January 8, 2004
Lots of Players, Little Harmony
By MICHEL MARRIOTT
BRETT RENWICK, an enterprising refugee from the dot-com implosion, considers himself an especially tech-savvy consumer. He spent weeks poring over reviews and product specifications before deciding on a high-speed Internet service for his Harlem apartment. And he is studying the pros and cons of plasma, liquid crystal and digital light processing as he wrestles with finding a television ready for high-definition viewing.
But when it comes to shopping for a digital music player, he huffs and throws up his hands.
"It's more difficult today to chose a MP3 player than an HD-ready TV," said Mr. Renwick, a 39-year-old marketing executive at Nielsen Media Research. "There are too many choices."
Hand-held players that permit consumers to transfer music from their computers and play it on the go have, like digital cameras, moved from niche to mainstream. Yet industry analysts agree that consumers face a knot of issues when selecting a player to suit their tastes, needs and technical aptitude.
Browse almost any digital-player message board on the Internet, and you'll discover thousands of words detailing frustrations, failures and suggested fixes. Some consumers are learning the hard way that all digital music players and formats are not the same.
For instance, owners of Apple's popular iPod are finding that music encoded in the format, or codec, known as WMA, for Windows Media Audio by Microsoft, will not play on the iPod - which performs best with music encoded with a format called AAC, for Advanced Audio Coding.
"The codec confusion needs to get resolved before we see dramatic changes in the market," said Van Baker, vice president of GartnerG2, a research service from Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn.
The variety, and the difficulty of choosing, may only increase in the short term. On Tuesday, Apple unveiled a smaller iPod called the iPod Mini, and digital-music announcements by other manufacturers are planned over the next few days at the Consumer Electronics Show, a major trade event in Las Vegas.
Hyder Rabbani, president and chief operating officer at Archos, a maker of portable digital storage devices and music players, compares today's digital audio environment to the dawn of the cellular telephone industry, when there was a confounding mix of competing systems and formats.
"It stalled the entire adoption of the industry," he said, noting that many consumers waited until the formats shook out to a dominant few before they bought a cellphone. "There's a similar challenge today."
Long gone are the days when digital music came only on compact discs, and any CD would play on any CD player. Among the factors consumers must now consider are a player's price, capacity, compatibility and versatility, like the ability to transfer or "rip" music directly to a player from a CD.
Fundamentally, digital music players can be broken down into two groups: those with flash memory, and those with portable hard drives. The flash memory players can store a modest amount of music (usually about 90 minutes) and are also modestly priced, at around $100. Additional memory cards, however, can cost as much as the player itself.
More popular are players like the iPod, which store music on hard drives not unlike the shiny little boxes of spinning memory platters that laptop computers use to store data. These can easily store some 10,000 songs, perhaps 600 hours of music, and are far costlier at $250 to $500. Hard-drive players also demand far more power than those with flash memory, which involves no moving parts. (The modest eight-hour battery life between charges is one of the few regular complaints from iPod owners.)
There are also multifunctional devices that play audio files, like electronic organizers, hand-held gaming consoles and CD players that read music burned on discs in various formats, including MP3 or Windows Media.
In addition to the hardware, a dizzying array of software is required to manage digital music, including the formats used for storage and playback. For starters, there are MP3, MP3 Pro, WMA, AAC and a format called Atrac that is used almost exclusively by Sony. Each format has its advantages and peculiarities, and not all players read all formats.
At the big DataVision Computer Video store in Midtown Manhattan, personal digital audio players were one of the holiday season's best sellers, said John A. Griffin, the store's sales manager, and iPods were clearly the players of choice.
"For every one of the other players we sold people bought 70 to 80 iPods," Mr. Griffin said one day recently as shoppers ogled a store display of more than 50 different models of players ranging in size from cigarette lighters to small jewelry boxes.
But though the iPod has seemingly become the overarching symbol of the latest wave of music players - as the Sony Walkman was for the first generation - it is hard to determine its precise grip on the market because music players come in so many forms.
Many analysts give the iPod the lead with about 30 percent of the digital player market, while Sony - which considers all of its Walkman devices capable of playing downloaded music to be personal audio players - says it has a leading 35 percent market share.
To reassert its momentum in the field, Sony is using the Las Vegas show to introduce a new line of players. Based on a re-engineered version of its MiniDisc format, the players are being promoted as a middle road in price and capacity between flash-memory and hard-drive-based players.
Sony says the new models, called Hi-MD Walkman players, will reach stores in April at prices ranging from $200 to $400. They will store up to 45 hours of high-fidelity music on a single, re-recordable disc, expected to cost about $7. (Existing MiniDiscs, which the new models will also play, cost about $2 and can store up to five hours of digital music, or 2 hours 40 minutes at near-CD quality.) The players are also designed to offer 30 hours of music on a single AA battery, three times the battery life of a hard-drive player.
Like Apple, with its popular iTunes Music Store, Sony is also creating a music downloading service, Connect, that will cater to its own players. "Our strategy for the new Walkman experience is a complete system for downloading, managing and playing back music on a wide selection of Sony portable devices," said Todd Schrader, vice president for marketing in Sony Electronics' personal mobile products division.
But if that music is in a Sony personal player, it will be playing in Sony's Atrac format, Mr. Schrader said. That means that consumers who already have music stored on flash memory or hard drives in other formats, like MP3 or Windows Media, would have to convert it to Atrac to play in Sony players.
Mr. Schrader said that more than 2.5 million Walkman devices in the United States were already compatible with the Connect service, and that another 4.5 million would reach the market this year. Sony says that all of its players use music management software, SonicStage 2.0, that translates various popular music formats into Atrac.
But some digital music enthusiasts contend that converting from one format to another degrades audio quality. Others complain that some formats (like Atrac) are more restrictive than others (like MP3) in the number of times a song can be played or on how many players. And some industry analysts question whether another music service, even one with Sony's brand and marketing muscle, can succeed in an already-crowded marketplace. In addition to iTunes, there are services from Wal-Mart, Musicmatch, BuyMusic.com and the recently introduced Napster 2.0, to a name a few. More are expected soon from big companies like Dell and Microsoft.
"Sony comes in here and says, 'We are going to do it on our own,' " said Josh Bernoff, a principal analyst with Forrester Research. "The question is, can Sony be as successful as Apple has been in creating support for its own format?"
The iTunes service offers some 500,000 songs (Sony promises that number for its own service), and Apple reports more than 30 million downloads to date. All of the iTunes selections are encoded in AAC, and the iPod, which works seamlessly with the music service, is the only personal digital audio player that can play the tracks. (Like many competing models, it also plays MP3's, the generally lower-quality files often used for online swapping.)
In effect, the Apple music service's optimal compatibility with iPod helps sell its players. It is a strategy that Apple's chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, has acknowledged. The new Napster music service, meanwhile, has created a particularly comfortable fit with the Samsung Napster YP-910GS player, which can store as many as 5,000 songs on its 20-gigabyte hard drive.
Other hardware makers are adding to the mix at the Las Vegas show, among them Archos, which is introducing a 20-gigabyte model, the Gmini 220, which costs $350 and is slightly smaller than a classic iPod. Samsung is announcing what it says is the smallest hard-drive-based audio player, the $300 YH-800. It has a 1.5-gigabyte capacity (compared with 4 gigabytes for the new iPod Mini) and measures 2.2 by 2.2 inches.
But for Mr. Renwick, the perplexed shopper and dot-com veteran, all the new hardware and music services add up to more choices to consider before he fulfills a resolution to buy a music player before the new year begins to show its age.
He said he was leaning toward an iPod, which would give him an excuse to scrap his four-year-old Windows PC and invest in an Apple desktop to keep things "perfectly" compatible. Then again, he just decided to buy a MiniDisc player for his wife to test some of Sony's claims.
Meanwhile, he ponders. "There's still just a clutter of confusion out there," he said.
AI
