Tech

Neil Young's Pono format will be out in early 2014

by Tyler Munro

via bad-news-beat.org

Neil Young is a farm boy troubadour who just so happens to also be finely tuned into the technological world. For years he’s been talking about the cloud, but his real passion is MP3s. Or, more specifically, hating them. He thinks they sound like shit. He’s not wrong. That’s why for what feels like forever he’s been working on Pono, an all-in-one lossless digital music format, download service and audio player.

And now Pono is almost ready for release. On Facebook, Young wrote that Pono is on track for an early 2014 release.

“The simplest way to describe what we’ve accomplished is that we’ve liberated the music of the artist from the digital file and restored it to its original artistic quality – as it was in the studio,” writes Young, who says the format restores music’s primal power. “Hearing Pono for the first time is like that first blast of daylight when you leave a movie theater on a sun-filled day. It takes you a second to adjust. Then you enter a bright reality, of wonderfully rendered detail.”

Er, okay.

He says he hopes to make Pono accessible, and you’ve got to love his intentions and passion, even if this thing is absolutely destined to fail. Lossless digital music is a niche already filled by the likes of the FLAC movement, which has support garnered by both nerds and the industry; Bandcamp has been offering FLAC downloads for years.

Not only will Neil Young have to deal with licensing, programming and distribution, but people aren’t going to be willing to buy another audio device. This is the MiniDisc all over again, and I write this as someone who owned one.

Young says he’s launching the product with its own online library. That’ll help. But as we wait for PonoMusic’s launch and hope for the best, it’s hard not to be skeptical. Will this be anything more than a roadbloack in listening to Neil Young’s music?