voodoofish

I know no one that uses casette anymore, and it was the CD-R that did it. No one tapes the radio anymore as they can download music instead (yes I know you might acctually want to tape the radio for it's real purpose and just to pirate music, but I don't know anyone who does that) and CD players in cars have replaced tape players. I don't think they even sell cassettes anymore in most stores. However, I have seen people still use Walkmen (ie. casette walkmen) for jogging/cross country because most people I know still use CD walkmen for general use, which are too big to just hold whilst running. To be honest, what I think is stopping the MD format from taking off to replace a mainstream technology is the fact that no one buys albums in the format. Whilst this is perfectly fine in itself, as you can just put CDs onto MDR, most people simply buy a portable MD-R instead of a home hi-fi. Therefore, CD has remained the dominent format, with most people buying their music in it, making CD walkmen more people, therefore cheaper, therefore more popular, and whilst I don't have figures I bet most people probably still use CD walkmen rather than any kind of specific pocket format. MP3 players still do well because of their association with CDs due to a) ease of ripping and ease of burning CD-Rs. Few people buy albums in digital format, but it is taking off with iTunes Music Store etc., which as they can be burned to CD will be seen as flexible and therefore people will adopt them more readily than MD as a CD replacement format (I doubt SACD and DVD-A will take off at the moment, but they may do if more people buy surround sound, however that is the only obvious advantage they hold to the normal every day consumer, who I doubt really cares that much around surround sound other than the coolness factor of it).

Yeah, I mean I can understand Sony forcing NetMD to use ATRAC as the NetMD players used the same 10 year old format, so it needed to be backwards compatable with non-netMD players. However, Hi-MD is effectively a brand new starting point - MD players will not be able to play Hi-MDs anyway. To me it seems stupid that Sony are only supporting ATRAC, I mean I can understand them wanting to push their own format, but I've never really seen an AAC or WMA player that doesn't support MP3 aswell. Sony have tried to give this format the same advantages as MP3 players that make good use of their PC connectivity, but this will only confuse consumers as they'll get confused with all the different formats, by which I mean SonicStage will say things like 'converting' and the every day user will be like what?!?!?! (after all, alot of people on this board don't really know what they're on about half the time and they're bound to know more than most because they're here in the first place. Also I've seen people using 'iPod' to just mean MP3 player instead of the specific Apple product - most people don't know or care about all the stuff behind all this).

1) Smaller MD players (eg. MZ-E10) have similarly built in batteries, though they do last longer. 2) Direct CD recording - why would you want it? 1x speed, then you have to connect it to a computer anyway to put in track names (either that or do it by hand). CD players with TOC-Link are not all that common, although the PS2 does have one. The iPod supports recording voice notes, but you cannot use a line-in (the mini-iPod does not support voice notes but may do in the future). 3) I've never had a problem. My iPod jogs better than my MD player, but my MD player is 4 years old. 4) But convenient (ie. no discs), which is what you're paying for, and I do prefer Apple's styling to Sony's on the whole. 5) I really don't think HDD problems are a worry for most people and MD players do break too. I probably know as many people with iPods as MD players, and none of the iPods have broken whereas one of my friend's MD players have.

well, if you just put files onto the Hi-MD as files it would just treat them as such and wouldn't play them. If you wanted to download a playable image to the MD player it would have to be in whatever file system they use (they use FAT for data but they may use a different one for audio) and also even then it won't 'burn' like a normal CD writer so writing some kinda driver for it would be difficult. Also, the files would have to be converted into ATRACplus format and have whichever encryption/copy protection scheme applied to them that Sony has used in order for the Hi-MD walkman to play them, so basically it's really unlikely that we could get it to work. This is what annoys me about Sony you see, because even years before I got a Mac (I only got one about a month ago but have had my iPod since summer) I'd always fancied the idea of getting one, like all those people that are like 'I'd love to get an iMac but it doesn't use windows ' so i'd always only bought things that would work on either a Mac or PC so that I always had the option for me to switch.

That is exactly why I've stopped buying Sony products - they're incredably arrogant. They make you use all of their technologies, assuming you would never want to use anything else and that they know best. For example, all their digital cameras use MemoryStick - why?!?! All it means is you pay twice as much for memory as you would otherwise, and subsequently are pretty much never going to buy another non-Sony camera as it would waste your memory card investment. But then they go and do things like releasing MemoryStick walkmen that only work with MagicGate memory sticks - meaning you couldn't use any of the cards you'd bought for your digital camera with it. Also, they force you to use their sub-standard software (eg. OpenMG). I have nothing against ATRAC, but they could at least let you use ATRAC and MP3, like Apple does with MP3 and AAC, so that you don't have to convert from one format to another or are locked into using their jukebox software. For example, in OpenMG if I wanted to copy something to MiniDisc in SP I had to rip it to the hard drive in WAV with another application and then import it to OpenMG before I could transfer it as OpenMG would only let me rip in LP formats. They've updated their software to SonicStage, which is very nice, but doesn't help me as they only ship it with new products. On the other hand, iTunes updates are free and so are firmware updates to iPods - the original iPods produced before AAC was used by iTunes can easily be updated to play it with a free software download. Sony's microMV format looks very cool, but is only compatable with some Sony application for transfering to a PC. Fine if you want to spend your entire life hooked to Sony products, but I really don't think they're that competent - for example, they released the PS2 spouting on about how you could use it online and buy a hard drive, but then sat back and did nothing until it's competitors released their own. Also, SACD is the most contrived format ever, which as part of it's liscensing is never allowed to be played on a PC incase it gets pirated, and cannot be read by standard DVD lasers (the music is encrypted and the decryption code is encoded in the width of pits on the disc. Normal CDs/DVDs only include data in terms of the length of pits). This means that the SACD readers are going to be needlessly expensive (as they require specially designed 'DVD' drives (the discs are basically DVDs but with the width of pits changing aswell as the length)) just to make the format prohivitably un-user friendly. Even though DVD-A uses its own copy protection, it can be read by any DVD drive and can still be played on any DVD-Video player (bizzarly, they don't bother to encrypt the DVD-Video audio with the DVD-Video encrytion), so the format is alot more flexible (even though I would not replace CDs with it). Yes, SACDs can be hybrid, but the second they think they can get away with it they'll stop producing hyrbid discs to lock you into thier format. Sorry, I know I'm ranting on and on, but it makes the point that Sony takes propriotryness to an extreme with their products and I don't want to buy into such a ridiculously protected format.