SanDisk Announces New Physical Format for Music

[JMcEntegart]

The four biggest record companies in the industry have gotten together with SanDisk and last week announced what the group obviously hopes will rescue slumping physical music sales.

SanDisk Announces New Physical Format for Music : Read more

 

[aevm]

Why would anybody want to rescue slumping physical music sales??? If I can buy high-quality MP3 files with no DRM pollution I'm happy. Making and shipping a physical product is a waste of money and resources and won't even let me enjoy my purchase right away.

LOL, if I want 500 tracks, and I buy one every day, I'll end up with 500 microSD cards. Just try to figure out which is which and where to store them... And how much would it cost? With Amazon, you can just pay $1/track, download it, put it on a DVD-RW. A single 4.7 disk can hold hundreds of tracks in MP3.

SanDisk should focus on making SSDs that can compete with the Velociraptors on price/size/speed. If they do that, they'll drive Seagate and WD into bankruptcy and they'll make a ton of money.

 

[ilovebarny]

^+1

 

[sandmanwn]

a complete and utter waste of resources. id rather they didn't and instead used these resources to bring down the price of ssd hard drives.

 

[mtyermom]

Using mp3 on a 1GB card just doesn't make any sense to me. Why not use an uncompressed/lossless format and still have room for additional content? There would still be room for portable player specific tracks (ie: mp3s).

 

[martel80]

I may download MP3s from online store so what's the point? They need to make it in a lossless format to be worth a purchase (but then there's the problem as not every player supports ALAC, FLAC or WAV). They could use the idea to sell something like 48kHz/24bit masters of the CD counterparts to make it more appealing.

 

[koss64]

I think its a decent idea to go into a store and pick up a card that i can use right away, i like the tourist angle for it, something cheap and not too bulky to carry around as a peice of the place your visiting that gives you more than you bargined for.

 

[WheelsOfConfusion]

Dammit, MP3? Why can't it be an open format like vorbis or FLAC? That way they wouldn't even face the possibility of paying licenses, and the music would sound better. They're touting this standard as DRM-free anyway so they don't have anything to lose. Also maybe then more portable hardware would support those formats (but to be honest, I don't see this slotMusic being taken seriously either). On their site, they claim that the USB sleeve makes this compatible with Win/Lin/Mac, but some Linux distros don't support MP3 out of the box for the licensing issues.

Besides, 1GB for storage of MP3s? What are they going to sell, an artist's entire back catalogs? Music, videos, and photos? There's nothing innovative about any of that, and it's so vague. That doesn't sound like a new standard so much as a common consumer practice being made into a business practice.

Let's be honest, this isn't a tactic to sell more music, this is a tactic to sell more -microSD cards-