Sony ditching ATRAC??

[Almoxil]

Very interesting.

http://www.pmptoday.com/2007/08/30/sony-nwz-s610-the-common-player/

Now if they only ditch SonicStage and make their players UMS...

[Phoenix-X]

if you havent noticed their new players wont need sonicstage

[Almoxil]

Really? Someone wake me up!

Thanks for the heads up!

[tman]

The new players (A810 and S610) look great and I'm looking forward to user reports soon so I can finally buy a flash player. Judging by features and Sonys rep for sound quality these look like they could be among the best players available, for music at least. (Could be 'T9 killers'.) I've always ignored previous Sonys because of the software required.

[dfkt]

Originally Posted by Phoenix-X

if you havent noticed their new players wont need sonicstage

But they're still neither UMS/MSC nor MTP... they have proprietary drivers preloaded that auto-install on connect, afaik. Sony just doesn't get it.

[Phoenix-X]

Originally Posted by dfkt

But they're still neither UMS/MSC nor MTP... they have proprietary drivers preloaded that auto-install on connect, afaik. Sony just doesn't get it.

which is why i didn't say they were ums/msc. and since i dont know all about them i didn't quite know about this specific thing

[Zeddicus Zu'l Zorander]

Originally Posted by dfkt

But they're still neither UMS/MSC nor MTP... they have proprietary drivers preloaded that auto-install on connect, afaik. Sony just doesn't get it.

Sony has said that the B100, S610 and A810 are PlaysForSure and come with WMP11. I'm not entirely certain, but I thought this indicates that they are MTP devices. Also, is it possible to produce a compatibility with WMA-DRM through a proprietary driver?

[dfkt]

I really do not know if Sony did implement all of this ass-backwards (as usual), or if they actually did it right. The only thing I made out of all the reviews is that the non-SonicStage stuff comes preloaded with proprietary drivers.

I do not have any further info, since I make a big detour around Sony stuff in the stores...

[EnzoTen]

i never reviewed sony player since i had nothing nice to say about ATRAC and sonicstage... minus that... they are really good players... so im interested in checking this out

[CDMP3PlayerFan]

Originally Posted by EnzoTen

i never reviewed sony player since i had nothing nice to say about ATRAC and sonicstage... minus that... they are really good players... so im interested in checking this out

I've used Sony MP3-CD players for a while (although I've recently moved on to Philips players which are also very good) and I agree about the quality of their players. They have both great sound quality and excellent battery life.

As far as SonicStage software goes, I only used it for a short while to burn CDs and it worked okay for that. In the end, I decided to disregard it because ATRAC wasn't compatible with non-Sony players and I've stayed with higher-bit (no less than 160bit) MP3 as my format of choice.

I think that Sony's move away from ATRAC and mandated SonicStage software is a good one for them. It seems that people have liked their players, but have disliked the software. With this move, I think that Sony has a chance to be a strong contender in the digital audio player market.

[emfa]

The new sony MP3 players are fantastic! Believe me, I am a proud owner of a NWZ-S618 and this thing is incredible. Nothing compared to my previous mp3's ( sansa e250 and Creative ZVW). The firmware is almost perfect ( version 1.00 !!!). The screen can be compared to the ZVW's and the size and weight are better than the Sansa e200 series. Did I mention that I get about 26 to 28 hours of battery life? I don't use it for video playback, only music, photos and sometimes radio.