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The article begins by setting up language/display barrier but looking at MiniDisc players of that era (which did in fact have displays and often a second one on

The article begins by setting up language/display barrier but looking at MiniDisc players of that era (which did in fact have displays and often a second one on a remote) all of them used English menus. And judging by sales the Japanese consumers were fine with that. Also, in 2001 Sony introduced USB connectors on their portable MD lineup so they didn't miss the train by much (by Japanese standards).

ekianjo 5y ago
> Also, in 2001 Sony introduced USB connectors on their portable MD lineup so they didn't miss the train by much (by Japanese standards). It was still ridiculously tedious to transfer songs to a Sony device with USB. They did not support MP3 initially so you had to convert everything into their own proprietary format. Completely useless piece of hardware.
- rmetzler 5y ago
  And from what I learned from my DJ friends, who wanted to record their sets, it was impossible to get it out digitally. The only way out was analog.
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    Yup! They were completely going amok trying to control everything.
djpr 5y ago
I had a number of Sony digital music players like the NM-MS10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NW-MS10.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NW-MS10.jpg Their main drawbacks you're required to convert all the MP3 into Atrac3 using their atrocious software. It is hard to imagine now, but iTunes was a few generations ahead of anything else in speed and ease of use.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  They were a few generations ahead of other extremely locked down devises. They were terrible when compared to devices that just allowed you to copy files to them.
  - kalleboo 5y ago
    I used MP3 feature phones before I got an iPod and the music library system of the iPod was miles ahead of manually managing my music. Having new songs and album art automatically sync onto the iPod, having play counts sync back, having smart playlists update, it all exposed what a garbage system manual file management was and made me yearn for the future we were promised with the meta-data driven file system of BeOS
  - Kadin 5y ago
    Yeah gonna have to disagree strongly with that. iTunes abstracted away the need to manually manage music files. Very few non-nerds actually wanted to do that. Jamming iPhone-related features into iTunes bloated it up, but in the beginning iTunes was a pretty great piece of media-management software.

ekianjo 5y ago

> Also, in 2001 Sony introduced USB connectors on their portable MD lineup so they didn't miss the train by much (by Japanese standards). It was still ridiculously tedious to transfer songs to a Sony device with USB. They did not support MP3 initially so you had to convert everything into their own proprietary format. Completely useless piece of hardware.

rmetzler 5y ago
And from what I learned from my DJ friends, who wanted to record their sets, it was impossible to get it out digitally. The only way out was analog.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  Yup! They were completely going amok trying to control everything.

djpr 5y ago

I had a number of Sony digital music players like the NM-MS10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NW-MS10.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NW-MS10.jpg Their main drawbacks you're required to convert all the MP3 into Atrac3 using their atrocious software. It is hard to imagine now, but iTunes was a few generations ahead of anything else in speed and ease of use.

pessimizer 5y ago
They were a few generations ahead of other extremely locked down devises. They were terrible when compared to devices that just allowed you to copy files to them.
- kalleboo 5y ago
  I used MP3 feature phones before I got an iPod and the music library system of the iPod was miles ahead of manually managing my music. Having new songs and album art automatically sync onto the iPod, having play counts sync back, having smart playlists update, it all exposed what a garbage system manual file management was and made me yearn for the future we were promised with the meta-data driven file system of BeOS
- Kadin 5y ago
  Yeah gonna have to disagree strongly with that. iTunes abstracted away the need to manually manage music files. Very few non-nerds actually wanted to do that. Jamming iPhone-related features into iTunes bloated it up, but in the beginning iTunes was a pretty great piece of media-management software.