Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Pono - HiRes Music - Kickstarter 250% funded - Muzak will never be the same!

Pono Music - Where Your Soul Rediscovers Music by the PonoMusic Team — Kickstarter:

Pono Music... a project funded at Kickstarterhttp://kck.st/1g5xVf3

High resolution music in a world that has gone Digital!

Finally, I can put those olde (analog) records back on the shelf!

This Kickstarter.com campaign is set to roll over $2M in fund raising today. !Oops, took too long to blog! It is already over $2M! Original goal was only $800k. It is headed by Neil Young but has lots and lots of celec muzak backers. Two more added since I took too long to write this (James Taylor autographed player).

If you like this idea, jump on board. You can get a Pono muzak player for $300 this way with 128GB of storage. That actually is less than 1,000 tracks if you store them at the highest resolution. Of course, nobody has music at that high resolution... 

Pono will work with any artist or music company to get the highest resolution available (from masters) for the site. They won't stream initially in part because the size of the stream. Compression gets us the muZak we have today for our MP3 players -- maybe good, but definitely not great.

So, for 300 bucks or so, you to can sponsor this event, and the music site and the player devise. You will get a Pono player free for your sponsorship... well, $99 off of a $399 player. It should play any music, and the high resolution music you can put on it (now, really from PonoMusic.com, once the project is launched). Since the project is 200% funded, one can assume that it will launch. The plan is to build by this summer everything if the money came through from pre-sales and such on Kickstarter. Then all of the sponsors could expect their memorabilia and Pono players soon thereafter, say August.

The IP behind the player.I'm asking the question at Kickstarter about the IP behind the player. But, one of the key components of their IP is a patent by none other than Neil Young, himself. 

Patent Application: PCT/US2012/038099
Title: Multiple-resolution audio and video systems, methods of production, delivery and uses thereof
Priority date: Jan 20, 2009.

It will be interesting to see if it issues?

It will also be interesting to see if they go for a more open architecture like MP3 or proprietary approach.?

Kids, who have been listening to bad (quality) muzak all their lives, will never be the same.:-)

'via Blog this'

6 comments:

  1. Wow... Funding has been going up about $ 1/2 Million$ per day!... Too cool.
    Blasted past $2.5M ...
    Now they really have to deliver.

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  2. Friday March 14 2014. More than 9,000 backers and rolling over $3M at 11EST. WOW... Talk about an idea, whos time has come.

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  3. Sun March 16. ~11,300 backers. And coming up on $4M fast. 29 days to go.! That's at a pace for almost $20m... Assuming that sales don't slow (or accelerate!:)...
    For now, all we can do is listen to CSN&Y on MP3 and wait!

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  4. $4.1m; 12,228 backers. 28 days to go (out of a 35 day recruiting period).

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  5. Only 10 days out. And Pono has raised about $5.5m with more than 16k backers.

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  6. 17.7k backers with $6M+ raised. And only 25 hours left. Very cool. With that many pre-sales, they should be able to afford to really get it right, first triangle out of the door.

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