Sony CONNECT Disaster Impressively Well Realized

August 30, 2007 at 5:04 am PT

Sony ATRAC is at long last joining Betamax, MiniDisc, Sony Dynamic Digital Sound, HiFD, (pause for breath) Multi-Media Compact Disc, Memory Stick and Super Audio CD in the company’s Museum of Failed Formats.

After an overlong and unsuccessful campaign to spread adoption of ATRAC, Sony is scrapping the proprietary audio format. This morning the company said it would close its CONNECT digital music store and forthcoming Walkman digital media players will support formats that consumers actually use like Windows Media Audio, along with MP3 and AAC (or advanced audio coding). “Customers don’t want to be locked into one service, consumers are demanding choice in music,” said Jeffrey Van Ede, Sony Europe audio marketing VP. “There has been a fundamental shift in legal downloading, and that is toward DRM-free music.”

And what of those few Sony customers who actually own ATRAC music? For them the company’s offering an MP3 Conversion Tool and some advice that CONNECT users have been likely following for some time now: “For your purchased music from CONNECT, you can burn it to audio CD and rerip it into MP3 format to continue enjoying it for personal use.”

Tagged with: ATRAC, audio, CD, connect, download, DRM, format, John Paczkowski, MP3, music, rip, Sony, Walkman, Windows

comments so far. Add yours.

http://allthingsd.com/ Eric Welch

One wonder why Sony didn’t learn long ago what IBM learned with the failed PS/2, OS/2, attempt to lock people into one company’s technolgy using proprietary hardware and software.

You gotta be Apple to do it. Funny how Steve Jobs said a few years back they’d like to be more like Sony. But they just never got there – thank goodness!
http://allthingsd.com/ Nav A

It’s a testament to how bad Sony’s marketing is that respected online sources still claim that Sony’s players don’t support more formats. They’ve supported MP3 for the past 4 years and WMA/AAC for the past 2. Only CONNECT tied you to ATRAC and, really, it doesn’t matter what format DRM’ed music is as you’re locked in regardless.
http://allthingsd.com/ Jon Healey

It seems more significant to me that Sony is dropping its reliance on OpenMG, its DRM, than ATRAC, which was just a codec. Sony had been supporting WMA for a while, just not Microsoft’s DRM. Now it’s supporting PlaysForSure in lieu of OpenMG, and using Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows Media Player instead of its own SonicStage software. I prattle on in more depth here: http://opinion.latimes.com/bit.....cts-w.html