It's official: Sony, you suck

If you've read this blog for any length of time, you know my feelings on PlayStation3. A quick recap if you haven't been paying attention: hopeful, then disappointed, then downright angry.

Our TV, a Sony Bravia, has also worked out fine so far, so that tempered my anger a bit.

Now, I'm back to full-on rage.

Several Woot-offs ago, I bought myself a handy little Sony MP3 player. I downloaded basically every song I liked off of every CD I have; I bought a few more as well. I won't list them here, because the embarrassment factor is quite high, particularly in one case. (And no, it's not "Justify My Love," which I raved about on a long-ago video wall.)

For Christmas, my lovely wife bought me a new MP3 player with a considerably larger capacity. I haven't had a whole lot of time to get it all set up, but made a point to do so tonight.

Except there's one little problem. The new Sandisk plays MP3s.

The old Sony never did.

Instead, all the music was saved as an .oma file, which Sony refers to as ATRAC.

A little Googling turns up that ATRAC and the related .oma files are Sony proprietary. Direct conversions to MP3 - hell, even .wav files - are well nigh impossible.

I'm all about building a better mousetrap. But taking a now commonplace activity - ripping and burning MP3s for personal use - and making it so that you're stuck with one brand of devices is utter bullshit. Just like the still exorbitant price for a PS3.

Perhaps their own special format makes Sony money; good for them. But to engender anger among potential consumers seems like a rather unsafe business practice.

Sony's arrogance and stupidity will do that company in.

I, for one, am happy to participate in the process.

If I can possibly help it, Sony will not see another dime from me.