SonicStage

End of the line for Sony's Atrac?

Sony's years-long effort to promote its Atrac audio encoding format appears to be coming to an end.

Sony's known for creating proprietary formats rather than adopting formats developed elsewhere. Many other companies--Microsoft in particular--do the same thing, but Sony sometimes seems to cling to its technologies long past the date where it makes business sense. Sony invented Atrac for its MiniDisc, but as MP3 players became popular, Sony tried to push the format into the new world of discless players. Those first Sony portable players didn't support MP3. This helped a down-on-its-luck company with no consumer electronics … Read more

The future of Sony Connect

Care to take a stab at guessing this one? I'll give you a hint: it's fabulous news. As you may have gathered from Sony's abandonment of SonicStage, the company is giving its Connect music store the ax as well. Considering the new Walkmans are now PlaysForSure devices capable of playing both purchased and subscription WMAs--and they support unprotected AACs purchased from iTunes--it only makes sense to get rid of the faltering (and horrifically designed) store. For my part, I'm pleased as punch by the death of SonicStage and Connect. Yes, I'm a little bit sadistic...… Read more

Sony: Good riddance, SonicStage

OK, OK, two Sony products in two days doesn't mean Crave's all loved-up with the Japanese Walkmanites, but considering how much we bash its media-manager software SonicStage, we felt compelled to mention that the company's ickle new MP3 player--the NWD-B100--doesn't require it. About time, too.

The NWD-B100 is possibly the most respectable Sony Walkman product to see the light of day in 2007. Yeah, the NW-A808 is a superb piece of audio gadgetry, and the E series earned kudos points for including a system very similar to iTunes' Cover Flow on a tiny colour display. But … Read more

Slide show: Sony's noise-canceling MP3 player, up close

Earlier this month we wrote that Sony would be releasing an iPod Nano-style MP3 player in the US with a built-in active noise-cancellation feature. Well, the Sony NW-S705F is here, and CNET's review has just posted along with a slide show.

Sony releases its noise-canceling answer to the iPod Nano

Sony's NW-S705F Noise Canceling MP3 player is now on sale in the U.S. for about $199 for 2GB version and $169 for 1GB. You may remember when Crave reported on Sony's announcement of this player back in October. The big hullabaloo is that the NW-S705F has active noise-cancellation integrated into the player. Before you get too excited, the active noise-cancellation system will still require you to use Sony's proprietary earbuds. Even though the noise-canceling circuitry is in the player, microphones located on the outside of the earbuds are necessary for the function to work properly. The … Read more