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iTunes already does this. http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/05/ 31/eff-drm-free-itunes-files-carry-more-than-just- names-and-e-mail-addresses/

Granted it's not contained within the actual music data to my knowledge, so your idea for removal does work http://playlistmag.com/weblogs/ipodblog/2007/06/un wateritunesplus/index.php/

As for actually corrupting the quality of the song, I highly doubt it will do that more than the encoding process already does - not to mention it could be put at higher/lower than human hearing range (though this would make it easier to find), or it could possibly be removed by comparison of multiple tracks (as mentioned by another poster).

Finally... If they're going to transfer the file anyway, someone could just buy the CD and rip that... but I understand this will likely deter the common user from transfering files, which is ultimately the point. No DRM stands up to dedicated hackers, but the average user will get too annoyed to bother to learn how to crack it...

Let's see now, how to gain cash over the weekend - I know! The hottest topic in the computing sphere right now has to be Apple - with the keynote at their conference tomorrow. Let's do a hack-job on them...

Strike one - let's paint Apple as stupid - pretend that the company famous for 'rip, mix, burn' don't understand that the code *they* built into iTunes can remove the DRM. [ed - are you sure you're going somewhere here ?]

Strike two - we'll pretend that the bug in iTunes was put there maliciously. We'll claim that Apple were caught out by their users being too clever [ed - I thought Apple acknowledge [Roy B's post] this as a bug, they *are* human you know]

Strike three, they're out. They *embed* your email address into these "supposedly DRM-free" tracks! How are you supposed to upload and spread them around the net if they identify who did it ? That's it! Game over for Apple! [ed - but surely the people who *buy* iTunes music are the people who *don't* download free music from the 'net]

columnist: Trust me, ok, it'll make for loads of ad-hits. $$$ man!
ed: ok, ok. You know the territory, I'm just the business guy

Quite apart from the fact that the personal metadata has *always* been embedded, it doesn't prevent the exact same method of protection-removal if you really want to upload your tracks - lay it down to CD as audio, rip it, "share" it.

Perhaps what we have is simply that Apple didn't *remove* a piece of metadata that was always there, they just delivered on their promise to allow you to migrate your music to wherever you want to play it. But that's not a story that'll deliver ad-revenue...

Y'all just oughta be glad it's not *me* in charge... I'd have embedded the email address as an easy thing to spot & remove, and *also* embedded the binary user-GUID, spread around in the metadata block. Once you *thought* you'd removed all trace of your name, I'd still be able to track who'd uploaded files - enough files... time to emulate a ton of bricks. Given the pay-for timestamp and the appearance-on-the-network time, I ought to be able to tell who's just "sharing" files as a policy after a while...

Simon

MacWorld is an awful magazine and has been for years.

1. Pandering to newbies. They got rid of the in-depth Photoshop instructional articles, technical discussions about interfaces and architectures, and some of their better columnists. Now more content was devoted to color correcting old family photos and "secrets" to using iTunes one could get from the help function just as easily. I'm sure part of this was from Macworld buying MacUser out and needing to expand to keep MacUser's readership, but it also meant more articles that took less "work" to write, IMHO.
   
   
2. The iPod. It seemed every third issue had a cover story about the iPod. How to pick an iPod that was right for you. A review of the latest model of iPod, iPod accessories. Even when Macworld's publishers started a whole separate magazine devoted to digital audio and portable DAPs (note: a magazine that rarely talked about any player BUT the iPod) they still kept it up on Macworld. The magazine was less and less about the very topic it was named for!
   
   
3. Getting thinner. Macworld's average page count has gone down by about a third between 1998 and 2002. Some issues have half as many pages as issues from 1997. Less content, and they trimmed the size of the magazine itself in dimensions slightly, too. The magazine is so slim now they had to change the font they used on the spine for it to fit.
   
   
4. Ads, Ads, Ads. The number of ads in Macworld increased. It used to be most ads in Macworld were full page, half-page or sidebar style. And there would only be one type generally on each page. But around the time the size of the magazine was cut down the layout began to change, too. There might be more than one sidebar, two quarter-page ads on opposite corners. A full page on one side and the facing page having a half-page ad on it, ect. The result was Macworld appeared to be filling the margins around their advertising with content, instead of the other way around.
   
   
5. Everything is glowing! A saw fewer poor reviews about products, especially Apple products. They would go through a comparison on three Apple desktops and after saying model Y was not a very good value compared to model Z, they would still give model Y four stars! A third party product they considered "flawed" would still get two stars. I didn't feel I could really trust the reviewers at Macworld to give proper weight to the shortcomings of products when they wrote their reviews, which didn't make the reviews particularly usable to me.

http://playlistmag.com/news/2007/04/02/drmfree/ind ex.php

P.S. Smile. You're on iPod Camera.

The Ipod integration found in most cars is nothing more than a 3.5mm input. This is true for all GM cars, I know this for a fact.

Wrong

BMW is the only car manufacturer that I know of that is able to put the track info on the dashboard.

Really wrong

Friend, you need to learn about this here Google thingy. It's a real help in finding stuff. Like the fact that when Apple lists manufacturers with "iPod Integration", they mean manufacturers who have integrated iPod display and control into the automaker's head unit and/or steering wheel controls.

Feel smarter now?

The overall discussion is about iTunes purchased music, which is DRM emcumbered. See for example http://playlistmag.com/news/2005/11/21/ipoddrm/ind ex.php or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairPlay.

The additional gripe I have with the ipod is the unnecessary difficulty an ipod owner must go through to share a song stored on their ipod with a colleague. I.e. I resent the unnecessary difficulty one must go through to copy a song from an ipod to another storage device, eg the hard drive on a pc. See for example http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments /copying-music-from-ipod-to-computer/. Note that the latter link is an evangelist site helping ipod owners with this problem. This is a form of DRM placed into the hardware.

So you see my gripe is with DRM, not with itms

Inknato is an Apple fanboy - that's what this is about.

Who takes anyone like that seriously? Only other Apple fanboys. Jeez, Inknato isn't even a fanboy he's a fangirl with a silly hat, the big girl's blouse.

These people sold their integrity out, and no intelligent person cares *what* they say when the Apple brand is involved.

The *genuine* point against the Zune that anyone should make is that it's crippled with DRM. Otherwise, it's very nice: nice big screen - better than Apple's tiddly pissy iPod screen - nice UI, and it's got WiFi. But the DRM kills the thing.

Here's a critical - good but critical - review:

http://playlistmag.com/news/2006/11/24/zune/index. php?lsrc=mwrss

Says it all. Inknato couldn't hope to write anything as worth reading.

Apple, apparently in a concession to the music industry, obfuscates the file names of mp3s as it transfers songs to the device. "James McMurtry--Iolanthe.mp3" will become OTKO.mp3 on the device, stored in the folder F47 (and yes, there is an F01-F46), all with the express purpose of making it difficult (though not impossible) for you to find a song and copy it back by hooking up your iPod like a hard disk.

You can get the files back onto the desktop and into a sensible naming structure quite easily using itunes. Just copy the ipod's music folder (which can be accessed if you show hidden and system files and mount the ipod as a disk drive) to the desktop, and import it into itunes, with the itunes option to reorder the library to its own format enabled. Instructions can be found here.

I once read an interview with someone who worked on the ipod (no idea where or when), who claimed that the renaming and folder structure has nothing to do with the recording industry, but rather with the limitations of the early hardware and the requirement that playlists of thousands of files "open" instantaneous. Limitating filename lengths and the number of files in a folder apparently helped, as did storing the files' information in a central database. I don't know if this is true, but it sounds reasonable.

That wasn't my last post, but this one probably will be.

This article had instructions for PC users.

The deauthorization thing isn't quite accurate though:

http://playlistmag.com/weblogs/ipodblog/2006/01/de authorall/index.php

You can deauthorize all of them at once if you wish. I don't see "a couple a year" anywhere in iTunes help either. Just a tip.

The article linked is a little hard to read but Playlist has a decent report on the story. Also note that MacWorld UK ran this story yesterday.

But this kind of raises an interesting question. When a company operates accross many countries, which country's law do they uphold?

We saw both Google & Yahoo! run into a bit of a jam with their services in China. They pretty much violated what would be considered ethical duties in the United States overseas. Is this wrong? Do they face legal implications in one country or the other?

With iTMS operating in the UK, the US & Norway, what are they to do? Fairplay seems to be violating laws in the UK & Norway while in the United States it seems to be law to have some form of DRM (and with lobbyist Herr RIAA in charge, that's not going to change anytime soon). Do they alter the way their service works in each country? If so, sign me up for some musikk!

Perhaps Apple will license Fairplay so that other devices can play the MP4 music ... though I doubt it. They've got quite a racket going and I'm sure they don't want to hurt iPod sales anywhere. Maybe they'll have to better define a few EULAs in order to avoid this, I'm not a law-talking guy so I'm not sure.

I dislike the earbuds so much that the primary use of my iPod is to play music on my home stereo. I found the earbuds to be extraordinarily uncomfortable and unpleasant to use.

I also realized when I used it on the street that it isolated me too much from reality. And as a typical nerd, I'm too isolated to begin with.

So back to the home stereo for this iPod owner!

I seem to remember Bang & Olufsen makes some pretty darn cool looking earbuds. They're probably $5,000 each if I know that company but they might be worth trying.

Nope, not so bad. Here's a link:
http://playlistmag.com/products/complete/41-detail .php

And there's that cool looking integrated bluetooth earbuds/glasses from Oakley. At $350 (including a Bluetooth transmitter for your iPod), they might be the most expensive set of earbuds on the planet, but it looks like they would get the job done. Here's a pretty appealing review:

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/ipod/review/oakle y-o-rokr-bluetooth-eyewear/

That nice Oakley fellow:
http://jimjannard.com/life.html
is also making a really cool video camera:
http://www.red.com/
Can't say he doesn't have an interesting life. He seems kinda like a typical Slashdot reader, but with unlimited cash.

D

MacWorld has always been a pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking magazine.

Actually, I miss the old Macworld of back then. Macworld used to be more technical and more citical of design decisions at Apple. But since they incorporated MacUser and tough times have hit the publishing industry (especially the computer publishing industry), Macworld has gotten kinda soft. They're trying to appeal to a wider audience. I have over eight years of back issues of Macworld and the ones from near the beginning of my collection have 50% more to even twice the page count of the new ones. You can even see this in the design. They adopted a thinner typeface on the spine of the magazine because the old one was too thick to fit on the skimpy magazine.

Many of the articles have a much more positive spin and for awhile there it seemed every third issue was focusing on the iPod (which was an annoyance for those of us who care about Macintoshes, given that they have an entire magazine to devote to iPod worship).

Back in the day, when Apple was one bad day from becoming a memory, MacWorld had a glowing-postive view of the future.

Well, Macworld's readership depends on interest in the Mac platform, so publishing lots of articles fortelling that Apple was about to go out of business isn't going to help keep people faithful Apple wouldn't become the next Amiga and have them start looking at Wintels to switch to. It was an optimistic view not entirely without self serving tendencies for them to publish articles like that at the time.

If Macworld is glowing positive, it's now. They rarely say anything bad about Apple products they review anymore. They may point out that such-and-such desicison is specs yield performance not as good as the previous generation or some other model in the lineup. But they'll never say this was a poor decision, in the end the review always rates the hardware as being a good value.

I think part of this is simply advertising dollars. You saw the same thing with Mac News sites on the web a few years ago. Ones that have Apple as an advertiser don't say as many bad things about Apple as they used to, and ones that used to carry Apple rumors occasionally stopped completely from threat of having Apple pull their advertising.

As far as Microsofties having a mass exodus to Apple, I have to say "Why would Apple want them?"

The iPod already has a compressor, it's called Sound Check. However, a compressor doesn't make things quieter, it just reduces the difference between the loudest and quietest sounds in a music track.

If a particular track has a very wide dynamic range, than a compressor can be useful because you don't have to turn up the volume to hear the quiet parts (and blowing away your eardrums when the loud parts kick in), but as noted by another poster, most music today is so heavily compressed than adding more compression won't help much.

does songbird do anything cool like add itunes-like features to generic usb bulk storage mp3 players? automatic upload of playlists, automatic download and transfer of podcasts, etc? now THAT would be cool and remove the few points that tie me to itunes/ipod at the moment...

Nope, Songbird isn't ready for production yet. It does however plan to do everything you mention (and be extensible like firefox)

You're probably best off sticking with itunes for now - and if you want to use a generic mp3 player, give the Bad Apple generic mp3 player / itunes sync plugin a whirl. It allegedly breaks the Itunes Music Store, but hey, many people would consider that a feature

I wonder if he knows there's a menu item you can use to 'de-authorize' all the currently-authorized computers (which is 5, not 3) and then you can re-authorize the ones you want.

The songs I've bought from iTunes tell me that I can transfer them to a total of x number of other computers. (Is it 5? I don't remember. Lets just say it is 5.) Well, if I get a new computer every 2 years, that means in 12 years from buying a song, I can't use it on my new computer any more. That's kind of bullshit.

You're an idiot.

There's no limit on the number of times you can transfer a song. The rule is you can't have more than 5 computers authorized to play the song at any one time. So unless you plan on keeping all 6 of those computers and expect to be able to play your iTMS purchases on all six ou wont have any problems. You simply deauthorize your old PC when you get your new one. And to answer your next question (since I can tell you haven't really bothered to read the user agreement) you can deauthorize a computer even if you don't have access to it any more (like it got burned up in a fire, the HD failed, ect). So even if you forget to deauthorize your first five PC's when you get the sixth, you can access your account information from iTunes and in one click deauthorize the other machines and get those five slots back (this feature can be used once per year). Or you can send an email to Apple and they will deauthorize them for you.

Apple says differently over at Playlist.

• Protecting Nanos with nanofabrics.
  
• Protecting a Nano with ordinary LCD camera screen protectors.
  
• The InvisibleSHIELD (the best protector I've seen).
  
• Removing scratches from your iPod with GS27.
  
• A review of various iPod scratch removers.

OK, the Dell DJ Ditty has a 512MB storage capacity, one of the Shuffles has a 512 MB storage capacity. The Dell site says "...the DJ Ditty's 512MB of storage can hold up to 220 songs..." encoded in WMA at 64kbps. The Apple site says "...the Shuffle's 512MB of flash memory is good for storing up to 120 songs..." encoded in AAC at 128 kbps.

"Gretchen Miller, director of mobile product marketing at Dell..." claims that "...Windows Media Audio format...""...doesn't take up as much space as Apple's encoding format."

If Gretchen is telling the truth then why isn't the capacity of the Ditty reported to be more than double the number of tracks of the Shuffle when encoding at half the sample rate? If you record at half the sample rate and your encoding algorithm produces smaller files than another encoding algorithm shouldn't you be able to store more than double the files on the Ditty than on the Shuffle?

Could it be the FM?

http://playlistmag.com/reviews/2005/09/ipodnanoacc essories/index.php?lsrc=mwrss

Why would a person go to a car dealership for service on a battery in their car? Because they aren't educated how to do it and many don't care to know how to do it.

Most people don't, however, sue the car manufacturer when they leave their lights on and run down the battery. They tend to call a tow truck or the dealership to send someone out to fix the problem that they caused.

The most difficult part of replacing the battery in an iPod is getting the cover open. Then it's as simple as replacing the battery in a cordless phone.

Does this or this seem dfficult to any /. reader? Higher quality here and here. This is the instructons for the 1G iPods and there are full simple instructions for 2G and 3G iPods too. More examples of how-to instructions can be found here too.

Watch the video and read the PDF and tell me what you think then.

iPod 3G has a 220uF capacitor at the headphone output stage

The later Wolfson WM8750 (PortalPlayer iPods use WM8731 and WM8721) offers "No DC blocking capacitors required (capless mode)"

SigmaTel's D-Majors have a <0.05% THD headphone driver, including anti-pop and short-circuit protection

Why would it need short-circuit protection? Hmmm....