LISMO Port

» see au.kddi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

LISMO was KDDI's music brand, launched in January 2006 to make au phones into the thing you carried music on. LISMO Port was the desktop half of that, and it arrived two years and two weeks later, on 1 February 2008, replacing an earlier program called au Music Port. KDDI built it with Sony, which is visible in the seams: it was really three applications welded behind one launcher. Two of them did the obvious work, a music engine licensed from Sony called x-アプリ for LISMO and a backup tool for the phone. The third one's job was backing up the other two.

What it did was unglamorous and necessary. It ripped your CDs and held your library, then pushed tracks down a USB cable onto your handset, which required a driver specific to your exact phone model that you had to go and download separately. It also backed up the address book, the mail, the photos and the schedule. It burned audio CDs from version 3.0 onward, though never from anything you had bought as a 着うたフル. And it fed Sony hardware as readily as au hardware, supporting thirteen Walkman models on the day it launched alongside six phones.

One small sign of where the decade was going: au Music Port, the thing it replaced, would not accept MP3 files at all. LISMO Port would. It still refused DRM-protected WMA and Apple Lossless. It also refused .m4p, the format iTunes Store purchases came wrapped in, which is a reasonable sketch of who it thought its customer was.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was translating ~

The reason this program had to exist, rather than the phone simply appearing as a drive, was that two separate rights systems met inside it. KDDI protected its downloads one way and Sony protected its music another, and a track bought from au's store that you wanted on your Walkman had to be carried across that boundary by something that understood both. The transfer right was counted locally, as a number of permitted copies attached to the file. 着うたフル downloads were tied to the phone number they had been bought on.

KDDI was explicit about the strategy. In a deck it filed with the Ministry of Internal Affairs in December 2009, it set LISMO against docomo's subscription service and against the iPhone with iTunes, labeling the whole approach vertical integration through the handset and noting pointedly that Apple's music came over Wi-Fi while KDDI's came down the cellular network. The trade press of the time was blunter. BCN ran a piece in October 2008 under the headline asking whether you still needed an iPod, and noted that a track cost 200 to 400 yen from the carrier against 150 to 200 on iTunes, but that you needed no credit card for the carrier version because it went on the phone bill, which is why schoolchildren could buy music this way at all.

By the time KDDI announced the end in May 2013, the ground had moved. The mora store had gone DRM-free in October 2012, and the Japanese mobile press read the shutdown accordingly: the program had been built to speak two rights dialects, and the industry had stopped speaking either. KDDI's own notice gives a plainer reason, which is the spread of smartphones.

~ rip your cds again ~

Eleven weeks after launch it had a problem KDDI admitted to in writing. If you upgraded from au Music Port version 2.X, the CDs you had already ripped would no longer transfer to your phone, failing with a message reading 「OpenMGの内部エラーです」. Libraries from version 1.0X could not be brought across at all. KDDI said the fault lay in LISMO Port's own implementation and promised a fix in about six weeks.

The official workaround, published on au's own notice page in April of the program's first year, was to rip your CDs again. For something built to be the place your music lived, that is a thing to have in writing.

~ the day windows 8.1 shipped ~

It was Windows only for its whole life, and au said so in print twice, five years apart, in almost the same sentence about Windows 2000 and Mac OS not being supported. The 2013 version of that page adds that the software is for IBM PC/AT compatibles running a standard install, and that KDDI guarantees nothing under a virtual machine.

The last version was 5.1, released in late January 2013, and the installer binary was stamped 17 December 2012, so the final build predates its own burial by eleven months. It weighed 193,441,520 bytes. Version 1.0 had been about 65 megabytes, back when au published an estimated download time of roughly 138 minutes over ISDN.

Then on 17 October 2013, the day Microsoft released Windows 8.1, au posted a notice saying LISMO Port did not run on it and that 5.1 was the final version there would ever be. The same notice added that au phones from the 2013 winter lineup onward would not support LISMO Port at all. The ending had already been scheduled five months earlier. What the notice added was confirmation, on the record and six weeks out, that nothing further was coming. The program stopped being provided and supported at noon on 29 November 2013, and the copies already on people's machines carried on working with nowhere official left to go.

~ the cable and the folder ~

A phone bought in Turkey in 2008 was a GSM handset with no carrier software attached to it at all. Getting music onto one meant plugging in a cable and dragging a folder of MP3s onto the storage as though it were any other drive. No program sat in the way, and no account either, because the operator had never been in the middle of that transaction to begin with.

Which is why a product like LISMO Port only really reads as an artifact of the market that produced it. Its complexity exists largely to manage a set of restrictions, and when the restrictions went away the program had no remaining reason to be installed.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »