The excitement! Sony really is "thinking about" adopting the MP3 format for playback - in its flash memory based music players, only.

Who cares? Why? Most users aren't going to be aware of it. And you download them from the PC anyway... so the PC can - and will - transform them...

That's exactly the point. It does matter to people that the MP3 encoding method be supported. ATRAC8, the current encoder Sony is using, is not widely used and nowhere near as mainstream as MP3. Many users have MP3 file collections already, and to change these files into ATRAC8 would cause further quality loss, and (assuming the MP3 files were deleted) prevent the user from moving to non-Sony devices in the future without another re-encoding session back to MP3.

Most people don't like the idea of having to convert their whole MP3 collection to a format they never heard of. Maybe some are not aware that converting from MP3 to Atrac will result in a loss of quality, but for many people including non-techies "converting" means losing something in the process. Converting can also be a lenghty process, it can take hours to convert an MP3 collection to Atracs. Filling an iPod with MP3s is a matter of a few minutes with no loss of quality. The users currently not aware will probably be discouraged to buy the Atrac-only Sony players by news articles,salesmen and their techies friends by the time they start looking to buy one.

Good and valid points. I suppose I'm a bit jaundiced about portable music players. Most of the stuff people seem to listen to on them really makes me doubt that it would be possible to judge whether it was "original quality" or just a scratchy tape. And if you listen to it in the car or in a busy street, it's probably not even audible...

:-)