Pono Music Player

I like listening to high quality audio. The problem with listening to high quality audio has traditionally been that a person must play vinyl records, which are impractical store or one must buy high end digital files. Buying high end digital files has traditionally been a pain also,because you need to go to lots of different niche websites. Once you go to these niche websites you need to figure out which file type to download, get a third party program to download them and then use another program to play them.

I don't care about any of this technical stuff. I just want the music to sound good and I want an easy to use system like itunes, where I press one button and the music downloads and starts playing.

ponomusic is the best solution I've found. It's designed by Neil Young. With this service you get physical device that operates like a ipod and also a store like itunes.

Here's a chart comparing audio quality:



I've been listening to this device and audio downloads from the store for several weeks and I notice a significant quality improvement over CD quality. And of course the quality improvement is even much better than MP3. It makes me happier. I "feel" the music instead of just listening to the music.

A downside with this service is that the high res catalogue is limited right now.

Here's the site: https://ponomusic.force.com/

This is the core problem with pono:

https://www.ponomusic.com/ccrz__CCPage?pageKey=faq#ponopromise

The one year limit is absurd.  I don't want to pay for the same album twice.  There should be no time limit.

It's also stupid that they sell the same album at different resolutions.  They should just sell the highest resolution version.

Why would you buy a low resolution version in the first place? If you're going to buy a low res version then you might as well use an ipod. I wait for the highest resolution or I don't buy at all. Every song/album I have so far is the highest resolution.

Because there is music I like that isn't available in high resolution.  I would rather listen in low resolution than not at all.  If Pono was reasonable about upgrading, I would use Pono and know that I will get high resolution eventually.  But since they are unreasonable, I will just stick with Amazon.

Neil Young screwed his service. As of now you can no longer download music and there's no estimated relaunch time. This apparently has something to do with the distributor they use. Whatever case it doesn't work. Neil should stick to making music instead of being a techie engineer. He failed on his promise. The site was always slow to use but I stuck with this because once the music was downloaded it worked reasonably. As a joke he recently released his music on another platform and not his, that shows how little faith he has in Pono.

Here's the official message:

UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Progress continues to move the PonoMusic store to a new content partner. We are in the midst of doing all of the needed engineering work to enable that. Once completed, you'll have the ability to purchase our music in the US and Canada again and we will have the ability to begin expansion to other countries. This remains the top priority for the PonoMusic team, and we appreciate your continued support during this transition.

We have updated our FAQs in an effort to answer some of the questions that you may have about this transition.

In the meantime, the PonoMusic Community remains active, so please join in the conversations.

Thank you for your understanding, patience, and support.
The Ponomusic Team.

I no longer recommend Pono.