Os Modelos de Walkman Que Definiram Cada Época - Como a Sony reinterpretou a música portátil ao longo de quase cinco décadas - EP6

1998: WM-EX7 Walkman: The Smart Tape Illusion

With MiniDisc established, Sony tried to force that same digital logic backward onto cassette. The WM-EX7 included a Music Information Data Bank that allowed metadata to live separately from the tape itself. Track names followed the listener, not the cassette. In practice, it was administratively heavy and lightly adopted. The idea was ambitious, but the timing betrayed it. Sony no longer trusted tape to carry meaning on its own, yet it could not quite let it go. The cassette was being asked to behave like a file, and it resisted.