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I remember the Sony MiniDisk audio recorder/player. You could record digital audio, but couldn't transfer it to your computer in digital format. Due to the pos
by sackerhews 5y ago
I remember the Sony MiniDisk audio recorder/player. You could record digital audio, but couldn't transfer it to your computer in digital format.
Due to the possibility that you might not have had license to record what you recorded, then you couldn't have a digital version of it on your computer.
This was the end of my relationship with Sony.
- jetrink 5y agoI loved my MiniDisk player, but the arbitrary roadblocks that Sony put up for how you were allowed to use the device and the poor quality of the management software were so infuriating that I vowed not to give Sony another cent for ten years. (I stuck to that promise too, even avoiding the temptation of the beautiful PRS-505 e-book reader. That turned out to be a good decision when the first Kindle came out shortly after.)
- mikepurvis 5y agoNot that the Kindle has especially been a model of embracing open standards and user flexibility. But at least it’s popular.
- Tostino 5y agoSometimes it's just about not being stuck with a paperweight.
- salamandersauce 5y agoThe PRS-505 supports ePub. Can't remember if that was after a firmware update or from the factory though. And even after the Sony ebook store closed down they let you transfer everything to Kobo. And you can still sideload ePubs on with Adobe Digital Editions. Early Kindles are going to lose a lot of functionality soon as 3G networks get shut down and they have no WiFi to fall back on.
- mikepurvis 5y agoOh yeah definitely, but the GP was specifically talking about the manufacturer throwing up arbitrary roadblocks.
- Tostino 5y agoThose arbitrary roadblocks can often be the reason a device becomes unusable after it isn't "supported" any more. But yeah point taken.
- dotancohen 5y agoYou might like the Nook. I've been rooting e-ink Nooks for about nine years, and the latest model can install Android apps without root! I mostly use it for studying with Ankidroid.
- nextos 5y agoSony sadly has a long history of limiting devices in crazy ways. Their beautiful ebook reader was a disaster from a software perspective. Paradoxically, since they are a conglomerate some divisions have sane policies. Their mobile phone one is among the few manufacturers that release kernels and make it easy to self-compile your own AOSP.
- irontoby 5y agoReally wishing I would have realized that before buying my Sony Bravia TV a few years ago. It's basically just an output device for my Roku, I don't want/need any of the built-in smart TV junk but a recent update now causes it to reboot just about every time I turn it on. The reboot process takes almost a full minute, but at least the SONY logo emblazoned on the screen during that time has hopefully given me a Pavlovian aversion to their brand so that I won't make the same mistake again.
- dustymcp 5y agoI remember buying mine, then them saying they would'nt support apps on it anymore, then a month later the netflix app stopped working, was great timing i ended up getting a pirate box instead. Never again sony, never again.
- jbay808 5y agoHmm, my PRS e-reader is still going strong and I remember choosing it over a kindle, specifically because it had fewer restrictions on how I use it. It could read PDFs and ePubs, DRM-free, which I believe kindle couldn't at the time. Not sure how the landscape has changed.
- Theodores 5y agoIt was the record companies and not Sony specifically. They had to play by the rules. You probably ended your relationship with Sony for plenty of reasons that came together in these changing times. Flat screens came along and you probably got out of gaming too. I have an uncle who once had everything Sony. But now, no. That TV is LG and his music setup is Apple.
- Steve0 5y agoWell, it wasn't "the record companies" as a whole. The creative nomad player was during the same period and had no such limitations. Sony, being a record company and a hardware company, limited their players in this way. And basically paved the way for other companies to take over the market. Sad because their walk-man was basically the standard before, and sony makes some good hardware.
- ratww 5y ago> It was the record companies Sony is (and already was back then) a record company. They were a huge chunk of the group making the rules, and were in a much better position than any other electronics company to fight them.
- flir 5y agoThe Sony media tail was wagging the Sony hardware dog. That was the whole problem - they hamstrung their own products. End result was that they burned their own brand to the ground - there was a time when Sony hardware was cool.
- setpatchaddress 5y agoWhat's really sad is that the entire reason Sony bought the media companies was to prevent them from interfering with new Sony hardware innovations. The record companies resisted the audio CD and the studios resisted Betamax. Sony seems to have forgotten this after Akio Morita stopped running things.
- ssharp 5y agoHow would you have done this? USB wasn't around in the mid-90's, so you would have needed something that plugged into a serial port. Would that have been that much worse than just running a 3mm cable from the MiniDisk headphone out to the computer's mic/line in? Or was Sony somehow preventing that? I played around a lot with music trackers (production tool) during this time and often did the reverse so I could hear my productions on other stereos or in the car -- that is running computer output to a tape deck and recording to tape. This was obviously before CD burners were affordable.
- detaro 5y agoI assume they are talking about the USB-enabled MD players of the early 2000s
- sackerhews 5y agoCorrect!
- masklinn 5y ago> How would you have done this? USB wasn't around in the mid-90's, so you would have needed something that plugged into a serial port. Probably the NetMD series which supported compressed storage onto “data” MDs. While I never had a use for transferring off of MDs, the software used to manage MD contents was indeed one of the poorest I’ve ever had the misfortune to interact with. Even the worst eras of iTunes (which had generally been pretty shit especially on windows) does not come close to the utter dreck and absolute disaster that was SonicStage.
- benbristow 5y agoWas hoping someone would mention SonicStage. Sony forced you to use that awful software if you wanted to add music to your Walkman flash memory based MP3/4 players before they eventually gave up and let you just drag-and-drop as if it were a USB stick on newer models. That software made iTunes on Windows feel fast.
- 5y ago
- willtim 5y agoI have lots of hybrid SACDs and I cannot extract the high-res content for playback on computer/phone without my clunky Sony Blu-ray player. This is of course by design, but I do wonder if it also helped to kill the format before it even properly landed.
- tw04 5y agoSony’s media group has been an absolute cancer to the device group. To this day they make some of the best hardware on the market. To this day I won’t buy any of it beyond the PlayStation because of how horribly they screw it up with DRM and associated restrictions.
- Black101 5y ago> To this day I won’t buy any of it beyond the PlayStation It doesn't help much if you still buy the Playstation...
- labster 5y agoNah, it’s okay, GP will serve in the fifth column of the Console Wars.
- tw04 5y agoHow does it not help much? I’ve probably got a total of less than $2k invested into PlayStations and games in my entire life. If I were to add up all the electronic devices I’ve purchased in my entire life that could have been Sony but weren’t it would probably be pushing 6 figures.
- CamperBob2 5y agoIf you want to screw Sony, there's no better way to do it than to buy a Playstation and use it only as a dumb media player. They make money licensing games, not selling the console itself.
- fomine3 5y agoBut Sony media group earn much money so they contributes Sony conglomerate's stability including electrics department. Mixed feelings.
- monkpit 5y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_roo... Don’t forget about this! The CD rootkit thing was what really soured my opinion of Sony.
- wdb 5y agoImagine working for SonyBMG and needing to put music on their site and you had to avoid the copy protection lol
- dotancohen 5y ago> This was the end of my relationship with Sony. Honestly, I still did and still do love their headphones. For the money, Sony is probably the best bargain out there by far. But I'll never own another Sony product with a mircorprocessor. Not a phone, not a camera, not a receiver/amp, not a laptop computer. And I still won't buy music under the Sony label. Thank you Muse for signing with WB! It's a good thing that I bought my MiniDisc player in 2004, just a year before the rootkit fiasco. Because I loved that device.
- throwawaaarrgh 5y agoTheir phones used to be great. I had many Cybershot and Walkman branded Sony Ericsson feature phones over the years. The Walkman ones had good media features/speakers, and the Cybershots gave you good optics, a real flash, and generous megapixels for the time. Second only to the high end Nokias, until Apple started to eat everyone's lunch.
- Schlaefer 5y ago> This was the end of my relationship with Sony. One day I couldn't transfer my legally, newly bought Sony Music CD to my Sony MD player for mobile use (on my also expensive car and mobile MD players) because of DRM. That's when I decided I don't care anymore. What's the point if after all that money Napster and the newly released iPod provide a better experience.
- acomjean 5y agoI have a 5 disc cd /md shelf radio. You could copy cds to mds with a few button presses. I used that a lot at the turn of the century. I tried the mds a year ago and they work (the cd mechanisms is jammed) now the stereo is mainly used through the aux jack. I will agree MD would have made an excellent computer disc format had Sony allowed it. (They had something called MD Data but it was terrible). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc
- failwhaleshark 5y agoThe Trinitron TVs, monitors, WalkMans, and DiscMans were awesome. Then, they screwed the pooch in the mid 90's. Their support sucked and their products started sucking. And then rootkit scandal. Now, they're a cheaper Bose.
- Lammy 5y ago> This was the end of my relationship with Sony. SONY got the bad reputation but you can thank the western record companies for this with their reaction to Sony's earlier DAT format. Check out "An Open Letter To Japan" in this 1986 issue of "Billboard" (page 9): https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Billboard/80s/1986/BB-1986-09-06.pdf#page=9 https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Billboard/80...
- throwaway2048 5y agoThis isn't quite accurate, SONY was furious about the fate of DAT and how the recording industry sabotaged it, so they bought a major record producer (Columbia), unfortunately it seems at least for a time, the foxes came to rule the hen house at SONY, hence their 20 years of so of self sabotage with format restrictions.
- kmeisthax 5y agoIndeed. SONY tried user-friendly copying and nearly got banned from the US for their trouble. A common refrain during the Napster lawsuit was that "the law needs to catch up to technology". This is hilariously wrong, looking back on it. The music industry was very adamant back in the 70s and 80s that consumers shouldn't have access to audio recording technology, especially not digital copies. As a result, the law was about 20 steps ahead of technology. Any and all consumer audio recording technology had to prevent second-generation digital copies via SCMS. The fact that MP3 players were even allowed to exist (see RIAA v. Diamond) is a minor miracle; birthed from a legal battle that I doubt Sony was at all interested in fighting. At that point they had literally bought a record label, which pushed a lot of internal corporate changes within SONY. It's far harder to justify selling devices to copy music when you also happen to sell music. (Of course, Apple wound up completely monopolizing music sales for a decade by more or less ignoring all of the above, getting involved in both sides of the business, and just using the superior user experience to steamroll over both labels and other device manufacturers.)
- swilliamsio 5y ago> Apple wound up completely monopolizing music sales for a decade iTunes was never big enough to count as a monopoly on music sales, not even close.