Sony Connect music service

[rldunn]

I'm surprised this hasn't been posted yet. Sony announced their own music service today - similar to iTunes. The Clie is one of the supported devices, but I'll bet regular MS won't work. Here's the link:

www.connect.com

And here's the Sony press release.




Think of the Connect store as the best music store you’ve ever been to—
not just a place to pick up the latest hits, it's also a great place to wander the aisles, learn about music, and discover new artists. You'll find:

One of the most extensive music libraries online–
a better selection than any other legal download service. If you love it, chances are we have it.

A great selection of independent music
from dozens of independent and international labels, along with all five majors.

Unique recommendations
from our intrepid staff of music lovers—all their favorite new finds and rediscoveries.

Free samples
of all the songs, so you can try it before you buy it.



Install Sony's free SonicStage software on your PC and you’ll have access to the store whenever you’re online. Browse, listen to samples and download songs for 99 cents, or entire albums for $9.99 and up.

Have music, will travel.
With SonicStage, you can listen to music on your computer, transfer songs to your compatible portable device, or burn it to CD. The choice is yours.

Download
the application now and start to explore, or learn more about how Connect store works.

[rldunn]

Update - I decided to bite the bullet and try this out for a song. What's $1, eh? As I suspected, there is a very nice way to transfer purchased songs to Clies, but the standard purple MS is not supported. It took F - O - R - E - V - E - R to download the song. On iTunes, it takes a few seconds - this took a few minutes for ONE song!!

I'm just so sick of all this proprietary crap. Not just with Connect, but with all of these online music companies. I love iTunes, but it's a total PITA to get those songs onto my Clie. I'm not interested in downloading free MP3's, but I can certainly understand their appeal. At least with an MP3, you can do so many things with it. For instance, I could listen to a regular MP3 through my Tivo with the Home Media Option or on my Clie, but I can't listen to an iTunes song on either without burning a CD and re-ripping, and now the same thing is true for these Connect songs. I can certainly understand the need for DRM, but it is in such an awful form right now, handcuffing those of us who want to play by the rules. Can't we have a damn standard?!? UGGGGHHH!!!!

[jmg_NX21]

Not mac friendly? I'll pass...

I agree tho, for those who TRY to play by the rules, what a hassle...

[Jezlyn]

I bit an even bigger bullet. I bought a whole album, wanting to see if I could at least make an audio CD out of it. I didn't realize that on a non-Vaio computer, only making ATRAC CDs is enabled (not audio or mp3 CD creation)...! I suppose I'm not surprised, because if they didn't disable those features, it would be way too easy for people to just create CD-RWs full of mp3s or an audio CD-RW and rip it into mp3s. But I can't even dump the stupid files onto a purple MS to listen to on my Clie! GRRR.

I've done searches on how to convert ATRAC to mp3, but it seems there isn't a good way to do it besides getting a program like Total Recorder to record the music while it's playing, then convert those sound files to mp3. Pfff.

I am not surprised that Sony's music store is riddled with this ridiculous DRM. But at least iTunes allows you to create audio CDs from your tracks, doesn't it?

[wolwol]

Originally posted by Jezlyn

I am not surprised that Sony's music store is riddled with this ridiculous DRM. But at least iTunes allows you to create audio CDs from your tracks, doesn't it?

yup it does :)

[zwergnase]

rldunn:
Can't we have a damn standard?!?
You folks really don't get it, do you?
You actually believe all that whining of the musinc companies, their complaints of supposedly being ripped of by that dreaded MP3 standard?
They used the same silly excuses when they tried to shut down VHS, then when they prohibited users from enjoying their rightfully purchased DVD on the player of their choice and when they had the residence of the (swedish) kid stormed that finally gave us all the DVD codecs needed to do just that.
Its called "fair usage" under US consumer law and all(!) those copy protection schemes are meant to sabotage just that.
Its just like when Microsoft changes the standards for their MS-Office files with every(!) release, so previous versions become incompatible.
It has nothign to do with MS' claim of implementing new features into their software. After all, StarOffice and Lotus SmartSuite and so on have been doing the same for decades now and you can still exchange files between their office suites that are years appart.
But the real reason why MS-Office allows you to import files from older versions, but then you can no longer export them, is that they want to prohibit you to exchange files with none MS-Office products, who need to use (pricy) import/export filters and thus have to update their filters all the time, making their products more expensive and cumbersume in turn.
Its called "competetive advantage" and "market control".
Same with Sony and their proprietary music standard.
Once they got you "hooked" on their music web site, their marketing department counts on you finally getting frustrated enough with fruitless music file data export attempts, that you finally just give in and replace your entire music outfit with (compatible) Sony stuff.
Sounds silly? Guess what Steve Jobs said about the iTune when asked how he plans to make money on it.
You see, neither the songs nor the iPod sell at a money making price.
But its the "brand loyalty" that Steve Jobs claims will bring the big paypack for Apple.
By making it just a little bit more difficult to export said files (into a non-Apple platform), rather than just enjoying them in an all Apple like world, Steve hopes to have yet one more incentive to prevent people from "straying to far from the righteous (Apple) path".
Its called market monopoly power.
In in a proprietary market, the manufacturer has all the monopoly power they can dream off.
So forget about Sony offering MP3 songs anytime soon.

And you just wait until they've introduced TC (Trusted Computing) into every PC & PDA.
Than you won't even be able to read your own documents any more w/o paying licensing fees.
You will no longer buy games, but instead "rent" them.
And every time you want to play them, you'll have to pay a fee.
Same will go for Music and Video files.

Think of using hacks or cracks to bypass that?
Forget it. On a TC platform, the copy protection scheme is built into the hardware and BIOS of the machine itself.
Just like modern day memory protection schemes, only licenses software will be able to access the files in the first place.
Not to speak about playing them.

Welcome to the brave new world of market monopolies !

[banjo]

Originally posted by zwergnase

So forget about Sony offering MP3 songs anytime soon.


Fine with me. I just want to be able to use Sony's proprietary ATRAC3plus on Sony's proprietary 'magicgate' MSPro in my NX73.

I cannot for the life of me figure out why Sony has not enabled this...

db

[cylon]

Maybe Sony doesnt got a green light from HQ to implement it in Clie., just like they werent permitted to compete directly with Sony-Ericsson.

[Jezlyn]

So does anyone know of any way to convert ATRAC to mp3 or WMA or any other format that could be transcoded to mp3? I tried some Google searches last night and didn't really find anything.

I think that there are a couple things that Sony really dropped the ball on here:

1. They didn't release a good HD-based music player before this online music store came out. I truly believe that's part of the reason iTMS is doing very well.

2. They crippled Sonicstage so that non-Vaio machines cannot burn regular audio CDs (unless I'm completely missing something here...help me out if I did!). iTMS allows this, and while it does let you bypass their DRM, it's a sign of good faith on Apple's part. I don't want to be shackled to my computer in order to listen to the album that I bought!

Hey, I'll be the first to admit that I'm a Sony-phile and if they had a really good HD-based player that supports ATRAC and mp3, I probably would have bought it by now. I'm "making do" with a 2G 10GB iPod that I had originally retired in favor of a larger capacity player (Creative Nomad Zen NX), but the Zen just doesn't have a good interface. It's much simpler to control my iPod in my car by feel since all of the controls are on the front of the player, instead of on both sides of the player (and the Zen NX's jog dial totally sucks). I'm not really tempted by the new iPod, except for the fact that its firmware has a few more neato features, and there are more accessories for it. I'd rather have something like an iRiver iHP-400, but I'm still waiting to see what Sony will come up with (the PSP or otherwise).

Stop keeping us from waiting, Sony! We want to buy stuff from you, but you can't (or at least shouldn't) keep screwing over your consumers. *sigh*

[jmg_NX21]

Aren't they releasing a HI-MD (1 gig?) player no? I'll probably get one but WHO is going to want to get that when they can get GIGs load of mp3 players?

[andrewcoffin]

Tried this out last night. The SonicStage 2.0 interface is a HUGE improvement over past releases. Has some nice features and library organization tools. Nice enough to almost consider using it, but...

The drawbacks referred to above are significant. I have a VAIO PC, so I can burn audio CDs. However, the software won't let you rip to MP3, only ATRAC. Of course, all of the downloads are ATRACs as well. Pretty limiting, unless you own an MD player.

But what's really strange is that I can't use the software with my TH55. You'd think new(er) Sony PC + new Sony PDA (designed for music playback) + new Sony music software would be a perfect match. However, there's no method that I can see of putting tracks, even pre-existing MP3s (which SonicStage can play) onto my Memory Stick Pro. To me, that's just ludicrous. I understand the advantages of proprietary formats, and don't usually complain about Sony's affinity for doing everything their own way. However, proprietary software and hardware that excludes even some of their own products is a little extreme. It's not like the TH55 has been hacked or altered in some way to be able to play music--it was designed to be a music playback device!

I'd like to be able to use the software, but that's not going to happen with the current release. I love the iTunes program, but it's almost as limited.

For me, MusicMatch has the widest range for features and compatibility right now. There are some things I seriously dislike about that program too, but at least I can copy music directly to my Memory Stick with MusicMatch...

[Jezlyn]

Aren't they releasing a HI-MD (1 gig?) player no? I'll probably get one but WHO is going to want to get that when they can get GIGs load of mp3 players?

Yes, they are, but they should have done that either at the same time as launching their online music service (at least to compete with the 1, 2, and 4 GB HD-based players from Creative, Rio, and Apple), or before. Who's going to want to drop any money on an MD player now when the newer, non-backwards-compatible 1 GB MD players will be coming out soon?

I think they rushed to get the music store out there without really thinking through the details. For one thing, Sonicstage is nowhere near as user-friendly as iTunes. It's really buggy (I kept having to kill its task because it would lock up when I'd try to play a song when it wasn't ready, or I was trying the different CD-burning options). You can't just browse all of the artists in a certain genre that easily. You have to enter the genre into a search, then sort the results by genre, and browse the list that way. PITA! iTMS has a nice hierarchical view of genres and the artists' in those sections. Sonicstage was fairly good about playing the song samples soon after you click on them, but that's the only thing that worked relatively well.

I was disappointed to see that a lot of the tracks, especially their so-called exclusive tracks (!), didn't have song samples... What's up with that? One of the redeeming factors of buying music online is being able to listen to a sample to it first (IMO). They should at the very least have samples of their exclusive and pre-release tracks! And they should choose their samples wisely. I was trying to sample tracks from an Orb album, and all of their samples were from the very beginning of the songs. Normally that wouldn't be too bad, but Orb is an electronic/ambient (?) group, so their songs have long build ups at the beginning. So the song samples were useless, almost all a long fade in from silence with soft instrumentals building up to the main melody. Pff.

Seriously, this does not seem like a well thought-out music store. I think they were trying to be different from iTMS and its "lesser clones" like Napster and MusicMatch music stores, and ended up not picking up the nicer, redeeming features or well-thought-out interface of iTMS. They rushed it out the door without polishing it off, and now they're going to get a lot of complaints from customers regarding their buggy software and super-uptight DRM.

Again, I'm not a Sony basher; I am just really disappointed with the way they've been handling all of this digital music stuff. The in-fighting between the music/movie divisions of Sony and the consumer electronics division of Sony is really really hurting them. I'm worried that their Connect service will fail because of its overzealous DRM, unless they come out with some kickass MD and HD-based players to appeal to the public and bring some serious competition against iPod.

[Jezlyn]

I understand the advantages of proprietary formats, and don't usually complain about Sony's affinity for doing everything their own way. However, proprietary software and hardware that excludes even some of their own products is a little extreme. It's not like the TH55 has been hacked or altered in some way to be able to play music--it was designed to be a music playback device!

Amen. I tried to connect my regular purple MS to my computer to listen to the tracks on my UX50, but Sonicstage didn't recognize the MS. I figured it was because it wasn't an actual MagicGate MS, but then I read earlier in this thread that someone with an MSPro couldn't transfer the music either. WTH?? Sony, we're trying to listen to the music on our Sony devices, yet your stupid software doesn't allow it? Way to make us feel good about our purchases and brand loyalty. :P

Sorry to sound all snarky, but when I'm trying to do "the right thing" and use my Sony device to listen to music I =bought= from Sony, it shouldn't be this frustrating an experience.

[Morning Star]

I got a 64 MB MG memory stick, and a 256Mb Duo pro.
I can only listen to Atrac music on the small chip!
hey Sony?!
Why cant I download Atrac to my 256 Duo?????? :s
It seems silly to me
I hope they bring out an update for Sonicstage soon, as I quite like the software despite all the rants I have read on this and other forums.