Music Center for PC is a music player and transfer software for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for se ...

, developed by

Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...

and first released in 2017.

Overview

The software was created to replace

Media Go Media Go is a discontinued free multimedia management application that runs on Microsoft Windows, developed by Sony Entertainment Network. Media Go manages content on Sony family products including Sony Mobile phones, the PlayStation Portable, Pla ...

and x-APPLICATION (Japanese: x-アプリ). Unlike those, Music Center for PC only focuses on audio and as a result it has had several features removed, such as CD burning, or non-audio media functionalities like photo or video playback and transfer. It is also not compatible for transfer with phones or consoles, but only with audio devices like

Walkman Walkman, stylised as , 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 ...

, home stereos and theater systems, active speakers, and others. Version 1.0 of Music Center for PC is based on x-APPLICATION (and in turn,

SonicStage 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 Pl ...

). Version 2.0 was released in late 2018 and had a major overhaul of the user interface developed on

Electron The electron ( or ) is a subatomic particle with a negative one elementary electric charge. Electrons belong to the first generation of the lepton particle family, and are generally thought to be elementary particles because they have no kno ...

. Additionally there is now also support for DSEE HX.

Gracenote Gracenote, Inc. is a company owned by Nielsen Holdings that provides music, video and sports metadata and automatic content recognition (ACR) technologies to entertainment services and companies, worldwide. Formerly CDDB ("Compact Disc Data Bas ...

tagging of music is also integrated into Music Center for PC. The mora music store is also integrated for Japanese customers to directly purchase music.

Format support

Music Center for PC supports the playback of numerous formats including

high-resolution audio High-resolution audio (high-definition audio or HD audio) is a term for audio files with greater than 44.1 kHz sample rate or higher than 16-bit audio bit depth. It commonly refers to 96 or 192 kHz sample rates. However, there also exi ...

, namely:

ATRAC 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 h ...

(.oma/.aa3), ATRAC Advanced Lossless (.oma/.aa3),

WAV Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced "wave") is an audio file format standard, developed by IBM and Microsoft, for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is the main format used on Microsoft W ...

(.wav),

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

(.mp3),

AAC AAC may refer to: Aviation * Advanced Aircraft, a company from Carlsbad, California * Alaskan Air Command, a radar network * American Aeronautical Corporation, a company from Port Washington, New York * American Aviation, a company from Clevela ...

(.3gp/.mp4/.m4a),

HE-AAC High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE-AAC) is an audio coding format for lossy data compression of digital audio defined as an MPEG-4 Audio profile in ISO/ IEC 14496–3. It is an extension of Low Complexity AAC (AAC-LC) optimized for l ...

(.3gp/.mp4/.m4a), WMA (.wma), DSD (.dsf/.dff),

FLAC FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software ...

(.flac), MQA (.mqa.flac),

APE Apes (collectively Hominoidea ) are a clade of Old World simians native to sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia (though they were more widespread in Africa, most of Asia, and as well as Europe in prehistory), which together with its sister g ...

(.ape), ALAC (.mp4/.m4a) and

AIFF Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) is an audio file format standard used for storing sound data for personal computers and other electronic audio devices. The format was developed by Apple Inc. in 1988 based on Electronic Arts' Interchange File ...

(.aiff/.aif). It can also play

audio CDs The compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. In August 1982, the first compact disc was manufactured. It was then released in Octobe ...

, but

ripping Ripping is extracting all or parts of digital content from a container. Originally, it meant to rip music out of Commodore 64 games. Later, the term was used to extract WAV or MP3 format files from digital audio CDs, but got applied as well to ext ...

a CD is only possible into FLAC, WAV, MP3 or AAC formats.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Music Center for PC Digital audio Jukebox-style media players Sony Windows CD ripping software Windows media players Sony software