MiniDisc quite successfull in europe. That's all...

  • Wrong. Sony sells 80 minute MDs, you can record in mono for 144/160 minute discs, and with Sony's new all-in-one dubbing machine, you can record MDs at up to 4x speed, depending on the quality of the CD to be copied. Please get your facts straight before posting again.
  • Great idea. I'm sure that of the thousands of people that visit Slashdot, one must be a lawyer. Please tell me if this service would be legal.

    One goes to a website, browses a catalog of music, and picks out an album. After paying, the company sends him a CD. However, not to keep the customer waiting, they make the contents of the CD available for download in MP3 form. Now, subtract the shipment of the CD. Good idea?

    --

  • Remeber first that these are not MP3's, but Sony's ATRAC 3 format like their Mini Discs and such... Does anyone know if this format is proprietary? Anyway, there is a review in my latest stereo/video rag that states that MP3's have to get converted to ATRAC before getting uploaded to the player.
    MP3 - Lossy Compression
    ATRAC - Another Lossy Compression
    Make a copy of MP3 and re-compress it. How good does it sound to you?
  • Oops - My bad.

    Stereo Review's Sound & Vision - Feb/Mar 2000
    P 134 - Multimedia Maven Edited by Michael Antonoff
    "Pocket Music" section
    "Unlike the company's Memory Stick Walkman which must first convert MP3 files into Sony's ATRAC 3 format, the Music Clip accepts either format via a USB cable from your computer."

    The files on the web site are in Sony's ATRAC 3 format too.
  • The price is fair as others have said in comparison to what the Japanese pay for their CDs. What isn't fair is the whole regional division thing. I'd love to download some J-pop stuff that is hard to find for me here in the USA, or just to sample some Japanese artists.
    oh well
  • "$3 a track = $36 for an album!!! Will people actually pay that when they can just rip from a CD?"
    Actually, they probably will. If you want the whole CD, it's cheaper to get the CD, but if you only want 1-2 songs, then it's cheaper to get just the 1-2 songs. I personally have stopped buying more than about 2-3 CDs a year -- something about paying $20 for about $1 (if even that much) in raw materials.
  • MD is dead, dead, dead.

    Have you ever played with one of these things? They kick ass. I dunno what happened to the idiot marketing folks (or if there was a lawsuit somewhere) but somehow MD hasn't caught on here. A friend of mine got one for Christmas, totally sweet, blows away my Rio (or any other portable MP3er).

    That being said, i think they missed the window in the U.S. That window closes the second someone figures out how to put 128mg+ on a porty MP3 or play straight MP3 cds (6+hours per CD). Too bad, those MD players are sweet.
  • $3 worth of Yen will buy you a lot less in Japan than $3 in America will. So $3 is not as expensive as it sounds. But you'd have to be stupid to pay $3 per *listen*.

    That said, the price is still too high. The cost of getting a single into the shops in the high street is high, and there's a risk that you won't recoup your costs if sales are bad. The cost of putting a single online for download is approximately zero (plus some web page development, which will be good for *all* online sales) and there's no danger of not recouping this cost. I wonder what cut the artist gets of online sales? Still the same old 2%?

    OTOH if online music sales in general take off then this is probably good for places like mp3.com who are giving artists decent percentages and not ripping the consumer off as much.
  • i was thinking more along the lines of internet access. I remember paying like a buck and hour for compuserve about 8 years ago. Or how about how expensive DSL service is when it first comes to an area, in Iowa City its about $700 for US West to set the line up. in Atlanta where more people use it, its only around $100, or at least i'v been been told thats the price.
  • Why is it that people say thats too expensive, so it must be the big companies trying to screw everyone? well guess what, Sony just started doing this, its only in japan where CD's are much more expensive, and there won't really be too much of a market for it, so the price is high but it will go down as more and more people start using it. Now the tech that sony is using is the bad thing, forget the price, sooner or later that will go down, but they formats and copy protection they are using are just terrible! i want to be able to move my music around as much as i want, wherever i want, so find a way to be able to only move a file around and not copy it! Yes i can't archive it, but at least its better than what they have now. And if the record companies really want to make some money, make a site with LOTS of banner adds on it and only charge like 50cents for a download.

    MP3 is just not going to cut it, at least not in its current form, piracy is already rampent. i logged onto napster for the first time this weekend and i honestly think the record companies should be very worried, there are usualy around 900gigs of illegaly copied MP3's. a lot of artists put a lot of work into that music and there are thousands of people stealing it 24hrs a day! Its not the the record companies that are losing money, the artist are as well. The record companies will do what they have to in order to stay profitable, and if that mean screwing over the artists because a bunch of idiots are stealing the music instead of buying it, then thats exactly what they will do. So instead of complaining about what sony and others are doing, lets work on creating a tech. that does what we want while still ensuring that the material isn't stolen.

  • MD (Score:1)

    by gidds ( 56397 )
    I'm an MD fan - I've a couple of hundred of them (all recorded from my own CDs). And I'm nearly a thirtysomething :)

    MP3 is a great soft format, but until there's a hard format to match - or several - I'll stick with MD. I don't have half an hour to spend every morning downloading music to an MP3 player; I need to grab some music off the shelf and go! I also couldn't fit my (huge) CD collection, as MP3s, onto my hard disk...

    MD is surprisingly popular, and will keep growing. It won't replace CD or MP3, but it'll sit next to 'em. Who knows, perhaps we'll all be storing MP3 files on MD?!
  • Is it? Considering that a brand new single CD costs around 1,100yen in Japan, 350yen is not too expensive. Another similar service which I have seen in Tokyo, is that you can download songs to your MD for a cost. Please remember that Sony is a corporation, they are out to make money, just like any other coporation. 2c

  • WOW (Score:1)

    by pavo ( 70713 )
    God this is cool. Where can I get one?
  • No, if you rent a single CD (not one CD but a single release containing about 4 songs) from a rental shop in Japan, you'll pay about 150-200Y (1.50$ to 2$ american), maximum.
    Most people in Japan (well, thats an overgeneralization: I mean most Japanese people I know) have MD players. MD is HUGE here.
    I dont know why Sony bothers with this whole "download one song off the net" garbage. It's easier just to rent a full length CD (about 300Y or 3$) and then copy it onto mini disc. Thats what a large majority of people and I do anyway.
    Why pay 320Y to download ONE song off the internet when i can rent the ENTIRE single or full length CD for under 400Y (4$) and copy it onto MD without losing any sound quality?
  • Not really considering that most cds only have about 2 good songs, but its still the same price as a cd single, which you could rip too.
  • I was refering to most of the pop music that sony would be selling on their sites anyway. I prefer entire cds anyway, but you should get a -1 troll anyway, dumb turd.
  • I'm curious, how does the write time seem to be with your camera. I have a Kodak DC-260 and a 48 MB compact flash card. The write times are too slow. I also have a Sony Mavica that uses FDD which takes a very long time to write one 640x480 jpg. It's nice to have a shareable media, but for my next camera, I want fast write speed.

    Anyone compared compact flash, memory stick, and SmartMedia cards? which one is fastest?

  • This may sell in Japan, but it ain't gonna pass muster anywhere else. Sony has been pushing their anemic "memory" stick down their captive Japanese consumer's throats. I think those memory sticks will be about as popular as chop sticks in the ole' US.
  • I'm sorry, I should have been clearer. You're right, when I'm transfering my pics, I use the PCMCIA adapter and they transfer in less then 3 seconds.

    I was referring to the actual write speed while taking pics. I hate that damn delay between pics when the flashrom gets full and it has to write to the card. That takes upwards of 30-50 seconds sometimes. In the meantime, I got some fine female with her booty in the air and I want to snap some pics damn it!


  • MD never really caught on big-time in the US. but I hear its ultra-popular in Japan.

    Not sure about this comment. I am in the UK (over here MD is gaining popularity slowly) but virtually all of the americans I know have and rave about MD. I personally am more happy with CDR but on recent visits to NYC it certainly seems very much bigger that side of the pond than this.
  • CDs here in Japan sell for around $25-$32. There is NO discounting. No, this is not a cultural thing, but is legal, enshrined in so-called 'fair trade' laws that prohibit discounting domestic CDs, records, books, and newspapers. This is one of the key reasons that e-commerce is being hobbled in Japan, as there is no incentive to buy CDs or books over the net (fixed price + shipping > fixed price), and these are typical first purchases that get consumers comfortable with the process.

    Given that CD buyers often are buying whole CDs to get certain key tracks, the 350 yen price makes a certain sick sense. Of course Sony is on crack and you can only feel for innocents that end up buying the cripple-ware players they are making...

  • Well, they may let you download it, but don't expect to read about it. I can't believe a site like Sony has a page as illegible as this. What's with those two little frames? Yeesh.
  • A little bird told me that Sony owns Aiwa, but I am not sure.
  • No, there won't be any lawsuits, at least not from RIAA et al. This is a very crippled device, according to a review linked here on Slashdot yesterday. The gist of it is that this uses the new, rip-off-enriched SDMI technology, which means that while you may own the hardware, Sony reserves the right to later cripple the software so that you can't use it. See the review here:

    http://members.home.com/timruss/musicclip.html

    Yes, it's neat, but let's don't encourage the crooks in the music industry by buying these things. Hold out for MP3 players, or we may never get any.
  • I just got a DSC505 I it is trés cool. The delay between taking one photo and being able to take another is, for 1600*1200 about 4secs. I didn't do extensive tests, but that's about right

  • $3 a track is a lot, but maybe 350 yen isn't. For one thing, pretty much everything is more expensive in Japan and that is what they are used to. For another thing, fifteen years ago, 350 yen was maybe $1.50. Even though the exchange rates have changed, 350 yen is still 350 yen to the Japanese, no matter what it means to us. It's hard to compare like this across currencies and cultures.
  • No, if you rent a single CD (not one CD but a single release containing about 4 songs) from a rental shop in Japan, you'll pay about 150-200Y (1.50$ to 2$ american), maximum.

    Well, I didn't say anything about how much the rentals cost, because I didn't know anything about that, but you have a really good point.

    In my original post, I was going to say something about renting a CD and then ripping it (to MP3 or CD-R) instead of just taping it, but I couldn't come up with the right words. Copying to MD isn't quite as "open source", but still just as effective.

    When you compare this download thing to renting a CD and then copying it to MD, which also doesn't let you make a copy of the copy, you have something almost identical to what Sony is trying to do. The only difference is that an MD-discman is a little bit bigger than their "music pen".

    Actually, there's one small difference. It's moving bits, not atoms. If it weren't for the "Japan-only" thing, this would make it possible for people who were not in Japan to import music without having to do overseas mail-order (expen$ive $hipping) or wait for local import stores to receive their own bulk-orders.

    But as we know Sony is aiming for world domination anyhow, it is obvious they aren't doing this out of compassion for J-pop fans outside of Japan.
  • $3 a track = $36 for an album!!!
    Will people actually pay that when they can just rip from a CD?

    -----------------------------------
  • Given that they now have virtually no overhead for production or distribution $3-6 sounds about right for a whole album if that (artist's royalties + Sony's cut for hosting and delivering the music) have you seen the breakdown of costs of a cd, its shocking, and they've just taken most of that out cost of the loop.

    -----------------------------------
  • Watch out for the RIAA lawsuit.
  • I have a Music Clip and it's really a lot worse than you probably imagined. For one (as has already been pointed out) it only natively understands ATRAC3. Other than trying to own every aspect of the digital music distro. system, the main advantage of going with ATRAC3 is that the decoder is a lot smaller than those for MP3s. This is what allowed them to make the clip in it's funky form factor.

    But that's not the end of the stupidity. On top of the ATRAC3 business, the Music Clip software also employs OpenMG. This is an encryption/authentication scheme that was developed by Sony in an attempt to beat SDMI to the punch. Sony is hoping that if they can actually implement a workable form of copy protection, the rest of the SDMI people will decide to go with that.

    So what does all this mean in terms of using the device? Well since the music clip refuses to understand non-encrypted, non-authenticated MP3s, you have to "import" your entire library is order dump it on your device. Your MP3 library has to be converted to ATRAC3 and "protected" by OpenMG. You've just doubled the size of your music library.

  • We will crack the encryption, but we will probable need to redistribute the songs as ATRAC3 files since the conversion to mp3 will lose a lot of quality.

    Three things:
    1) The current version of ATRAC is 4.5, not 3. Almost all Minidisc equipment you encounter these days is either ATRAC 4 or 4.5 and there is a HUGE sonic difference. ATRAC 1 was just horrible. ATRAC 2 was on par with about 80-112k MP3s. ATRAC 3 is on par with 128-160k MP3s. ATRAC 4 is on par with 192-256k MP3s and ATRAC 4.5 is damn near DAT quality (if you come from a clean source).
    2) The quality loss of a conversion from ATRAC 4/4.5 to MP3 is minimal. If you like, I can prepare a little demo for you. I have an older ATRAC 4 MiniDisc and if I digitally transfer a CD over, and then take a digital copy back, then encode that to MP3 (at a high bitrate), it is almost totally indistinguishable from an MP3 made straight form the CD source and my gear is of fairly high quality. Even an analogue copy doesn't sound too bad, and the MD's D/As aren't great.
    3) ATRAC is not an encripted format. SDMI may be, but ATRAC is not. It's just a psycoacoustic compression model, like MP3.

  • Sounds like a rip off to me. $3 for one track!!! No wonder Sony is rushing ahead with this.
  • There is a noticable write time when I take 1600x1200 pictures ("fine" quality). I'd have to pay attention next time I take a 1024x768 picture to see if there is much delay for the write time.

    Deleting a specific image takes about a second, as well as formatting the entire memory stick.

    Reading from the stick is very fast, even the MPEG movies I've taken.
  • I have a Sony DSC-F55 digital still camera that uses memory sticks. They are actually pretty neat. My camera came with a 4MB stick. An 8MB stick is $30 (I think), a 32MB stick is $100 and I think the 64MB stick goes for about $160. You could fit a lot of pictures on a 32MB memory stick. That thing will pay for itself after about ten "rolls".

    The memory sticks will also be supported by the PlayStation 2. So, I think they will have a good chance of catching on here, unlike the MiniDisc.

    The coolest thing about memory sticks are that they have a mechanical switch on them that is used for write protection -- just like on 3.5" floppies.
  • Raw materials (CD, jewel case, average liner notes) ran about $1.25 a year ago.
  • I tend to agree. The thing a lot of Slashdotters probably won't understand is that there are plenty of people who will pay the extra cash for convenience. Hackers thrive on difficult tasks; most people will pay for simplicity. Why not just buy the whole CD and rip it? Who the hell has time? Just buy the tracks you want and shell out a few extra bucks.
  • Hmm, *nearly* there. I checked out the Japanese spec for the Memory Stick Walkman (as a PDF on Sony's Japan website), which is the first major application of this technology for Sony. What it appears they're trying to do is get you locked into using Magic Gate, which is their proprietary copy protection architecture based on a modified Memory Stick. You CAN'T use standard Memory Sticks with any of this kit, you have to use the special white sticks with the content control stuff built in, so forget using your blue sticks for your camera, personal stereo and Playstation 2.

    Sony's content management software allows you push up to three copies of a track, so in theory you could make a copy for your home hi-fi, one for your Walkman and a further copy for the car. The way it does this is by using a standard software engineering type source code control system, i.e. you check your music in and out of the software. It will also allow you to rip CDs and do the same, and it will also read your MP3 files and turn them into Magic Gate ATRAC compatible files, for all the benefit that gives you. This is a pretty insidious move for Sony, as the next thing they're probably going to do is start watermarking their CD content, so that their Internet connected software can report unauthorized use, etc, etc. Be afraid, be very afraid.

    Basically this is the first attempt by Sony to put the MP3 genie back in the bottle under their own steam. The RIAA have proved themselves to be impotent in dealing with MP3, because they're trying to address it in a very 'standards organization' kind of way. It'll never happen, and I'm sure Sony are fully aware of that. It's all very well saying 'just buy an MP3 player', but Sony are going to market this stuff to *death*, and within a year it'll be a widely understood technology by the non-Slashdot reading world. MP3 is great, but so were Betamax videos. That's what you've got to fear.

    The best way to deal with tech like MP3 is to do what Microsoft did to Apple, copy it, f*** with it, then pile the cash into merchandising the hell out of it and locking your key users into it. When the Playstation 2 launches, I predict that Sony will do exactly that. They'll have a very friendly, easy to browse, Playstation 2 friendly web site and make it extremely easy for Joe Public to suck tracks onto their Memory sticks with the minimum amount of fuss, all billed to Sony's Playstation 2 dial-up Internet service. Clean and simple. MP3 will rapidly become a voice in the wilderness, unless the MP3 community can do unto Sony what Linux is currently doing to Microsoft...
  • Compact flash slow? What interface are you using to transfer? I use smartmedia and my transfers max out the pcmcia interface at 2MB/sec. A 8MB card takes about 4 seconds to transfer all the pictures to and from the laptop. The serial cable that came with another camera is much, much slower.
  • Now I know exactly what you are talking about. Every digital camera I have used has a major lag time from the time the button is pushed, picture is taken, and the processing time required before the next one can be snapped. It would be nice to have a camera that the instant the button is pushed, a picture is taken. The slowest film cameras are faster than the fastest digital cameras when the button is pushed.

    A delay of even 10ms can make or break a picture with people in it. For example, take your stopwatch and start and stop it fast as you can and you should see from 10ms to 20ms. Like the trigger finger on a stopwatch, people's faces can change in an instant.

    In the world of high speed digital electronics, why hasn't there been an engineer that has programmed a camera to have the ccd ready to capture on an instant?
  • Don't be so absolute! It's not a question of being either limited or unlimited, but a comment
    on the fact that there are relatively few selections available. In case you haven't noticed, there is already quite a market (and grey/black market) for digital music, that does not involve sony. And there is already a certain expectation for the variety and number of selections that one my expect from such a service. Thus the comment was meant to say that Sony's selection is limited, in comparison to what we're already used to seeing.
  • Anyone know where I can source blank CD-r discs in the "CD Single" (3.25"?) size?
  • The price clearly shows they don't get it. The advantage of delivering through internet is that you can skip several steps of the logistics (burning to cd, distributing cd, etc.). In other words the main advantage is that delivering through internet is more cost effective. But what do they do???? They sell at a higher price.

    This clearly shows that they don't understand their own business model. All they think about is profit but they don't see the obvious opportunity to make more profit. If they'd offer music at a lower price online they'd make huge profits because people like buying things cheaply (duh).

    Sony is in a great position: they are responsible for about a third of 'traditional' music distribution so they have access to the content, they have their technology (storage, playing, recording you name it). All they have to do is put the two together.
  • Is there any service which doesn't have a limited selection of tracks? If there is, I wonder where they get their unlimited supply of disk drives from?
  • That's one of the options on My.mp3.com

    If you login, you can beam a CD, buy a CD, or add MP3's from www.mp3.com.

    MP3.com is currently being sued by the RIAA.

  • Here [home.com] is a good review of this thing (which was posted in the previous article, but somehow failed to get moderated above 0). Look down at the bottom of the review to see exactly why this thing a piece of crap designed to trick consumers into buying it instead of an mp3 player.

    Here [slashdot.org] is a post I wrote for the previous article which gives one idea about what we can do to kill the sails of these things.

    Finally, I feal I should clear up a little miss understanding about the usefulness of this service to us. Many people have suggested that we will break the encryption and pirate the digitally distributed music via mp3. This is not totally correct. We will crack the encryption, but we will probable need to redistribute the songs as ATRAC3 files since the conversion to mp3 will lose a lot of quality. Note: the lose of quality in the MP3 -> ATRAC3 conversion is part of why the RIAA likes this thing, i.e. it prevents mp3 only artists from having good music. Distributing unencrypted ATRAC3 files will not be a problem, but playing them could be a problem and making our own could be an even bigger problem (Sony may have patents on ATRAC3 algorithms so that they can prosicute the people who write the decoding/encoding software). Plus, Sony charges more for the songs then they would cost if you got them via CD, so there is no advnatage in getting this kind of digital music.

    The moral of the story is: SDMI and Sony are evil, they must die.

    Jeff

    BTW> Now, a project to do an ATRAC3 to mp3 transition without losing quality would be cool, but it would also be difficult (mathematically difficult so Joe Average Hacker could not do it).

  • Sometimes it seems to me that we leap to conclusions that large corporations are necessarily evil.

    They're out for their own interests. For some, that's evil, but that's what most people do, so why should corporations do any better? In the case of content businesses (like movies and music) they have a clear existing interest: their present revenue stream. You'd fight to keep your job if you were unsure there was anything else and your present job paid well - that's exactly what these corporations are doing.

    Yeah, large corporations (and large people, large governments, etc.) sometimes squash the little guy. This is called capitalism (or, if you prefer, Darwinian selection). It can lead to abuses. Name a system that can't.

    Now before we get into a political flamewar, let me point out a few things about the VAIO Music Clip and its accompanying service:

    • As noted, pricing for CDs in Japan is vastly different. You can bet Sony Music in the US is not going to be pricing songs at $3 per. Sold songs in the US presently seem to be $1 per, and many songs are being released for free as promotion. Sony Music execs know this, and won't be stupid enough not to at least remain competitive.
    • ATRAC3 is what is used in the Music Clip. It is not the same as ATRAC, which is used in a minidisc player and in SDDS movie theater sound. ATRAC3 is a derivative of ATRAC. There was an ATRAC2, but it never really saw the light of day. And you can believe that ATRAC3 is covered extensively by patents. Sony makes lots of money from CD patent royalties. Sony in Tokyo is particularly enthusiastic about being able to create new formats. However, Sony is not ignorant of open source - the PlayStation 2 development platform runs Linux. And they recognize the value of freely available playback et al in getting a format adopted.
    • Japan will almost certainly go for the player and the service in a fairly big way. In Japan, if its new, it is popular. If it is Sony, it is popular. Put the two together, and it is hard to fail. In Japan. Sony Corporation of America absolutely understands that the US market is different. They know a service like the Japan one would flop in the US. They won't market such a beast here.

    The music industry knows they looked bad with the SDMI announcement coming out just after MP3 really hit the hype wave. It wasn't as reactionary as it looked, though. The music industry has been worrying about all things digital for years. Had the SDMI announcement come out a year earlier, we might have been saying "Cool! The industry is getting behind digital music!" How many of us have DVD players? Even if we don't like regional encoding?

    It may look depressing at times. But if you think Sony's attitudes seem benighted now, well, two years ago, it was much worse. SDMI may not be what we want, but it took Sony two years to get to that point. They're moving in the right direction.

    ObDisclaimer: I used to work for Sony. I personally know some of the decision-makers involved in these things - I saw them wrestle with the many issues involved, and in some cases, helped them understand them. But I don't work for Sony any more and don't have any stock or any financial interest in Sony doing well going forward.

  • just wait until players like this one become available:

    mambo-x [mambox.com]

    then you just burn cdr or cdrw (of 10 hrs or so) and you're in business!

    try THAT with MD. you can barely get 70minutes on an MD. and recording on MD is in real-time and no faster. if I'm in a hurry, I can grab a bunch of .wav files and create a cdr of .mp3 files in much faster than real-time (since my computer writes to cdr and not some analog or possibly real-time digital link).

    --

  • also in the "death of MD" department:

    miniCDRW [mp3.com]

    like I said, with all the new neat things out there, MD is dead, dead, dead.

    --

  • especially considering that knowing sony, it will be SDMI and that you won't be able to archive your downloaded data. ie, download into the ramstick, then listen, then overwrite next time and pay YET AGAIN for the same music.

    when it comes to sony, just say no. they're not our friends. they don't believe in sharing and open software - they only believe in the almighty dollar (or yen).

    --

  • or as popular as the MD (minidisc, not doctors) ;-)

    MD never really caught on big-time in the US. but I hear its ultra-popular in Japan.

    while the US is pretty gadget-happy, I think Japan is even more so. and the sense of national pride helps the population adopt new standards more easily. perhaps the population sees Sony as part of the Great National Good, so stuffing Sony's pockets has a definite trickle-down effect.

    but here in the US, we have no such feelings. if anything, there's suspicion about all things corporate Sony.

    so until sony breaks apart (never happen) - like microsoft; into software-only and hardware-only components, I'll never trust sony to work on the side of the music lover. they want to keep you spending on both the hardware AND software (music).

    for a company like Sony, SDMI isn't just a good business idea, its a religion. and one that I'll never subscribe to.

    --

  • ok - I was off by a few minutes... shoot me. and mono doesn't count - who the heck cares about writing audio in mono? for dictation and interviews, there are tape decks specially made for long duration of voice.

    and this 4x dubbing box - I bet its not in the same pricerange as typical consumer gear? or even consumer computer gear?

    what does it dub from? I bet you can't dub from a hard drive (pc or unix).

    --

  • have you ever played with one of these things

    I've toyed with MD players; but I was very into DAT way before MD was even though of; and I'd still take my portable dat-walkman over any MD - anyday. we could get 2hrs standard (with ZERO compression), or 4hrs with some frequency limiting (still was better than PASC or ATRAC compression). and if you used long 90meter tapes you could get 3 or 6 hrs from it. try THAT with MD! ;-)

    consumer dat was expensive and unreliable. mostly since the mechanism was a mini spinning VCR head. and like all vcr's, was prone to dirt and misalignment. but if you kept it maintained properly, it would serve you very well.

    (I used to do a lot of live concert taping. I can tell you that there were at most 5 MD decks in the taping sections; whereas there were dozens (hundreds?) of dat units being spun. mostly due to the better quality and longer run/play length. oh, and cheaper media, too ;-)

    --

  • I can't speak for the teenage or college crowd but for folks in my stage of life (thirtysomething), MD appears to be a total flop. if you want compression, go mp3. if you want total quality (well, sort of...) go CD-R. MD was a temporary phase in home recording for consumers - like dat. except dat is still very significant in pro audio circles.

    mp3 is far more accessible since its not tied to a media type. in fact, cd audio (44.1/16) isn't really tied to one particular media type, either. but MD IS. and MD is made by a fairly small group of companies, so there's not a lot of price competition going on. over the years since MD has been out, I've not seen any significant price reductions, either.

    so given the current alternatives, I see MD as going the way of the 8-track. give it 3-5 yrs and you'll never see MD in the stores.

    --

  • I took the time to RTFL (Score:3)

    by Megane ( 129182 ) on Monday February 07, 2000 @06:00AM (#1299188)
    ...and you really don't need to be able to read Japanese to find out what it's about, because they put up an English page. I can read some Japanese, but I didn't need to.

    Anyhow, this is indeed SDMI, and you are only allowed to have a copy on one computer and transfer it one time to a digital device, for the low, low :-) price of 350 yen! (about $3.50 US)

    The compression is Sony's ATRAC (the same one used in MiniDisc, which I've heard is a better quality compression format than MP3), and here's the part that /.'ers should love: you have to use Windows Media Player! That's right, Windoze only! I think there is a non WMP player (called "Type E"), but I would expect it too to only runs under Windoze. Yes, I know that Microsoft is "considering" a Linux version of WMP, but I wouldn't be surprised if this music distribution system didn't work with Linux even then.

    Their site says that "bitmusic will only be available to consumers in Japan; access from locations outside Japan is restricted.". I don't know how they plan to do this, other than by checking IP block ranges (post-CIDR IP blocks are assigned geographically, and I think Japan had only a limited number of IP blocks before CIDR routing was implemented).

    And you have to turn on JavaShit to use the web site.

    As for the cost, you have to understand the music market in Japan. CDs in Japan tend to cost about 3200 yen (about $30), though two-disc soundtrack sets are usually only a few bucks more. I think it's that high because CD rental and taping of rentals is legal in Japan. CD singles (usually two songs + karaoke tracks) cost on the order of 1000 yen (I think). So the cost really is comparable to that of a single track on a full CD. Oh, and for some reason I do not understand, in Japan, all CDs go out of print two years after original release. Apparently, this happens no matter how popular they are.

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