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by c3833174
3086 days ago
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>Some of their early efforts literally required you to re-encode your music into another weird format to use (ATRAC, I think?) It's not really different from iPods, those required iTunes to load music just like Sony's devices used SonicStage, with the difference of the iPod having an internal hard drive instead of a MiniDISC drive (and later CD walkmans with ATRAC/MP3 support). |
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Sony's early digital players required your music to be in Sony's proprietary format, which was a whole additional step. And remember, 20 years ago, re-encoding took longer, so it was meaningfully less convenient.
There's definitely a case to be made that requiring iTunes to load iPods/iPhones is annoying and needlessly complex, but I think it's clear Apple did this to make it more accessible to normal humans, not to exert control or in a quixotic attempt to sideline open codecs.
(That Apple's current path is clearly away from iTunes sync and towards independent device connections to Apple Music kinda bears this out, I think, even if that's not something I'm interested in using.)