Sony Finally Recognizes That No One Is Going To Go With ATRAC

from the took-'em-long-enough dept

It’s been well over a year since Sony’s Ken Kutaragi admitted that Sony had made a huge strategic error in pushing its proprietary ATRAC music format (complete, of course, with copy protection). However, from admitting it to actually doing something about it takes time. Reports are coming out now, saying that Sony is going to allow its music players to play AAC formatted songs. A lot of the press seems to reporting this as Sony adopting “Apple’s” audio format — but that’s not really accurate. AAC is a standard, not an Apple proprietary format. Apple does use a proprietary copy protection system called FairPlay on the songs it sells from iTunes — and they refuse to let anyone else offer FairPlay compatible systems… including Sony. So, this doesn’t actually mean you’ll be able to play iTunes music directly on Sony systems. It just means Sony is finally recognizing that their products need to play additional formats.


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