Sony To Adopt AAC For Audio Players

[dipdude]

Sony gets back to its roots for digital audio

Japanese news portal Asahi.com has some information about Sony’s upcoming digital audio players. As it turns out, Sony will support the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) in future digital audio players. AAC format with However, Sony will not support Apple’s FairPlay DRM scheme, so songs purchased from iTunes will not work with the new players.

Previous Sony audio players used a proprietary format called Atrac in its audio players. This format was clumsy and often resulted in poorly encoded media. More recently, Sony began adopting MP3 and WMA media, but given the amount of Apple and iPod users, AAC is virtually a must for any new portable media player.

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=2244

[dipdude]

Over the last 24 hours we’ve watched some bad reporting lead to even more bad reporting, all circling the same issue: Sony’s decision to support AAC. The mainstream media, by and large, has picked this up as a sign of Apple’s dominance in the portable music player business. Hey, it makes for a good headline. Unfortunately, there’s no meat on those bones.

The problem, of course, is that Apple did not invent AAC, nor is it “their format.” Rather, AAC is part of the MPEG-4 standard. Furthermore, how this represents Sony “acknowledging Apple’s dominance” (what does that even mean?) is far from clear because Apple does not use utilize AAC in a way that makes it something that other companies can just support. Case in point: Apple’s FairPlay DRM is applied to all purchases from the iTMS, and it’s this DRM (not AAC) that keeps Sony and others at bay. So sure, Sony supports AAC. Great. Sony still a) can’t play anything purchased from the iTMS, and b) cannot sell protected content that will play on the iPod.

Note to the Press: AAC is not “Apple’s format”