developed by Sony Connect, a division of Sony Corporation of America in 2005. It was released for European and Japanese market in November 2005 to be used with Sony's new HDD digital music players - the NW-A Series Walkman (A1000 and A3000). In January 2006, Sony Europe recommended users to change to SonicStage (Sony's earlier media player) pending potential further updates to the CONNECT Player software due to thousands of reports regarding its many problems. In May 2006, Connect Player was absorbed into a newly released SonicStage version called SonicStage CP (the letters bearing the name). Compatibility The CONNECT Music Store was only accessible via Internet Explorer on computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system. Files downloaded from the CONNECT Music Store were encrypted using Sony's Digital Rights Management, in the OpenMG (*.omg & *.oma) file format. Audio content is encrypted using an OpenMG compliant program — SonicStage — and stored on a computer's hard disk for playback or transfer to a Sony media device. The file format is ATRAC3, Sony's proprietary compressed music format. References Defunct online music stores CONNECT Defunct digital music services or companies