Tricksy Sony

An interesting article from MacWorld’s MacCentral came across one of my news feeds today. I had read about Sony unleashing their new ‘Walkman’ before and that it was hard drive based like the iPod and that it only supported ATRAC3 - one of Sony’s own formats which has seriously strict DRM attached to it.

I might also have heard that they have a 20 GB version, but I believe that is their largest. What I hadn’t heard was that they were claiming that it can hold more than the iPod’s 10000 songs, saying that you can fit 13,000 songs on it. Obviously, being half of the iPod’s 40 GB in size, this doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that is what marketing is all about. Apparently where Apple uses 128kbps AAC encoding as its basis, Sony uses 48kbps ATRAC3. The article goes into more detail, but I think that this is absurd. I know no one who would encode their music like that. Before AAC, Apples used 160kbps MP3 as the comparison because they wanted to be realistic. Most people these days are encoding at 192kbps MP3 or 160kpbs AAC.

Normally I have no problem with Sony - they make some solid stuff, but I’d stay away from ATRAC3 and and false claims by Sony. :)