Upgrading firmware for mp3 players?

Fenster

Possibly the wrong board for this..

Anyways, I interited a Sony NM-MS7 today. Its a sturdily built MP3 player, but there are two problems:

Its only compatible with Windows 98-I run XP/Fedora

It will only play a proprietary, protected format whose files can't be copied anywhere else and can only be converted through a Sony utility, which requires you to have the original music CD on hand.

While I have a nice little 256mb Muvo as a pen drive, I figure this would make a great MP3 player for me if I can get XP compatibility and if I can get it playing MP3's.

Google didn't return anything useful, so I turn to here.

Inspector Gadget

You've answered your own question, I'm afraid.

It will only play a proprietary, protected format whose files can't be copied anywhere else and can only be converted through a Sony utility, which requires you to have the original music CD on hand.

It's one of the early ATRAC walkman thingies. This is the same compression system used for MiniDisc players (well, there have been a few versions of ATRAC over the years, but it uses one of 'em) and undoubtedly uses a custom Sony ASIC as used in one or more MiniDisc devices to actually decode the audio - hence, no MP3 support as it doesn't know how.

By contrast, most MP3 players these days employ either a full-blown CPU or a DSP processor (both of which are programmable) to decode the audio from whatever formats it supports - this is why a firmware update can magically add format support on some players. However, considering the sheer volume of ATRAC devices Sony (and Aiwa, owned by Sony) have been churning out, it's almost inevitable that economies of scale (i.e. "we're making so many of these damn things it would justify building a custom chip that could be manufactured more cheaply than fitting a more general-purpose device in every product") would have caused them to go the ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) route.

This (ASIC vs CPU/DSP) is hypothesis, mind you... however, this would also tie in nicely with Sony's stance on DRM. Not surprising when they own both record labels _and_ movie studios... even if that element of what I'm saying is inaccurate, it's not in Sony's interest to sell a device that supports a non-DRM'ed format like MP3. Or, at least, it wasn't back then, when they thought they could convert the world to their way of thinking
Gadget

Ciaran500

They still think they can. Doesn't sony's newest "ipod beater" use Atrac only. Doomed from day one.

Inspector Gadget

True... though I believe that some of their Atrac Discman efforts also support MP3. However, this may ultimately be due to the fact that these are read-only devices, so they're not providing the means for people to create MP3-based copies of music - even if that music is legally acquired :rolleyes:

Gadget

Fenster

Ciaran500 wrote:

They still think they can. Doesn't sony's newest "ipod beater" use Atrac only. Doomed from day one.

Ouch. We stocked the ATRAC players in Currys/Dixons a while back. We only sold a few and those that we did came back as people didn't want something that didn't support .mp3's.

Yup, its doomed.