Let it be known that I now loathe Sony.

I got a Hi-MD Walkman MZ-RH910 minidisc recorder a bit ago. For those of you who don't know what this is, it's basically the digital equivalent of a tape recorder. This particular model has a mic in as well as a combo line-in and optical in port. It's also got a headphone port, USB, buttons, etc. Essentially, it's an MP3 player that uses a removable disk. $6 for a 1 GB disk. Really dirt cheap media.

It's a very nice device. Midrange portable recording deck. Better than the little flash-based recorders, but not quite as good as the samplers put out by Edirol and so forth.



And now, my problem.

They make this really nice hardware for portable recording ...

They give it capabilities that very few other standalone recorders have ...

Then, they make it completely, totally, and utterly incompatible with the one computer system that music professionals actually use.



I can't use it because Sony, in their infinite wisdom, decided to "copy-protect" the tracks that you, yourself record and the only software that can decrypt this stuff is Sony's software designed for use with their minidisc recorders. The disk mounts as a normal external drive. It charges over the USB connection. I can browse the files. I just can't use them because they're all in Sony's proprietary, DRM'd file format and there's no converter for my model for the Mac. There's a converter for the MZ-M10 and MZ-M100, but not mine.

Every other brand of recorder I've ever even heard of records PCM files as straight WAV files. Even the iPod does. Why can't Sony seem to do anything other than the Playstation and high-end consumer video cameras properly?



Wow am I ever angry.