When I first heard about Sony deliberately planning to not include MP3 support in its “iPod Killer” in favor of ATRAC3, I wanted to grab the closest available Sony employee and shake them until their arms fell off.

Finally someone in Japan has seen the light. Native mp3 playback is coming to the VGF-AP1 and most of Sony’s other digital music players. I guess you can only deal with so much industry ridicule before you cave in and start providing what your customers actually want.

In related news, Emusic.com sells downloadable music – with no DRM! 192kb/sec MP3s are all you’ll find! At $0.25 cents per track, that’s a heck of a lot less than Wal-Mart’s $0.88, and a hell of a lot less than Apple’s $0.99.