"Hey AtAT," we hear you pestering us, "how come you haven't broached the topic of Sony's new 'Connect' downloadable music service? Seeing as it's yet another in a long line of alleged 'iTunes killers,' after all." Well, yeah, see, about that... isn't anyone else a little bored with the services that keep popping up as competition for the iTunes Music Store? People keep setting us up for some scary and dramatic showdown, like the newcomer's finally going to show the iTMS a thing or two about how to sell music. So we get all excited and prepare for an epic battle, a clash of the titans (only the entertaining kind, you know, not the kind with Harry Hamlin in a bedsheet), and then what happens? We get the likes of BuyMusic.com. Or Napster. Talk about your letdowns. And since none of these "iTMS-killers" is ever even Mac- or iPod-compatible, frankly, it all seems like a major waste of our time.

Of course, that's when we remember that our time is utterly worthless, so we figure that if there's at least something wildly new and original about one of these pretenders to the throne, we might as well blather on about it for a bit. And that's about when faithful viewer Joshua Weiland clued us in to a simply nifty little review of Sony Connect in the Washington Post. The reviewer says that pricing is "fair" (and it's the same as the iTMS's) but slams just about everything else about Connect before concluding that "this service is an embarrassment to the company." In particular, we love the usage rights: you can apparently only burn each purchased song five times to audio discs and five times to proprietary ATRAC CDs; when you transfer songs to two additional authorized PCs, those PCs can't burn or transfer the songs at all; and while most songs come with "an unlimited number of transfers to portable players," songs from Warner Music Group labels "are restricted to three transfers. Ever."

All that aside, however, there's a real kicker about Connect-- a difference that really makes it stand out from the crowd. Whereas pundits regularly predict the eventual demise of the iTMS because it sells music that can only be played in iTunes or on an iPod (horror of horrors-- it will "only" work with the best jukebox software and the best portable player! We're fans of choice as much as the next staff of an online soap opera, but it hardly seems worth going Chicken Little over), Sony's gone one better: it's selling music that doesn't work in iTunes or the iPod or basically any other jukebox or player on the market, save Sony's own offerings. Which is a strategy that has a shot of working if, like Apple, you make some of the niftiest software and players ever created, but which, so far, Sony apparently does not.

So if you want to buy any music from Connect, you have to use Sony's "bloated, bug-ridden beast of a program" (for Windows only, natch), and if you want to take any of it with you, you either need a MiniDisc player, a CLIÉ PDA, or a Sony iPod wannabe, such as the newly-announced currently-Japan-only VAIO Pocket VGF-AP1, as noted by faithful viewer darknite. Which is maybe nice in some ways (long battery life, hi-res color screen), but it just isn't an iPod, which is what a whole slew of digital music fans currently own or are in the process of selling internal organs to buy.

Meanwhile, the name of Sony's format-- ATRAC-- sounds more than a little like "8-track." Coincidenza?

Again, in some sense, most of this is irrelevant to us anyway, since, despite Sony not climbing on the Windows Media Audio bandwagon, its service still isn't Mac-compatible-- despite Sony's home page showing Connect loaded in Internet Explorer for Mac OS X. It's kinda blurry and they've made a token attempt to genericize the browser window, but there's little mistaking that "go" button and, especially, the Aqua scroll bar. Apparently they were just trying to scare us, though. Don't worry folks-- Connect will not run on your Mac! Whew-- dodged a bullet there, huh?