Walkman, stylised as WALKMAN (ウォークマン), is a brand of portable audio players manufactured and marketed by Japanese technology company Sony since 1979. The original Walkman was a portable cassette player and its popularity made "walkman" an unofficial term for personal stereos of any producer or brand. By 2010, when production stopped, Sony had built about 200 million cassette-based Walkmans.
Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding (ATRAC) is a family of proprietary audio compression algorithms developed by Sony. MiniDisc was the first commercial product to incorporate ATRAC in 1992. ATRAC allowed a relatively small disc like MiniDisc to have the same running time as CD while storing audio information with minimal loss in perceptible quality. Improvements to the codec in the form of ATRAC3, ATRAC3plus, and ATRAC Advanced Lossless followed in 1999, 2002, and 2006 respectively.
Hi-MD is a magneto-optical disc-based data storage format. It was a further development of the MiniDisc. With its release in later 2004, came the ability to use newly developed, high-capacity 1 gigabyte Hi-MD discs, in the same dimensions as MiniDisc. The last recorder and player was discontinued in 2011. Blank discs stopped production in September 2012.
Sony Connect, stylised Sony CONNECT, was the name for a series of related software products by Sony, most notably the Connect Music Store online music store. Sony CONNECT Inc. was a subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America.
Gapless playback is the uninterrupted playback of consecutive audio tracks, such that relative time distances in the original audio source are preserved over track boundaries on playback. For this to be useful, other artifacts at track boundaries should not be severed either. Gapless playback is common with compact discs, gramophone records, or tapes, but is not always available with other formats that employ compressed digital audio. The absence of gapless playback is a source of annoyance to listeners of music where tracks are meant to segue into each other, such as some classical music, progressive rock, concept albums, electronic music, and live recordings with audience noise between tracks.
Archos is a French multinational electronics company that was established in 1988 by Henri Crohas. Archos manufactures tablets, smartphones, portable media players and portable data storage devices. The name is an anagram of Crohas' last name. Also, in Greek (-αρχος), it's a suffix used in nouns indicating a person with power. The company's slogan has been updated from "Think Smaller" to "On The Go", and the current "Entertainment your way".
SonicStage is a discontinued software product from Sony that is used for managing portable devices when they are plugged into a computer running Microsoft Windows. It comprises a music player and library manager, similar to iTunes, Windows Media Player and RealPlayer. It is used to manage the library of ATRAC and MP3 recordings on a PC.
The following comparison of portable media players compares general and technical information for notable digital playback devices.
The Walkman A810 series is a portable media player designed by Sony. It was a flagship model in the Walkman digital player family. The model debuted in Asia in 2007, and then became available in North America. This series updates the previous Walkman A800 of the Walkman A Series, with the same hardware but different on-PC music management program.
SensMe is a proprietary music mood and tempo detection system created by Sony Corporation, and employed in numerous Sony branded products, including in some Walkman digital music players, the Media Go application, the PlayStation Portable, and Sony Ericsson and Sony Xperia handsets. It is named Omakase Channel (おまかせチャンネルを使う) in Japan.
The Walkman X series is a portable music player designed and released by Sony in Japan in 2009. It was marketed as a high-end, internet-enabled model in the Walkman digital player family in 2009. The model debuted in Japan in April 2009, and then became available in North America, Europe, China and also other regions. The Walkman X series was the first Walkman device to feature a touch screen and S-Master digital amplifier technologies.
The Sony Walkman Z series is a discontinued Android 2.3-based portable media player manufactured as a part of Sony's Walkman line of music players. First announced in Japan on September 13, 2011, and going on sale the following December, it was announced for an American release by mid-2012 at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show. It was the first Walkman that ran on the Android operating system.
The Walkman S Series is a line of portable media players designed and developed by Sony, currently marketed in Japan. The S Series made their debut in the fall of 2006 and later were launched in other regions. Although the first generation of models had generic displays, all next generations of players of the S Series had TFT color displays and supported video playback. They were slightly cheaper than the flagship A Series but had more features than the E Series. The S Series was discontinued outside Japan in 2012 and continues solely in the domestic market.
The Walkman A Series is a flagship line of mid-range digital audio players (DAP) by Sony as part of its Walkman range. The A Series has been marketed since 2005, initially as the top spec Walkman players and since 2014 as a mid-range following the introduction of the ZX Series. The "A" originally stood for "All in one, Advanced, and Attractive".
The Walkman ZX Series is a line of premium high-end digital audio players designed and developed by Sony since 2013. It sits above the A Series and below the luxury WM1 Series in the Walkman range.
The Walkman E Series is a line of digital audio (DAP) and portable media (PMP) players, marketed by Sony as part of its Walkman range. E Series devices have been marketed since 2000, although in its current form since 2008 as entry-level, candybar styled players.
Music Center for PC is a music player and transfer software for Microsoft Windows, developed by Sony and first released in 2017.
