Due to the possibility that you might not have had license to record what you recorded, then you couldn't have a digital version of it on your computer.
This was the end of my relationship with Sony.
Early Kindles are going to lose a lot of functionality soon as 3G networks get shut down and they have no WiFi to fall back on.
Paradoxically, since they are a conglomerate some divisions have sane policies. Their mobile phone one is among the few manufacturers that release kernels and make it easy to self-compile your own AOSP.
The reboot process takes almost a full minute, but at least the SONY logo emblazoned on the screen during that time has hopefully given me a Pavlovian aversion to their brand so that I won't make the same mistake again.
Don’t forget about this! The CD rootkit thing was what really soured my opinion of Sony.
SONY got the bad reputation but you can thank the western record companies for this with their reaction to Sony's earlier DAT format. Check out "An Open Letter To Japan" in this 1986 issue of "Billboard" (page 9): https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Billboard/80...
A common refrain during the Napster lawsuit was that "the law needs to catch up to technology". This is hilariously wrong, looking back on it. The music industry was very adamant back in the 70s and 80s that consumers shouldn't have access to audio recording technology, especially not digital copies. As a result, the law was about 20 steps ahead of technology. Any and all consumer audio recording technology had to prevent second-generation digital copies via SCMS.
The fact that MP3 players were even allowed to exist (see RIAA v. Diamond) is a minor miracle; birthed from a legal battle that I doubt Sony was at all interested in fighting. At that point they had literally bought a record label, which pushed a lot of internal corporate changes within SONY. It's far harder to justify selling devices to copy music when you also happen to sell music.
(Of course, Apple wound up completely monopolizing music sales for a decade by more or less ignoring all of the above, getting involved in both sides of the business, and just using the superior user experience to steamroll over both labels and other device manufacturers.)
iTunes was never big enough to count as a monopoly on music sales, not even close.
By the time iTunes went DRM-free (in 2009), CD sales were about a third of what they were at their peak and digital was the industry's only growth market. 90% of 40% is still a huge chunk of the market.
At least I still have my CD collection!
One day I couldn't transfer my legally, newly bought Sony Music CD to my Sony MD player for mobile use (on my also expensive car and mobile MD players) because of DRM.
That's when I decided I don't care anymore. What's the point if after all that money Napster and the newly released iPod provide a better experience.
I tried the mds a year ago and they work (the cd mechanisms is jammed) now the stereo is mainly used through the aux jack.
I will agree MD would have made an excellent computer disc format had Sony allowed it. (They had something called MD Data but it was terrible). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc
It doesn't help much if you still buy the Playstation...
> This was the end of my relationship with Sony.
It's a good thing that I bought my MiniDisc player in 2004, just a year before the rootkit fiasco. Because I loved that device.
And then rootkit scandal.
Now, they're a cheaper Bose.
Would that have been that much worse than just running a 3mm cable from the MiniDisk headphone out to the computer's mic/line in? Or was Sony somehow preventing that?
I played around a lot with music trackers (production tool) during this time and often did the reverse so I could hear my productions on other stereos or in the car -- that is running computer output to a tape deck and recording to tape. This was obviously before CD burners were affordable.
Probably the NetMD series which supported compressed storage onto “data” MDs.
While I never had a use for transferring off of MDs, the software used to manage MD contents was indeed one of the poorest I’ve ever had the misfortune to interact with. Even the worst eras of iTunes (which had generally been pretty shit especially on windows) does not come close to the utter dreck and absolute disaster that was SonicStage.
That software made iTunes on Windows feel fast.
I'm not certain though; it's 20 years since I last used mine, and I wouldn't have had anything to connect it to except analogue audio.
But it had an "SCMS" copy protection scheme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc#Copy_protection
USB 1.0 was introduced in 1996, which is very much "mid 90s". Then again, it wasn't very popular and at 12Mbps for "full speed", it would not have been very fast.
My girlfriend at the time started college in Fall 1999 and got a new laptop. She later got a CD burner and I remember it hooked up via serial port.
It definitely took a few years to see it become common. Mac may have been the first to really push it, but that would have been late-90's as well, post-Jobs' return.
Sad because their walk-man was basically the standard before, and sony makes some good hardware.
Sony is (and already was back then) a record company. They were a huge chunk of the group making the rules, and were in a much better position than any other electronics company to fight them.