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CD burning Will Never Be The Same
mooneyguy writes: "Reuters is reporting that EMI has just announced a partnership with Roxio (you know, the "toast" and "Easy CD Creator" folks). They have also bought a minority stake in the company. The potential impact here is scary. Roxio's Duea is quoted: 'Our goal is to enable consumers to legally download and record music to CD in a consumer-friendly manner while fairly compensating copyright owners and creators...' What changes now are forthcoming in their software to force this "fair compensation"? And how far will those changes penetrate throughout the industry? This can't be good for the consumer. Roxio has also come forth with a press release announcing this partnership. In it they announce "EMI will work to develop ways for consumers to easily record authorized music onto recordable CDs" and, even better, 'We want to continue to work with leaders in the music industry, like EMI, to not only provide for the protection of their digital content, but also to enable record companies and artists to get paid for burning.' Yikes!" Anybody else notice how stores like Walmart and Target are pushing the Music CD-Rs more and more? Hmmmm.
This is for music burning kiosks in stores. Go in, slide your credit card through the slot, make your selections and get a custom CD all your own.
Come off your high horse. This is about putting anti-copying restrictions in place against everyone, including people who have already paid for their music and want to exercise their Fair Use rights. Backing up a CD you own or making a compilation CD from CDs you own are both examples of Fair Use that could be interfered with by this latest scheme.
Does the name Thomas Jefferson ring a bell? He believed in freedom, but certainly not in anything like the Ayn Rand speech you are giving. Among other things, he wrote that ideas could not, in nature, be a subject of property. U.S. copyright law is grounded in the philosophy of him and others like him who believed that all published works must ultimately belong to the public, that Government may grant limited-time monopolies as an incentive to produce more works, but that those monopolies are not a recognition of any form of natural property right.
I personaly have used the shorten (.shn) formatt a few times for getting concerts off the E-tree (http://www.etree.org/). the compression formatt shrinks wavs to about half the original without any degredation what so ever. So with a good broadband connecion, which I have, a 300 meg file isn't that big a deal.
I also want to point out that this is all from bands that allow taping, and there's a bunch of great stuff out there thats totaly legal. From the E-tree's home page...
"You can find nearly every band that allows taping in the jambands community on etree.org, including Phish, The Grateful Dead, String Cheese Incident, The Slip, Medeski, Martin & Wood, Umphrey's McGee, The Big Wu, Amfibian and The New Deal."
and there's more bands there and of course there are other similar places too.
I have a ton of mp3's and frankly I really don't care about them all that much because of the sound degredation. sure it was fun too collect them, but in retrospect, I wouldn't do it again. Not only because I feel kind of guilty about what I now see as stolen, but because the quality is just not there. Even the files I have made myself (I've used several, my fave being Lame with the Razor front-end) just don't sound as good on my system, I can easily hear the difference. But I probley still won't part with the ones I have....
"live music is better, bumper stickers should be issued" Neil Young
Come on. Slashdot has been like this for ages.
"Sony is in the RIAA. They're evil. Boycott them."
"Sony is in the MPAA. They're evil. Boycott them."
"Oh, look, Sony has the PS2! I've got to go buy one right now!"
This has obviously been the next logical step in the evolution of CD-R. For the longest time, people (especially here on /.) have been debating the pros and cons of taxes on the CD-R drvies, or taxes on the actual CD-R's which are meant to help compensate those musicians (read greedy RIAA). Obviously, that's a long way away (and likely to never happen), so the next logical step is software control, and here it comes via Easy CD Creator. Too bad there's a lot more better writing programs out there that are free.
They do accomplish their goal here though. they are slowly making it harder for the average Joe to pirate music. Generally, I don't think that the RIAA, MPAA and whoever else really cares if the whole slashdot crowd pirates their music (we're the geeks, we'll always have the ability to pirate). But when Joe Blow sitting next to you has to so much as scratch his head to pirate music, they've won.
Sorry for posting anonymous coward :)
Easy CD Creator adamantly refuses to burn to audio-only CD-Rs anyway, and has since at least the later Adaptec versions. It's a horrid piece of shit.
--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
My primary concern is always, "I make my own music. Do I have the technical and legal capability to record and copy it to industry-standard media that I can distribute?"
Well, I already _have_ a CD burner, and even if all future CD writers refused to write a byte without me paying money for authorization to burn a _specific_ _RIAA_ song, I would still have my CD burner, and there are others out there if mine broke.
Plus, Red Book is a very well-established format, and there's so much of it out there that it's impossible to deprecate at this point. It's only just gotten to the point where quality rivals top-end analog systems: modern dithering is a thing of wonder. So not only can I be confident that I will be able to find a (not necessarily new!) CD burner, but I will also have the capacity to burn disks that are consumer-ready. CD audio's going to be supported for a _long_ time. Digital means you can support a lot of different formats- someday we'll have 27 terabyte disks that also play all DVD formats and _also_ play good old Audio CDs. It's just too easy and useful to add the support, to skip it. That means that all future disk-based playback decks are likely to support the format I can write.
This article is alarming, but it's a false alarm. If they do that it'll be about as commercially successful as pay-per-download Napster.
They'd have to mobilize legislation and basically destroy anyone who makes an unrestricted burner or unrestricted burning software. There are way too many other purposes for a burner to make that remotely feasible. They're NOT just for music CDs- and the standard Red Book is not a restricted format. Those music CDs are for _standalone_ burners that are intentionally crippled, the playing back needs no such special media to work.
It's meme time again: assuming that we _have_ already got the word out that 'music' CDRs are simply CDRs to work with crippleware standalone burners (pay more, for no extra functionality or fidelity AT ALL), we now have to also get the word out that the new Toast is merely a 'downgrade' taking away functionality that was previously there. And I can't wait to see exactly how they intend to implement this! Should be good for a laugh.
This is assuming they even get that far.
If _I_ was EMI, here's what I'd do. I'd figure out some way of pushing the _existing_ software out there- bundle it, price-cut it, whatever- with NO restriction, but with a timebomb built into it. Then, at some future time, the software switches to a mode where in order to burn an audio CD or audio track, it does an analysis (fingerprint) of the audio and refers to an online verification site that charges you. If you don't pay and get the verification, no burn! This also has the advantage that if YOU make music, you no longer have the capability to burn your own CDs. Better get signed with EMI if you expect to hear yourself on a CD boy! This would be not a side-effect but an intended effect of the authorisation process. For more fun, you can have the burner refuse to burn the other record companies' songs, and only make CDs from EMI, so you'd have to get five burners! :D
But then I _am_ a complete bastard when I set my mind to it :)
Problem 1 is GOOD. This is a GOOD THING! Please oh please, let them do this! The only real danger is that the big five _will_ hold together as a cartel and cooperate! I would much rather they fight and cause hardware vendors to release misleadingly named special crippled devices (How about the "Complete Music Collection Initiative CD Burner"? Will only burn EMI's releases, for a small payment. Anything else, no go...)
We should _beg_ them to do this. It would totally destroy the commercial potential of those devices, those burners, those initiatives. If we can get the Big Five backbiting each other and using the technological restrictions ON EACH OTHER, we'll have it made. That would backfire viciously and do them considerable damage...
GO FOR IT ROXIO! Make your burner so it will only burn EMI content at a dollar a song! Release a different model with different firmware for each of the Big Five, collect the whole set! Make consumers have to learn which multinational conglomerate really owns Prawn Song or Swan Song or whatever little vanity label that's supposed to look all indie and stuff! RIP OFF THE VEIL!
*G* *G* *G* *G* *G* (oh, how I hope they're fools enough to do this...)
It's going to be impossibly hard to keep _you_ from having the capability to burn your CDs, as long as you have a fairly minor ability to hunt down the proper tool for it. The concern is more for your Aunt Mary who only uses AOL and doesn't understand these things. It would be nice if she, too, had the capacity to make mix CDs without being penalized for not being as savvy as you. Think of it as consumer protection.
The conclusion is there is NO demand for 'music' CDRs. ANY presence of 'music' CDRs in stores is a scam. The whole concept is a scam from the beginning, and if anyone suggests they 'sound better' they need a quick refresher on digital audio (technically, what would affect the sound would be burst errors, and 'music' CDRs offer NO advantage whatsoever on that score)
The only reason 'music' CDRs are in the stores at all, much less being (at some times) the ONLY brand name CDRs you can buy (I've seen this in Radio Shack at times) is because _somebody_ is pushing them on the channel, and you're seeing them because some people are smart enough or price-sensitive enough to buy the 'data' kind and use that. Surprise surprise, it works perfectly (expect computer CD burners to begin refusing to burn audio onto 'data' CDs... but the trick is, how's the burner gonna know the difference? It's the software that would know).
When most people would rather buy 'data' for cheaper, and don't want to buy 'music', the stores end up with lots of 'music' CDRs sitting around, which is what you see. You may even end up buying them if you're desperate for media and there's no 'data' left. But really, it would be better if you left the 'music' CDRs to rot on the shelf, and walked out of the place.
After asking the management if they have any 'data' CDRs, maybe asking them to carry more of the 'data' kind and noting that they do double duty as audio CDs. But don't expect to have your request listened to... these guys are all pretty armtwisted. Don't make the error of thinking we have a free market here :) it's all too easy to control. Next time you're in the store, _count_ how many 'data' and how many 'music' there are. See if you're offered the choice of 'music' CDR, or going to find another store hoping they too are not 'out of stock'. Which is a nice euphemism for "We're not allowed to carry too many of those because people buy them instead of the music CDRs".
Out of curiosity, does anyone working in retail have any idea of the ordering requirements? For instance, I am wondering if at any time the music CDRs are BUNDLED- as in, the store HAS to buy equal amounts of each to do business with the supplier. That would cause the result we see. What's it look like from the viewpoint of store inventory and purchasing? Anybody have hard data here? Maybe there's price breaks if you buy a certain amount of 'music' CDRs?
When you combine these things, it becomes very easy to download a music file and burn an audio CD of it. It's also easy to take a microphone and record your baby's first words and burn an audio CD of it. The permissible uses are just too wide-ranging- it'd be impossibly hard to stamp out all the methods used to copy RIAA stuff, so they have to focus on the specific businesses that are out there obviously doing things with RIAA stuff without asking.
The only difference in 'music' CDRs is the price, and the fact that there's a small additional area with data to enable crippleware standalone CD writers to be authorised. If you have a player that doesn't work with audio CDs from CDRs, it won't work with 'music' CDRs either. There's no performance gain.
Or would you prefer the consumer NOT to be told to take advantage of the freedom and flexibility of digital media? 'sitdown-shutup-consume'? That's fine, but I think 'rip-mix-burn' has more sales appeal, frankly >:)
You _cannot_ have a new generation of CD players refuse to play 'data' CDs, because that would make them also refuse to play all legacy CDs. The extra information is for consumer standalone _burners_. Players don't care about that part.
You can cripple burners, but an uncrippled burner will produce discs that will play on all players, excepting those that can't read the dye layer. The difference is the price and the ability to work with crippleware standalone burners- and possibly with a new generation of PC software/burner combinations.
I don't think you can block CD writing in the burner itself- I think you have to control the software, too. Even with a crippleware burner that's ready to check for the 'music' header area, the software will still have to check for that and give thumbs-up/thumbs-down. Hence, EMI/Roxio. And much good may it do them... ;)
This implicit assumption that the only audio recording anyone wants to do is to record big-name pop music is arrogant, rude, and obviously designed to destroy the small-time up-and-coming labels. This reminds me of the way corps are portrayed in Cyberpunk-genre sci-fi. I used to think that stuff was fiction.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I have zero confidence in the industry's ability (or more important, their willingness) to produce a solution that repsects this fair use type of copying. Those a**holes would love to make fair use a thing of the past. If they can't do it by changing the law, they'll do it by ruining all the available tools.
Normally, that wouldn't matter. I'd just say, "Screw them, I'll use my own burning software". The specs are public, there's a plethora of CD burner software. But the badly worded DMCA will make those tools become illegal because they "circumvent" a protection scheme, even if that protection scheme wasn't invented until after the fact, and even if that protection scheme is so badly implemented that ignoring it is acutally the default if your software wasn't written to notice it.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I have a DVD player that only has one read head. It doesn't officially support CD-Rs, although I have some green Maxell discs that I can play on it if there are no marks or scratches on the surface. CD-RWs will not work at all. Will these "music" CD-Rs be any better? I've always thought that these were just about marketing and making extra money (they seem to be 2-3x the price of an ordinary CD-R).
Companies that make alliances with Microsoft get screwed. Companies that get bought by Microsoft do just fine.
As an example. Microsoft is planning on bundling their own CD burning software with Windows XP. Can you imagine what this will do to the value of Roxio's CD burning software? Somehow I can't imagine that the alliance with Microsoft worked out well for Roxio.
I repeat. Companies that make alliances with Microsoft get screwed.
Well, I truly believe in freedom. But you're backwards, my friend.
In a state of perfect freedom, *everyone* can disseminate works, provided that they have them. In a state of total oppression, only the creator can disseminate works - others have the ability to, as granted by God, and the natural right to, which we call Freedom of Speech, but the exercise of their rights and abilities are denied them by an interfering authority.
Your freedom is oppression, and your oppression is freedom.
That said, there may be, and in fact _are_ socially desirable consequences of enacting a carefully devised and moderate system wherein rights are circumscribed, but it is impossible to call this freedom. It's just practical - don't flaunt it as anything but.
The real point of copyright is not to enshrine natural moral rights artists posess, since there simply are none. It is to encourage artists to create as many useful works as possible, in order that they may be freely used without regard to the artist. A temporary and limited monopoly on certain instances of dissemination is granted to the artist, but it is a means to an end, and never ever an end in itself.
And even then, the real system is not like you describe. Artists do not have absolute rights to dictate how their works are disseminated. No artist can rightfully deny a fair use of their work. (such as its inclusion within a transformative work) No artist can rightfully prevent their work from entering the public domain, whereupon the limits that people willingly suffer are lifted.
And certainly this isn't a matter of stealing - it's a matter of copyright infringement, which could also be considered illegally exercising natural rights to which only the copyright holder and his designees have permission to exercise. (roughly)
Ideas are not property. Even works are not property, though the medium they are within may - _may_ - be. A book is property; the words are not. A statue is property; the shape is not. Yet reproduce either into another medium which you impeccably own, and you have transgressed. Words are not things, and we actually do not treat them as such. What is illegal is not the thing, but the act of copying them - the exercise of rights that you're not permitted to exercise. Thus, infringement.
As for the Roxio system itself, I can see a significant flaw. It imposes burdens for copyright holders to make use of it to exercise their own legal rights. This treads dangerously close to copyright infringement. (as copyrights must be exclusively assigned to the creator, unless he transfers or expands them) In my capacity in my job, I've made copies of CDs for musicians with ordinary equipment. Prohibiting this is just not a good thing.
Besides which, the courts have found that it is entirely outside the scope of copyright to preclude the copying of works from one medium to another, aka "space shifting." Statutory exceptions exist for many other classes of works. (for instance, any software you legally own or lease may be backed up all you please) There is no need to require that the original source be used, or that you prove to the satisfaction of an inanimate hunk of junk that you may legally do so; posession and performing the copy oneself is all.
Ultimately, no computer program in the world will _ever_ be a substitute for a court. We have perfectly good mechanisms in place for determining if copies are legally or illegally made and disseminated, and that entire framework exists within the domain that we collectively through our government allow it to. Copyrights for music could vanish tomorrow if we really wanted them to - there'd be nothing wrong with it, they aren't manditory.
Software cannot make the kinds of decisions human beings are capable of, it's not a substitute. We should not try to allow it to attempt to be one as it'll inevitably be sorely lacking.
Me, I'm an artist, and that's how I earn my daily bread. Nevertheless, I know the place that I and my bretheren occupy. It is *not* one that deserves dear privleges.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I just helped a 13 year old kid set up apache and a dynamic dns client on his computer, I'm pretty sure all he wants to do is share mp3s with his buddies.
Actually I'm hoping he'll develop an interest in more than that, but who knows?
In the meantime, he's happily telling his buddies about his new website or whatever.
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
Bleh!
I'm sorry. I have friends who are music majors and are, IMHO, millions of times better than the likes of Brittany Spears.
Even if you think Spears is the greatest musician ever, I still doubt that she puts the same amount of work into truely mastering music that my friends have.
I'm going to argue that it is better for regional stars to arise because people like them, not because some fat cat record company propped them up.
I know some fantastic jazz musicians who play for a subsistance lifestyle that enables them to spend all their time doing what they love.
Perhaps art is dead elsewhere, but where I come from we like our local bands. Many of our local bands are every bit as good as anyone else, and they are funner to listen to because they are people.
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
that new cd R/W units will have a coin slot?
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
Co'm on folks, you don't realy think I will belive you are using Windows are you ?
Look, download CDRecord and compile it.
Put whatever you want to burn into a directory DDD and do "mkisofs -l -r -J -o Image.iso -V "My Stuff" /location/of/DDD
Then do "cdrecord --scanbus" to find the ID of your SCSI writer (there is a little bit different command for IDE drives)
Now write the image with "cdrecord dev=0:6:6 speed=12 -v Image.iso"
And CD burning will never be the same again ;-)2 C3AF4F2snlbxq'|dc
--
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb15CB32EF3AF9C0E5D727
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
For Windows:
.ogg files into the track window and have them burn out to normal CD Audio files. Is this the first burning app to offer this feature?
Beginner: NTI's software (http://www.nticdmaker.com/index.cfm)
Advanced: Nero
http://www.ahead.de/en/index2.htm
For Linux:
Gnometoaster
(http://gnometoaster.rulez.org)
kisocd
(http://kisocd.sourceforge.net)
Or cdrecord directly for Win32, Linux, Mac, BeOS, Solaris and more.
Hey, for those of you not following, Andy (the developer for Gnometoaster) has released a 1.0Beta1 of the excellent Gnometoaster burning app.
One of the nifty new features is the ability to DnD
Ben
Yes, that was exactly my point. A lot of the replies have said "no, you can't read into the file and detect a bit" etc. But if the majority of cd-burners are bought out and they suddenly "respect" this bit, then that seems functionally equivalent (or so the RIAA could argue) to the CSS, where the "valid" players use a key to unlock the scrambled content.
So a "rogue" burner that ignores the set bit could arguably be "jumping over" the technical obstacle used by every valid burner, thus violating the new DMCA law.
In that way it just takes one judge to make those open source burners illegal.
As an anoymous coward said:
>Ever heard of SCMS? It's a flip-bit copy/no-copy system implemented on DAT and MiniDisc. It is the direct result of the Audio Home Recording Act, and certainly illegal to bypass under the DMCA.
>
>I think the intent is that a system is "effective" if it's widely used (such as with Macrovision, also DMCA protected), not that it's good. Obviously the widely used part is a problem with standard red book CDs.
So this could be an attempt to make respect for the bit widely used.
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I mean, if a song is encoded in such a way that it has a "security bit" turned on (say, uh, bit 1 turned on means "copyrighted") and all the commercial burning software "respects" this convention, then either Nero has to refuse to burn as well or it's "circumventing a technology intended to protect copyright" and becomes illegal.
Or am I missing something?
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
There's still a small part of me that tries to remain optimistic, and believes that when Roxio begins messing around with EZ CD Creator then someone else will come out with a burner that's not crippled. I don't know -- I haven't been at Win shareware sites in years -- but there just might be some shareware burners that can also be used.
I really don't see any reason to panic. Life goes on.
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Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Bah... read this:
s .h tml
http://www.urbanlegends.com/products/beta_vs_vh
First of all, Nero is not a freeware program. From what I gather it is a well known and versatile Windows program for CD authoring etc.
Anyway, I didn't have to look for it, It came bundled with my YAMAHA CD-RW drive. I also got Easy CD Creator bundled with a cheap SCSI controller I bought for an old system. Considering that I don't use Windows, have no use for Windows CD authoring software and would never bother finding and downloading one, it was quite easy getting hold of it, wasn't it?
Oh well, I'll just go on using mkisofs/cdrecord.
The "knee-jerk reaction" is to paying to copy your files, not to paying for music. That's a pretty justified reflex./p.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I'm not really talking about copies. I guess I'm talking about redistribution. Are you saying that making a complete analog copy of a copyrighted work (whether it's dubbing a tape or Xeroxing a book) and then giving that copy to your friend, has been the law since the 1700s?
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
No, because it is not reasonable or normal for CDR copying software to look inside the files that it copies. They have worked blindly for many many years. Thus, the bit cannot conceivable be said to "effectively control access".
It's bascially way too late (by more than a decade) to establish a brand new convention for writing CDs.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Maybe EMI will insist on Roxio patching their products to the point where they DON'T destroy Windows, regardless of the install options selected.
--
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
The last couple of versions of EasyCD have apparently being irrevocably trashing people's Windows installations-- the Register has been covering it blow-by-blow, including the patches that don't solve the problem, the revelation that connecting a USB device suddenly triggers it etc. etc. So my impression is that they're taken some seriously bad press of late, and could be in trouble; could be that EMI are throwing them a line?
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
nobody complained about fair use when we used tapes.
:)
Yes, they certainly did! I have a Captain Sensible LP from 1982 with a 'tape and crossbones' design on the back that states "Home taping is killing music."
And this was before dual cassette decks started getting popular.
As for the rest of your statement: I've had more tapes get stuck in players rendering them useless than I have scratched CD's beyond fixing. I'm just really careful with them, and rarely have a problem. I also try not to lend them out
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Distribute their music themselves on websites that they can build and get hosted for free.
Keep dreaming. Do you really think think this will happen?
If an mp3 search engine gets axed (or a file-trading service has its hands tied) it doesn't slow the people who use IRC or FTP.
With Napster now pretty much out of the picture, there has been a huge jump in the amount of traffic on the efnet channels that release albums on a regular basis. #mp3hqdcc saw many hundreds of additional users in the past 3 months. Looks like the college kids are wising up and going straight to the source.
Cheers,
levine
I want to be able to pay the artists money for their songs.
Yeah, sure, great. But I've already paid once. I regularly rip batches of CDs to mp3, then burn a bunch of albums back onto a CD in mp3 format. Why? So I can take one CD with me to listen to on my CD/mp3 player instead of ten. Or so that I can listen to a hundred different songs off of a hundred different CDs that I already bought and paid for. Simple. This is not theoretical - I'm actually doing this, and if I had to pay extra to space-shift music that I've already paid for once, I'd be super pissed, and more likely to pirate/steal music and not use their crappy fascist hardware.
Bottom line is, the majority people are using this technology well withing the legal limits of fair use, and shouldn't have to pay more tribute to the record labels. If you want to do something extra to support the artists, fine - but let it be voluntary, not a mandatory corporate tax.
Are we talking about the Easy CD Creator 4-5 which has been destroying W2K and W95 machines? The above links say that the Microsoft instructions might not save your machine. Be careful out there.
From what I understand, the difference only (currently) comes into play when you're using a stereo component CD recorder, which looks for a bit on the Music CD-R that is not present on the Data CD-R. That way, anyone using a component CD recorder is paying part of their money to the RIAA to compensate for 'piracy'.
If I'm wrong, please correct me, but that's the way I understand it to be.
_______
Scott Jones
Newscast Director / ABC19 WKPT
FC Closer
Yeah... I've got "EZ CD Creator" 3.something, which came with my CD burner, and it's not what I would have bought if it weren't bundled with the burner, but it works OK... except MicroSlough's latest version of Windows Media Player is incompatible with it being installed. I figured, like every decent company out there, I could get a bug fix (yeah, it's MicroSlough's bug, but...) from their web site...
Nope. Pay full price for 4.0.
No. Not just no, but Hell no! Not now, not ever. Millions for defense, but not one penny for tribute. I can easily live without Windows Media Player 8. If I ever decide otherwise, I'll buy Nero Burning ROM, or something else from one of (any of) Roxio's competitors. It's not the money, it's the principle of the thing.
(Even if the Roxio software were better, which, by all acounts, it most emphatically is not.)
Yes there are. On the Mac, there is no audio connection between the CDRom (or DVD Rom) drive and the sound output. The audio data is ripped off the CD, and sent to the computer's sound system in real time. This was done, partially, so that users could listen to their CDs over their USB speakers.
An interesting side effect of this is that if you do it right, you can play two tracks off the CD at the same time, with no skipping. Why you'd want to do this is another matter entirely.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Sounds a lot like Copy Code on DATs, however it allowed you to make only a first generation copy from the master. You could not copy the copy, only the master. Of course, any DAT deck worth its salt (TASCAM comes to mind) had a jumper on the logic board that you could close to disable Copy Code. Tascam even included the jumper half on the jumper block.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
The question isn't what ROXI is doing to make me pay extra for each cut on the mix CDs I'm making for a trip this weekend. The question is what is going into CD-RW drives to make me use Roxio or forget about burning anything at all.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Rader
They want it so bad, they're rolling over in their graves. (Record execs are the undead, after all)
Rader
Let's say I want to create a mix CD from live concert MP3s. Since this is /., let's say we're talking about the Minibosses, who distribute their unsigned MP3s freely. Will I be able to do it with Roxio's awesome software, without the cracks that will inevitably be released within a week of release?
Stealing is stealing, but this isn't stealing. It's copyright infringement. Theft is the act of taking something away from someone with the intent of depriving that person of possessing what you've taken. Copying zeroes and ones while leaving the original data intact is not stealing, and U.S. law (on a good day) has different laws regarding each. All those mp3 lawsuits you keep reading about are for copyright infringement, not theft.
No I don't. But treating gnutella like a 24-hour all-request radio station does help me make smarter purchasing decisions about my music.
How does adding a corpo-funded layer of complexity to CD burning software make it easier for me to buy more music? Sounds like all it does is make it easier for EMI and their colleagues to keep CD prices nutrageously high, just to fund more copy-protection schemes like this one.
A question: How will Roxio prevent users from decoding MP3s into WAV/AIFFs, then burning them? Will it all of a sudden become morally wrong to burn arbitrary AIFFs? Somebody better tell the budding garage bands of the world that they are not welcome to use Roxio software.
< tofuhead >
--
It is still the dark of night.
The recording industry has cried wolf too many times, and cloaked new restrictions (e.g. technical interference with legal backup copies and fair-use excerpting, DVD region cartelization) under the color of established copyright protection too many times. It has reached a point where belief that they are sincerely attempting to protect the artists' legitimate interests is as naive as belief in Santa Claus.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
If you check the readme while installing Easy CD Creater 4.0, you'll notice it says you have to install Internet Explorer because Microsoft won't let them distribute the necessary DLL files seperately.
I hope the slashdot article was tongue-in-cheek, because this is EXACTLY WHAT WE NEED.
.cx), Oh No, That's Awful!
"The potential impact here is scary."
Yeah, it's scary that we might be getting what we were asking for the whole time!
"And how far will those changes penetrate throughout the industry?"
Hopefully far and wide.
"This can't be good for the consumer."
But paying $17 dollars for a CD for one good song IS? I thought the whole point was to avoid the artificial scarcity and inefficiency of material distribution.
"'We want to continue to work with leaders in the music industry, like EMI, to not only provide for the protection of their digital content, but also to enable record companies and artists to get paid for burning.' Yikes!"
Not "Yikes!", "YAY!". I don't get you people. First we complained that the music industry didn't "get it", and that CDs are exorbitantly inexpensive and of much less value than digital copies. But now that somebody actually "gets it" and wants to SELL you legitimate digital copies so you don't have to illegally copy them (say, from a "friend" in
How many of you were crowing that you trade MP3s because CDs are outrageously expensive, or some other similar moral rationalization? Well HERE is your solution. You can't now cry and say "oh, wait a minute...no no, I really DID want free copyright-infringed music...this isn't fair!". If you respect the GPL, you have to respect the copyrights of artists (just another form of "author"). Now, whether the music industry will really allow a fair amount of profits to filter back to artists anyway is still an issue, and some may still find a moral haven for trading MP3s. How can the same people that tout micro-payments and street performer's protocol, complain when a mechanism allowing people to compensate artists is being created?
Or have I been trolled?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I think you have a seriously naive view of how musicians, and the music industry, works.
Almost all the great musicians have become great before getting 'signed' and 'famous'. They get good by playing in small, cheap shows over and over and over. Then, once they can make good music, they become famous (usually when they are signed by a record company). They don't get signed, start getting paid big $, and then get good.
In recent times, the record companies have noticed that 'sex sells' and started signing good-looking people with no or little talent. These people are paid insane amounts of money but I guarantee that their skill does not improve at all.
If there is no money in music, then a lot of the best musicians will simply cease to exist.
You are so very, very wrong. If you do some background research into past musicians, you will find that NONE of them became rich and famous before they became a great musician. They all became great musicians, then became rich and famous (some, maybe most, never became rich and only famous after they died).
a lot of the best musicians will never happen unless they are able to practice all day, every day, and you can't do that unless you do it professionally.
I see you're not a musician!
And no, 200 years ago Mozart or whoever DID NOT do it on an amateur basis. They were paid by either royalty, upper class citizens or the church.
Hmm...I think it's called 'a gig'? Believe it or not, there are a lot of musicians who are paid exactly that way today! And, Mozart was composing at the age of eight. Exactly how much cash do you think he was getting at that age?
You can see it coming, can you? "cdrecord forks without the ()..."
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I learned a long time back that just because a product has a higher version number does not mean that it is in any way better (compare stability and ram consumption of Photoshop 5 and 6, or Word 5 and 6 and you'll see what I mean immediatly). So some dingbat company is getting in bed with a record giant? Yes, it's definitely not a good thing by any stretch of the word, but there are alternatives, you know....
By the same token, we have a CD burner attached to one of the G3s at work... and a built-in drive on the G4. The software that comes with the MacOS for burning is useable for one purpose- making music CDs. It blows for everything else... and it doesn't play well with Toast, either. The solution? Simple- we keep using the burner on the G3, with Toast, which works beautifully. We haven't upgraded toast for a very, very long time... and it still does everything we need it to do and then some. Shit, the only thing it doesn't do is convert MP3s straight to CD audio on the fly.... but that's what the G4 and iTunes will do, and quite speedily, to boot.
Honestly, with a laptop and a pile of computers at work and at home, I've stopped caring about audio CDs- I still have them, but my collection has a thin film of dust on it. You can't beat the convenience of having two hundred albums on your hard drive, rather than having to shuffle a disk every five tracks....
True in the early part of the 20th century, when electronic distribution at zero cost was impossible, leaving for-pay distribution at moderate cost as the only way for the "Rock and Roll" derived from early Jazz/R&B musicians to make its way into the ears of Joe Consumer and sweep the nation in the 1950s.
False in the early part of the 21st century, when electronic distribution at zero cost was widely available, and the recording industry served only to prevent Joe Consumer from hearing the early Tibetan Electronica artists whose work set the stage for the solar-system-shaking grooves that rocked the colonies of Luna and Mars in the 2180s.
Download all patches for Windows-based CD-burning software today.
Install Linux tomorrow.
Suppose they pulled the plug on useful hardware today. Every manufacturer on the planet goes to copy control, no exceptions, and nobody ever cracks it. (This is of course, impossible. But let's go with the doomsday scenario for a bit.)
Given the number of ATs and XTs at my local surplus store, and the time it's taken to have them gradually replaced with 386s and 486s, I'd say we have at least a 10-15 year supply of useful hardware ahead of us.
And given the age of some of the older pieces of hardware in my collection, I'd say we have at least another 10 years, probably more, before that supply of useful hardware starts to fail.
If Copy Control Doomsday happened tomorrow, we'd have about 25 years before we had to worry. Spare parts purchased now, run for 6 months (to shake out any cases of "infant mortality") and stored in anti-static bags, will be just as good 25 years from now as they are today.
For less than $1000, you can buy enough hard drive storage and multiple sets of spare parts to store 100G of MP3s and have at least one system capable of playing them back for the rest of your natural life.
My old CD burning software didn't care about copy control.
My old CD burning software did things my new CD burning software doesn't do.
My old CD burning software was more functional - I could do more things with it than I can the new version.
What's wrong about it is that there are people trying to pass off downgrades as upgrades.
If your local Porsche dealer said "By the way, the new model Porsche has a rev-limiter hooked up to a GPS system that prevents you from going faster than 55 mph! It's so much better than last year's model!", you'd slap him silly, and you'd be right to slap him silly whether you ever intended to drive over the speed limit or not.
RIAA: Listen up. I tried to buy that CD the other day when I have 30 minutes to kill, and could not get it at K-mart.
Sorry Frank, the Taste Police got there before you. In fact, all of Las Vegas is scheduled for removal later this year.
If you must have it and you want an easy way, try amazon or cdnow.
So in essence this company thinks that either by offering a program to burn mp3's to cd will halt what they call illegal thievery? I doubt it in fact why would someone who allegedly steals cd's go out and buy this software when they could continue with their normal bypassing ways.
Is it me or does this reak with this notion;
By creating these so called programs I personally think they sort of force people to go out and rip more since your sort of telling someone USE THIS TO DO THIS. People should have choices, and while I do see the pro's and con's of Napster I also see somebody somewhere along the lines of Roxio, the Artists complaining, RIAA, $INSERT_TARGET_HERE don't have a really good clue yet.
Maybe these people should go and read Bruce Schneier's "The Futility of Digital Copy Prevention" article word for word, and come to a better conclusion instead of thinking some lawsuit, or some program is going to be the answer to people ripping mp3's and doing whatever the heck they want with them.
Want Root?
I agree. Saying "this can't be good for the consumer" is getting too easy to say, and it doesn't need to be the case here. Noone argues that selling CDs is bad for the consumer, and that's really all this appears to be doing; it's just going to move the burning mechanism down to the desktop and probably reduce costs and improve flexibility to boot. At least, if done correctly it will.
There's no reason to be negative on new technology that allows new inroads into consumer products. The things that are bad for consumers are exhibited in fighting against new tech. Of course they want to have some security on the process, which may amount to limited copy protection, but if the service lets you burn CDs that work in audio players, they're not doing any major black ops here.
We can't go jumping down everyone's throat just because their new products include "copy protection".
If this is actually the case, you have a defective minidisc player. The copyright bit should not be set when an analog (I'm assuming that your own music is recorded via microphone or guitar pickup or the like) recording is made and you should be able to make as many generations of digital recordings as you like. Even if it is the case that the no copy bit gets set on your analog recordings you are still free to make as many copies as you like, though you are not able to make copies of those copies.
If you're complaining that your MD player doesn't have a digital out port, you should have forked over a few extra few dollars to get one that does. Yeah, it's stupid that Sony charges an extra $100 to add in a $0.49 laser diode, but that's just the way marketing works. If in doubt, consult any introduction of microeconomics book and check the index for "price discrimination".
________________________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
See subject and run if you fret over this stuff... www.barchord.com is a website dedicated to independent or signed artists. We give them control over the price, music type (mp3, vorbis, some strange encoded format), and in general attempt to provide tools and places for them to do their thing. Website is fairly new, but theres already a few hundred bands most of which have music listed. About half of that is free. Go and enjoy. Also, I'd love constructive comments on the website itself.
Rod Taylor
There are no artists, only the recording industry. Or haven't you been listening to Courtney Love?
.sig: Now legally binding!
Actually, I expect this will probably cause a drop in casual burning (Geez, I make it sound like drug use). Joe Schmoe suddenly discovers he has to pay to burn a CD, so what's he do? 1) Give up, or 2) Talk to a geek and find out how to get around it. Either way, it's a minor stumbling block to the average user. I don't expect it will be too effective, though. I imagine that those who know how to cirvumvent this account for a large majority of the cd-burning population, so all you do is fend off the dumb users.
My only complaint is that all my non-techie friends are suddenly going to be asking me to burn CDs for them, seeing as they can't anymore without a credit card number. As if I needed more to do.
Exactly! And that is why you will simply not be able to do many legal things in the future, if the industry goes the RIAA/MPAA/SDMI/... way. Look: You are legally permitted to make VCR copies as many as you want. But - without extra effort - you cannot. Why? Because of Macrovision. You can legally buy a DVD, and legally buy a DVD Player, and the player will refuse to play your DVD, because it thinks that you might be in the wrong country. My MD player refuses to copy my own recordings digitally, because by allowing digital copies there is the slight possiblity of maybe me committing a sinister crime (i.e. distributing copyrighted music)!
You would be perfectly legal if you could copy your CDs in the future, only you cannot. That is what "they" want, and if the industry complies, in 5 years CDs will be obsolete. What can be done with stupid laws (DMCA) will be done that way, and where they cannot castrate your basic human rights (freedom of speech for example) the industry will simply take away the technical means for exercising them, and sue every company who doesn't comply.
Look at this article for details about what's wrong with copy protection.
Remember: CDs are just about the only digital Hi-Fi media left that do not have some form of copy protection! They must be destroyed, because every CD owner is a potential criminal!
Home Page
There sure is: 'roid rage.
Let's say I own quite a few CDs that are no longer readable. This is happening quite often for some of the older CDs that I own -- KMFDM's "Naive", The Cult's "Electric", Meat Beat Manifesto's "Armed Audio Warfare", etc. Some songs won't play in a regular CD player and none will rip into MP3s.
There's no way I'm going to buy these CDs again (even if they are still in print) because I already own them. Therefore, I downloaded MP3s of the songs off LimeWire and add them to my iTunes music library. As far as I'm concerned, downloading MP3s of songs I own is the same as inserting the disc and ripping them myself. In fact, converting your CDs into MP3s has a hundred advantages over discs, including being generally immune to the paint-leaking-though-the-plastic syndrome that seems to affect lesser discs.
Now, I'm not going to explain to Roxio the above situation, and I don't want to have the hassle of dealing with some goofy digital signature "feature". I like to listen to music, not fsck around with digital signatures or whatever so that "the artist can be compensated" -- we all know that Roxio means it's the RIAA and the music labels that will be compensated.
I expect that Roxio will add some annoying feature because that's the way they run their business. I've had to buy three copies of Toast ($99 ea): once for Mac OS 8 capability, once for Mac OS 8.5 capability, once for Mac OS 9 capability. Toast had no new features I wanted, but I had to buy to use the software with the new OS. This is crazy because Adaptec (now Roxio) never offer an upgrade price. "Oh, you upgraded your OS? Where's our $100?"
I am now more than happy to use the free Disc Burner software that Apple provides. iTunes is better than the SoundJam/Toast hack, and it's much easier to burn indexed CDs with Disc Burner than Toast anyway.
If nothing else, Apple's free disc burning software will make Roxio think twice about charging for a simple compatibility upgrade. It doesn't matter anyway; they lost me as a customer a long time ago.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
I mean, if a song is encoded in such a way that it has a "security bit" turned on (say, uh, bit 1 turned on means "copyrighted") and all the commercial burning software "respects" this convention, then either Nero has to refuse to burn as well or it's "circumventing a technology intended to protect copyright" and becomes illegal.
IANAL, etc, but right now copying all of the bits in a file is not illegal. If someone changes the meaning of bit 1147 at some point, do they suddenly and retroactively take ownership of bit 1147 on all of my own files? What about the 250 CDs of mine that I legally ripped to mp3 for my personal use over the past couple of weeks? Can that retroactively be made a crime?
What I *do* with my copied files might be illegal (if I share them, which I don't), but I don't think you can easily distinguish between the physical act of making a backup copy of something, and making a backup copy you intend to distribute, etc. Squishy territory to be sure, but I think we're still safe as far as the actual backing up of program and data files goes. I would think that as long as copy programs can be used for legal purposes, their use can't be criminalized.
TomatoMan
-- http://frobnosticate.com
I agree 100%. Anybody ever burn cds with linux? Yeah, that's right... there ARE other cd recording programs out there. So, don't worry about it. Roxio isn't the only ball game in town, and even if they were, somebody will write a "non-compliant" burning program that isn't buddy-buddy with EMI. So, no big deal here.
Can someone explain to me what the difference between these "Music" CD-Rs and normal CD-Rs are? I always thought they used a different dye type to get the discs to play in older CD players. This suggests otherwise. Can anyone elaborate?
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Have fun complaining about losing those rights you never had, losing rights that you are not actually losing, and how people actually want you to PAY THEM for access to things they created. I'm outta here.
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I do wonder how effective this will be though. How do they plan to stop bootlegs from being made? Take out mp3 support? Make it so you have to pay royalties whenever you burn your own compilations for personal use? This to me sounds like corporate suicide, as much so as the new XP copy restraint system. People don't like being nickled and dimed to death, and making people pay a lot of money for the "right" (notice how any "right" these days can be taken away as easily as a privelege?) to make compilations from the cds they legally buy sure as hell is a doomed idea. Part of me is wondering if Roxio isn't trying to give out good PR to keep the DMCA from being expanded to provide massive oversight and regulation of the burning industry. Just a thought.
Roxio can do whatever they want. They are not obligated to anyone for anything and that includes CD writing software. Why do you think they owe you their software?
Anyway, there will always be a need for data CDs and there is no way to diffrentiate between kinds of data. As longs as those mp3 CD players keep coming out, this partnership is meaningless.
"Intellectual property" is not a concept supported in law until quite recently, really -- think of it. The idea is that somehow this type of property is not a physical thing, something that the theft of which would deprive the owner of its use. IP is the incredible idea that patterns of bits are a piece of inventory that can be somehow taken from some metaphysical warehouse. Digital copying removes the scarcity factor from the market -- we must adjust to this somehow.
Why is that? Is it because the record companies and associated studios have near-monopoly on publication, marketing, and distribution, so they set incredible prices for which the bands must sell their souls? How is home recording doing this to them? Is it not in fact the record companies, not the listeners, that impoverish the bands?
Maybe they didn't sell out because not enough people thought them a good enough draw to buy a ticket. No one promised musicians that they could make a living at it. Hell, the market is oversaturated with them -- there just aren't enough customers to make all of them wealthy, or even give them enough money to give up their day jobs. And let's not forget that the bulk of the money spent on concerts and albums go into the companies' pockets -- it takes a long, long time for a band to pay back its "bill" to the company. Intentionally.
What industry bribed congress to let us make copies?
Sales are not down, an impressive thing considering that the economy has downturned. Napster did nothing perceptible to music sales. Not that this is an argument. Buggy whip manufacturers took a lasting hit from the auto industry.
Congress made Fair Use copying legal because in classic theory, when I bought the record, tape, CD, whatever, I owned the item. I could copy it, sell it to someone (right of First Sale), set it on fire, write on its pristine surface. No one considered the owner of the media to be merely licensing "intellectual property". The owner owned the tape, the book, the CD. This was settled by the Supremes over a decade ago.
What seems to be happening today is that the federal judiciary was seeded over two decades with pro-business judges who seem to think that law should enable businesses to make profits in a time-honored fashion even if that fashion is obsolete. IP is a concept that is being molded by the collective rulings of some really misguided jurists -- we are losing First Sale rights, Fair Use rights, and the concept that we actually own the CD or whatever we paid for at the store. This is not good, people.
As of Windows XP, CD burning is built into the operating system, thus rendering this entire thread mute since Easy CD Creator will likely never be bought by a customer again anyway.
"If I can see farther it is because I am surrounded by dwarves." -- Murray Gell-Mann
One of the nifty new features is the ability to DnD .ogg files into the track window and have them burn out to normal CD Audio files. Is this the first burning app to offer this feature?
Roxio's Easy CD Creator claims to do this with MPEG layer 3 audio files (and could probably do ogg vorbis with a plugin), but it has never worked properly for me (dies on the slightest corruption that Winamp skips right over), so I just use AOL's Winamp to turn the OGGs and MP3s into wav files and then fix and mix them with some audio editing software.
Will I retire or break 10K?
My old CD burning software
My old CD burning
Will I retire or break 10K?
And THAT, my friend, is exactly what the big media cartels are afraid of.
The media companies got fat because the barrier to entry in the recorded music market was high -- you needed hundereds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment to record professional-quality music, and millions of dollars to master, duplicate, and distribute the media.
Now, you can set up a home studio with a PC for less than $10k that equals or surpasses professional studios of 10 years ago. For the cost of a web hosting account, you can advertise and sell your product directly to the consumers. The only premium the record companies can still offer is mindshare / exposure, but a band can hire their own publicist to do that for a whole lot less.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Good (bad) enough scenario for you?
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
I.e. the same tax structure, maybe different rates, divying up could be made more fair, and only audio CDs "play". (I'm not saying this is what is proposed)
Bad, good, or indifferent?
P.S. I am extremely strongly in favor of fair use, but I do want the artists to get payed. That's why I am going to BUY a Gladys Knight CD instead of downloading the songs. I want to support her, she is extremely good and is a Las Vegas resident as am I :).
RIAA: Listen up. I tried to buy that CD the other day when I have 30 minutes to kill, and could not get it at K-mart.
Make it EASIER TO BUY CDs and more people will buy - not just the true fans and those who can't use Napster. How about enter a CD and/or song title on RIAA.com, enter your zip code, and it tell you where to buy it. Or just buy it over the Net, and get the CD 48 hours later.
MAKE IT EASY folks.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Or if you are unaware you have a choice. Look at people who use IE because it is the DEFAULT, even though they can download Netscape FOR FREE.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
A tax/royalty and (I think) a bit set somewhere it the prewritten header or CD identification area. Would be easy to have CD players (stereos and CD-ROMS in play-audio mode) only play if the bit is set for an Audio ("music") CD. WOuld actually seem like a semi-reasonable compromise.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Of course. Their lawyers are too busy filing look and feel and trademark lawsuits to have any time left to file DMCA lawsuits.
There are only 168 hours in a week you know...
Plus Steve Jobs would NEVER accept any fascist system other than his own - he HATES competition.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
The Powers That Be have managed to destroy some mechanisms for music trading (Napster, MP3.com), but have not succeeded with even a single positive step toward controlling music trading (such as SDMI, CPRM, CD burning control, etc.) This heartens me. Am I overlooking something?
And why all commercial software kicks all free software. NOT!
:*)
What good would a CD-ROM be if you couldn't pull data off a CD? Repeat after me: Audio CD's are just 1's and 0's.
LOL. Not quite. Audio data is arranged COMPLETELY differently from other data (files, etc) on a CD. Pulling audio data from a CD, pulling regular ISO 9660 data from a CD, and having the CD read audio data and run it through the DAC and out through an analog connection are three ENTIRELY different opreations from a hardware standpoint.
"It is true that audio CDs use all 2352 bytes per block for sound samples, while CD-ROMs use only 2048 bytes per block, with most of the rest going to ECC (Error Correcting Code) data. The error correction that keeps your CDs sounding the way they're supposed to, even when scratched or dirty, is applied at a lower level.
All of the data written to a CD uses CIRC (Cross-Interleaved Reed-Solomon Code) encoding. Every CD has two layers of error correction, called C1 and C2. C1 corrects bit errors at the lowest level, C2 applies to bytes in a frame (24 bytes per frame, 98 frames per block). In addition, the data is interleaved and spread over a large arc. (This is why you should always clean CDs from the center out, not in a circular motion.)"
--from this cool faq
Like I said... a ton of CDROM drives used to NOT support DAE. DAE is an extra feature purposely included by hardware manufacturers. From a technical standpoint they could EASILY stop including this feature (if laws forced them to do so).
"Don't worry about the hardware manufacturers of CD-ROM's, worry about a new format to replace CD-ROM's that carries copy protection bullshit in with it"
Well... I agree with you 100% there... you're right... like you say they're already building all sorts of digital protection into new digital TV's... I just wonder WHY they never went after (in a legal sense) the DAE feature on CDROM's. Made sense to me... not that that would be right... it just seems like the logical step of attack. *shrug*
http://www.bootyproject.org
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
"I've seensome games use DAE to cache their in game music. ITs not common, but its sometimes done, and its also legitimate."
Are you sure it's streamed in via DAE and not just streamed in as regular data? See my other post on this thread... DAE != regular data. Just because they're streaming data (even audio data) in doesn't mean they're using DAE.
In fact, I really doubt they'd want to use DAE. High error rate, high CPU utilization, absolutely no control over bitrate, no ability to interleave other game data (for example, terrain data, etc) with the audio.
http://www.bootyproject.org
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Yeah that's true... hehehe, the way I understand it, basically three options if you're playing music from a CD during a game:
http://www.bootyproject.org
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
I don't really care if companies like Roxio will stop making ripping-friendly software... as a zillion other posters have pointed out, we can always use other software (or other OS's, if need be).
:)
Here's the thing, though, that's scary. When will they start going after the HARDWARE makers? If I was an bastard record company exec, I would go after the CD-ROM drive manufacturers and fight against the digital audio extraction (DAE) feature. Because without that, you can't rip songs directly from a CD. Sure, you could do an analog rip, but that's a pain in the ass (and usually sounds like ass).
Are there any uses for DAE, besides ripping music? It's seems to me that's pretty much it's sole purpose... used to be, in the days of 8x (and lesser) cd-rom drives, a lot of drives didn't even support DAE and they worked fine for everything but ripping.
So, to me, based on the $#$%#$ evil laws that we have in America it would be hard to defend the inclusion of the DAE feature. Not saying that's right, but basically, from a functional standpoint... DSS:DVD = DAE:CD. You know what I mean? Please, someone correct me if I'm wrong in a legal sense. I hope I am.
One good thing: the hardware manufacturers WILL fight efforts by the RIAA, et al, to defend their hardware's ability to rip music... because as another poster pointed out, ripping/burning/downloading music is pretty much the only new "killer app" for PC's these days.
http://www.bootyproject.org
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
"
That was analog recording at its finest...
"
No it's not, it's digital copying with n representations per digit rather than 2 like binary.
Analog copying would be a photocopier, it's possible that the millionth hand copied book could be identical to the first.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
When you get into bed with a giant, you gotta expect he'll roll over during the night. Roxio's management seems to be so ignorant of a fact that's left a string of empty buildings from Fisherman's Wharf to Los Gatos that they've gotten into bed with two giants.
This is called the Dance of the Doomed.
The only sensible advice to shareholders of ROXI is contained in the subject line.
If you don't own any shares in Roxio -- and why you'd have held any after their announcement of the alliance with MSFT escapes me -- and if you don't use their Easy CD Creator/Direct CD -- another "in God's name, why?" kind of practice --this is a NOP. Roxio won't be here to worry about this time next year.
And if there's anybody on /. who didn't already know that Windows and Office XP were going to be very nasty propositions -- helLOOOOOOO!
DAO support is now in cdrecord, but cdrdao still does it better. cdrecord doesn't use a table of contents. You can burn tracks that run into each other and have them end up playing seamlessly, but you can't have audio in-between tracks. With cdrdao I burned a copy of The Tea Party's Transmission and the two minutes of audio between tracks 8 and 9 showed up as it should have, not just as a part of track 8 as it would with cdrecord.
No, BETA lost out because of the booming porn industry.
Sony apparently refused to let pornos be released on BETA, so VHS took over.
You're confusing BetaMax with VCC 2000. As far as i know BetaMax 'lost' for the same reason MCA failed; licensing fees.
use another CD burner, or don't upgrade Toast. Roxio loses money. Fuck 'em.
I'm still using the Adaptec Easy CD Creator 3.5c that came with my Plextor burner, and for a very good reason; 4.0 not only managed to totally fuck up my cd's but insisted i install IE 5.5, which i refused to do. Why do i need IE 5.5 to burn CD's??? Also, Feurio is much better for burning music cd's...
Now, those sales are not going to be there, and a majority of the
Yes, by all means, if the situation is created that is "inhospitable" to the consumer, the consumer should stand up and say "fuck company x", after all, this is what keeps the suppliers in touch with the consumers.
Customer loyalty is a load of crap and is very outdated.
If "company x" starts making crap (and there is competition, unlike M$, cause my parents can't use linux / kde / x, I tried it, square pegs don't fit into round holes.) then consumers will choose the competition, company x better fix their shit or be put out of business.
Welcome to the democracy called capatalism.
About the third paragraph of your post - I don't think you are in the majority of ther users with cd burners. Lets be honest with ourselves - cd burners are for one of several things.
List (in order)
#1. Warez / a copy of ms office
#2. Mp3z / CD Audio (pirated)
#3. Moviez (i.e. bootlegs or dvd rips)
#4. Other (actual work, porn)
This is for both home / work use, although at work, actual business related things might be one or two (ok.. maybe three) items up the list.
You back up shit at work to a tape drive - or a high capacity optical disk - not to a 650mb cdr.
Lets be honest to ourselves here.
Anyways, my point is that although you won't mind it - because you are one of the rare honest people (or a poser, wow, that word is so 80's) - other people who rely on their CDRW drives for the above "traditional" uses will.
You are an exception, most likely roxio will not find a market and will discontinue this unless the RIAA gives them more $ for this.
Though judging by the greed of the RIAA (or it just be a markup because all their stuff is pirated), invididual songs will cost $5, which isn't really important because there will be ways to hack it.
The slashdot 2 minute between postings limit: /.'ers since Spring 2001.
Pissing off hyper caffeineated
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Easy way around that; use another CD writing program.
With the problems that Easy CD has been having, that's probably a good idea anyway.
The reference to the 'Music CD-Rs' is another of the music industry's daft ideas. From the CD-R FAQ: http://www.cdrfaq.org/faq07.html#S7-17
So potentially expect to see Easy CD whinge if you try and burn audio onto an ordinary data CD. I doubt they'd be silly enough to block it, but pop up a warning and your average user gets worried enough to think maybe they ought to buy those 'Music CD-Rs' after all.
I also would like to give money to artists when I enjoy their songs. However I want to give monney to the artist and NOT EMI or any other big label. ESPECIALY when those companies go arround restricting my freedoms.
just my 2bits
Note that I'm clarifying the law. Not giving copies to friends because you want them to pay the artist could be considered the "right thing" to do. I'm just saying one can't say they don't give copies to friends because it's illegal; it's not. Moral and legal are two different things. If it's a moral decision you can say something like "this band sucks, you can copy their disk, but you should pay for this other band because they're starving". I love buying CDs at small shows because I put that 15 bucks straight into the artist's hand.
The basic trouble is that compensation has been tied to reproduction (and distribution) for so long that figuring out another way to do it will take a while. But finding another way is essential, because legislating people to not do something that is as natural as breathing (copying digital data) will not work. It's going to be a bumpy road. And with the current trend I often wonder if people with photographic memories or some of the musicians I've known who can play nearly any song they've ever heard will need special permits for living.
This strengthens your argument, since they have already succeeded in restricting your exercise of fair use without you even knowing it.
They get good by playing in small, cheap shows over and over and over.
That's called "playing professionally". But you're right, in the sense that Napster doesn't necessarily kill live performances, and musicians can still earn a living.
However, I think it can't be ignored that we have seen an explosion of musical talent in the 20th century that is primarily owed to the recording industry. The recording industry has allowed the potential market to be expanded tremendously to people that otherwise wouldn't be able to hear the London Philharmonic, or whomever. If the recording industry was destroyed, how many people would have heard early black Jazz performers?
And, Mozart was composing at the age of eight. Exactly how much cash do you think he was getting at that age?
And how much less music would we have if he had to lay bricks by day?
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
This is the right principle, the only question is the execution. If you think this is bad, then you are part of the problem, not the solution.
I want to be able to pay the artists money for their songs. Up until now, there simply is no way to give money if you want to download an electronic version. If they allow me to pay a reasonable price to download a song, then I will gladly pay it.
The only question is whether they are going to put restrictions on what I can do with my purchased song for my personal use. If there is any copy restriction, then that obviously is not acceptable.
But this knee-jerk reaction to any kind of paying for music is just stupid. If there is no money in music, then a lot of the best musicians will simply cease to exist. Yes, we will always have amateur musicians, but a lot of the best musicians will never happen unless they are able to practice all day, every day, and you can't do that unless you do it professionally. There is a reason why professional athletes, for example, will kick almost any amateur's ass.
And no, 200 years ago Mozart or whoever DID NOT do it on an amateur basis. They were paid by either royalty, upper class citizens or the church. In fact, most artists were compensated in that way. Art and money have always gone hand in hand. Anyone who thinks otherwise is naive (and impractical).
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Well, let's see.
Functionally, this doesn't have *THAT* great an impact. Data cds are still kosher, but music cds will be affected.
Great, I'll make my x86 music discs with cdrecord (thanks, Jorg!) and my PPC music discs with iTunes and the MacOS cdburner. (thanks Jobs!)
We know that Jobs isn't interested in this kind of strong-arming to get consumers to get in step- they advertised it with the Rip.Mix.Burn. campaign, and that combined with iTunes and the new iBook, the user is meant to insert a cd, have iTunes rip it to mp3, and burn to cd-r/rw.
So I can still do the things I need to do in iTunes and cdrecord. I can use roxio for data cds if I must.
At least Apple is still catering to some of the customers' concerns.
And hey, reason enough for me to support Apple? They voted AGAINST all CPRM proposals.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
No! Keep using it. I was just noting that Roxio will suffer in the market when people don't buy their crippled software, and that they will deserve it.
sulli
RTFJ.
use another CD burner, or don't upgrade Toast. Roxio loses money. Fuck 'em.
sulli
RTFJ.
This really is the new killer app. Think of Apple's "Rip, Mix, Burn" ads. Of course the industry is running scared ... serves 'em right.
sulli
RTFJ.
It's called SCMS.
Serial Copy Management System.
Home CD-R units for stereo systems will NOT burn onto normal data CDR's as those CDR's lack an SCMS block.
The SCMS block tells the home recorder NOT to make a digital copy of the disc. If an SCMS encoded CD is used in a CD player hooked via a digital connection to a consumer CDR deck, the disc will not be copied. If it is connected through the convential analog input/output, it can be copied.
It is there solely to stop a person from making a mix, and then using that disc to master more copies of the same disc. And it is really a consumer technology. The lack of SCMS is what caused the recording industry to effectively kill DAT as a consumer format. The 'Music CDR' will help bring CD recording to the masses in a way the PC never could. It is a Good Thing, even if the discs are more expensive. I'd start worrying if the RIAA started saying that home CD Recorders are bad.
All you know-it-all, pole-in-ass types are so sure that you're morally superior, that every Napster or Gnutella user is out there stealing music. Well, there are LEGAL uses for Napster that DO involve downloading lots of music.
FOR EXAMPLE:
I own about 1,000 CDs. I own a tablet PC which I carry around with me nearly everywhere I go and which doubles as my memopad-sized MP3 walkman. Now I could spend hours encoding songs from CD to MP3 each morning so that I can carry around the music that I want, but that's not really time-effective. What do I do? I download the songs that someone else has already encoded. And what's more, sometimes in the middle of the day I find myself wanting that one particular song that I don't have loaded into the PC at the moment. What do I do? Pop on to one of the OpenNap servers and grab the song. If some of you had your way, I'd have to run home, find the CD, encode the track on my desktop PC, IR it to my tablet and run back to work -- or forego listening to it. Buy why should I have to forego listening to it if I've already BOUGHT the damn thing?
I've bought every CD that ever contained a song I liked. I can show you the matching CD from every song I've ever downloaded. I'm not stealing, and I resent the implication that just because I use the MP3 format or visit Napster/OpenNap sites I'm some sort of criminal.
And just to prove that I'm ON TOPIC, I've even burned a few MP3 CDs that I downloaded. How is this legal? Well, I've been through some albums (Black Crowes SHMC, Fiona Apple Tidal, etc.) 4+ times, buying the damn CD each time, because they've been scratched so much they start to skip. Now for the ones I really like, where quality is really important, I will always buy the CD again (paying royalties EACH time, even though I'm only one listener), but for some of them which aren't worth THAT much to me, I'll just grab the non-working tracks off the net and re-burn the entire CD with the skipping tracks replaced. Voila. FIXED CD. That I already paid for.
And aside from these black-and-white issues, I don't see ANY problem with grabbing an MP3 from a CD I own and sending it to a friend in e-mail with "Hey man, check this track out!" in the message body. I lend my CDs out. Sometimes friends copy them to tape, I'm sure. That doesn't give me any guilt pangs and neither do MP3s.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Use CD-R/W for what these folks would consider as "legitimate" purposes, such as backups? I, as an artist, often build up large numbers of high resolution pictures on my HD that I would like to make backups of from time to time, and being the copyright holder, see no reason why I should pay EMI/Roxio for the right to do so...
In addition, what of those who want to back up their HD's who happen to also have mp3's? Does this mean that they will be unable to, until every unsigned audio file (including, ironically, those that install automatically with some games, operating systems, and professional audio applications)is hunted down and eradicated?
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Remember, XP is crippled in the CD ripping department. It's a feature to reduce casual piracy as the rips are low quality. Aftermarket ripping software may get past this, but it may be crippled at the low level. Anybody know for sure?
The truth shall set you free!
I can stream
Artist, studio get paid. Roxio keeps selling software subscriptions. Consumer gets a cheap, easy alternative to buying at the store. Everyone wins.
REALLY bad .wav file to a CD, even the ones I already own. Now, I pay for the "privilege" of making my own Best of Iron Maiden, Vol. 1 - 4 because I don't feel like lugging 20 discs around in my car all the time. I pay for the "privilege" of having a burned copy of Seventh Son of a Seventh Son at work, so I can keep the original at home.
I have to pay the studio *anytime* I burn a
Consumer pay more money to legally use media she has already purchased. She seeks out less restrictive alternatives. Roxio loses money she may have spent on software. Artist, studio loses money she might have spent for an album that is worth $8 to her but certainly not $16. She considers boycotting studio and Roxio who tried to fuck her through ill-conceived business plan to bleed legitimate consumers of more money. Everybody loses.
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We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat
- Ministry
That's probably besides the point. One of the big criticisms that everyone has about the music industry is that they're always behind the times on catching up to new technology. Seems to me to be a fairly good approach on their part, if you ask me. They can cut manufacturing costs like nuts and put out a low-cost alternative to buying CDs and a higher-quality (and not to mention legal) alternative to downloading amateur rips.
Plus, it opens up the door for providing an even better service than what Napster has. They can set up a fast, dedicated network to serve the files instead of having to rely on shaky internet downloads, they can make the process of finding a song quicker by providing their own directories, they can even order CDs en masse (like, tens of thousands at a time) and reduce the per-unit expense for themselves and (potentially) the consumer... It seems like a smart all around play, if you ask me.
The only real question will be if they (a) can implement it properly, and (b) can resist the temptation to once again become the megalithic expensive dinosaur that charged too much and encouraged the average music-lover to piracy in the first place.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
I really fail to see why recording companies should be getting money from people burning their own cds. Sure, the artists should get some money, after all it is their music. But the recording industry? No, I just don't see it. The recording industry is going the way of the dinosaurs in the future.
What is the difference between a Music CD-R and a conventional CD-R? Is there a real difference, or is it just a marketing gimmick, and if the latter, how does *Mart marketing the stuff make a difference in this case?
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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Despite the reporter's negative view about secure digital music transaction, I think the consumer can only benefit from this. How do we lose if we pay a low, reasonable price for downloadable music? Do you honestly feel good about yourself when you steal music from artists you like? If you do, move to a third world country where that's legal.
I have never had a problem with paying for music, but I love the convienience and satisfaction of being able to download music whenever I want. Having an integrated solution is the next logical step. Kudos!
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
Ok, the big argumnet to date for support Napster and its kin has been that I want my music in an online format and the record companies and artists don't make it easy for me pay for it in that format.
So, now we have a way to pay them. A way that likely would - if worked right - allow us to reduce the overhead in moving money to the artists. But how do people react they start bitching that they want be able to take stuff without paying the folks that created it. Please, grow up!
If you truly believe in freedom, then the people that create stuff have the freedom to decide how and under what terms their creations are distributed. You on the other hand have the freedom to choose if you will accpet distribution on their terms. If you don't like those terms, then don't use it. Find someone else that will give you what you want on acceptable terms. If you don't like the terms, you don't have a right to take it without their permission ! This is called stealing and it is a direct attack on their freedom to choose how they want to and under what terms they choose to disribute their creations. Attacking someone's freedom is called oppression and that is a bad thing!
Properly executed, a Roxio based distribution technology has the promise of allowing smaller labels to have a reach equal to the big guys. This is a good thing. It means that they can be economically viable.
In case people haven't been paying attention, the world of everything costing nothing on the Internet is quickly disappearing. If people are going to create, they have to figure out how to eat. Some do this by working at a "job" so that they can pursue their "vocation". That is fine, it is their choice. Others want to engage in their vocation full-time. But to do so, they need a way to sell the fruit of their labor. If you like the taste of that fruit and the terms under which they want to provide it to you, then you pay them for it. But you don't take it without their consent.
I don't want to be forced to pay for creations I don't want or under terms I find unacceptable - this is my criticism of RMS and the Free Software Model, I don't want to pay a "software tax" for software I may or may not want - but I also can't take something that another has created without their consent.
This will stop only the people who are ignorant to their options or too lazy to find a different route.
If an mp3 search engine gets axed (or a file-trading service has its hands tied) it doesn't slow the people who use IRC or FTP. Sure it's less convenient for most, but it doesn't stop the practice.
If Adaptec handicaps their product, it will only make other burning software more appealing. If you're reading slashdot, you're probably capable of finding an alternative.
Would it be possible to invoke antitrust law against the music industry for attempting to boost sales of CDs by making legitimate CD copying impossible? Where's that lawyer guy that Slashdot interviewed earlier today?
that's why we have other programs like Nero out there. So what if Joe-Schmoe uses Easy CD Creator and has to pay a small fee. Your average computer geeks will still be using Nero or some 'other' program out there.
Really, when you get down to it, this could be a big mistake. Nothing could drive more people to a different product than creating some sort of burn-payment scheme. Nero and others like it should be happy.
And if you worry about joe blow, not being able to run on windows or mac, I guarantee that someone will slap a gui on top of one some existing opensource cd recording software. cdrecord alreasy runs in DOS i believe.
And in no time roxio's market share will disappear, and no longer be bundled with Apple's OS, or HP CD burners, or wherever else it's bundled today, because at some point the vendors realize that everybody downloads 'package X' anyways.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.