Dataplay Ready to Launch

geophile writes "Let's see. This is a CD-like, CD-incompatible storage medium with lower storage capacity than a CD; copying, which is supported by CDs and permitted by fair-use laws is not possible; and it's more expensive than a CD. Read about this great idea here." We've done a couple of stories on the Dataplay discs; this one discusses the heavy content controls built-in. MSNBC had an article on Dataplay a few weeks ago that mentions an "education process" needed to get people to re-buy all their old music in a new format.

Comments

Bah

[dieMSdie]

I quit buying CDs years ago due to the RIAA's greedy, grasping control-freak mentality. It will be a cold day in hell before I shell out a single cent to them for some broken incompatible crap like this.

These people live in their own little world - with only the MPAA and some other like-minded morons as neighbors. Small wonder they can get laws like the DMCA passed - Congress lives in the same world.

I just do not foresee people buying these things. Yes, the "public" can be incredibly stupid at times, but they do catch on, eventually, and I think the RIAA's game is up.

Re:This will be a good test...

[Mr.Spaz]

I'm not that fast to react anymore. Everytime I see a scheme like this come along, I point to DIVX. Those "in the know" successfully killed that format with an enduring information campaign that didn't let up until DIVX was out the window. It was to the point that people looking at DIVX players at Circuit City were approached by strangers who would inform them exactly what buying DIVX was going to mean. I think that in any similar situation where a less restrictive, less costly, and less burdensome alternative exists, the same kind of results can be had by simply informing the sheep that the $16 disc in their hand will actually cost $16+$8+$13, etc. if they want to access everything listed on the cover. Oh, play on your computer? No, it won't do that. Put the music on CD to listen to in the car? Oh, sorry, not allowed. Etcetera ad nauseum...

And you can be sure that another plan behind this system is going to be "disc expiration." 20 plays and then another $20 to get the thing going again, or what have you. If I can, I'll be steering people away from the format. I'm sure most slashdotters will too.

Here we go again..

[Anonymous Coward]

I was under the impression that once you owned the rights to the music, you wouldn't have to pay royalties again.

Why can't you just buy music in the new format for $1 a disc, if you already own the music?

eh.. I already know the answer why do I bother
And how long will it be before someone cracks all the "hidden" music on the disks?

Re:How long ?

[Dunkalis]

The RIAA thinks this is going to stop piracy? Nobody is going to go out and buy a Dataplay player and have to buy ALL their music over again. The few people that buy this are going to be geeks that hack them and turn them into really high-capacity floppy drives. The RIAA will then think that nobody is buying this crap since they would think the people who do are putting the music on the net. Its going go be awhile until something replaces the Audio-CD as the most ubiquitous format.

Of course, they can simply stop producing CDs to make people convert. Their music they already own, that is.

The RIAA is shooting themselves in the foot (again). Why can't they realize the Internet is THEIR future?

Whatever copy protection it has is useless...

[stienman]

They are going to depend on the licensing scheme that won't allow players to emit the raw data - ie, no computer dataplay drives. They'll connect with USB and firewire, but part of their copy protection is no raw access to data, meaning it's hard to break the encryption.

However, that just means hackers get to go to a new level, modifying hardware, changing the code in the microcontrollers, etc.

I've no doubt that this will go the way of the "DVD Killer Divx", the minidisc, and the DAT (which is used professionally - dataplay won't even have that market).

All of which have Digital Restrictions Management built in. Of course the recording industry is going to go for it. Their SDMI initiative failed (and is still flopping about like a fish looking for water), and there is no way they can control any software/data based approach - too many fingers have to be in the pudding to make it work, and one of those fingers may leak - much like how the DVD decryption routines were discovered (which would have taken longer without the key, but would likely have still taken place)

So their only hope is

1. Copyright/patent new format
2. Copyright/patent hardware and algorithms
3. Only license copyrights/patents to those willing to play ball their way

But the trick is then getting the consumers to pay for this new deal, which initially is going to be very expensive. Given the choice of buying an IPOD and this new disc device, which do you think the average joe is going to get? No little discs to lose, tons of space, no DRM (well, hacked away) , and personal organizer to boot.

They'd have to sell millions of these before the price comes down, and like the minidisc it ain't gonna happen.

I suspect that even when they only release a certian artist in that format the music will still be available (one person with player and a nice sound card, or simply ripped off the radio) in an adequate format. It will backfire, because music consumers are fickle and will simply stop listening to an artist if the entrance fee is $300, and the artists are less likely to play ball with companies that use them like pawns to bring about DRM.

It's a complicated chess game, and they are playing like they've lost their queen. They will fail if they don't fold the game and start with a completely different mindset.

So I'm not worried. Besides, CDs will likely be available cheaply for a long, long time.

-Adam

Interesting Math

[Posting=!Working]

"The tiny discs will be able to store up to five hours of CD-quality music, one hour of video, 1,000 digital photos, one video game or 100 e-books -- or any combination, up to 500 megabytes of storage."

Let's see 80 minutes of CD-quality music now uses 700 MB of space. How exactly does 300 minutes of CD-quality music fit on 500 MB?

Blank discs, which can store up to 500 megabytes of data, will retail for between $10 and $12

Wow, much better than the $15 I'm paying for 50 700 MB CD's. A single 500 MB disk for the price of over 20 GB of blank CD's. Where do I get in line?

"I just know by being in the business, there's definitely a need for a portable format," Bob Higgins said. "Portable CD players are too big and too bulky."

Gee, if there were only widely available, simple to use, portable digital music storage and listening devices on the market right now.

Mossbergt Article

[asv108]

Walt Mossberg has a good review of Dataplay. He sights numerous reasons why it will fail, but his main objection is the rights managment, "feature." I submitted it a few days ago but:

* 2002-04-18 07:06:54 Copying Limits Stifle Innovation (articles,news) (rejected)

As time goes by...

[Phoenix]

...I find that I'm really glad that I bought a MiniDisk player/recorder instead of the MP3 player.

Pros:
* Cheap disks - $2 each as opposed to $45 a compact flash card
* Quality player devices - can survive a trek into the off road bike trails with no skip
* Good sound reproduction - as good as 256bit MP3 (in my opinion)
* Holds 74 minutes - more if you downsample the music (built into most new recorders)
* using analog input - prevents any copy protection as it can record from the headphone-out jack
* Can erase and re-use disks, or delete an unwanted track
* Player costs the same as a MP3 player (32-64mb devices)

Cons:
* Did not catch on as well in the US as other standards (MP3, CD/CD-R)
* Can only record in real time (not too much of a problem as I will listen to a CD all the way the first time...takes no effort to record at the same time)

So the record companies can do whatever they want. We will find a way around whatever the @#$% they try to throw at us. They never seem to learn that there is ALWAYS a way to get around whatever they want to do to us. I found a way that works well for me, others will find thier own way.

Nero often is described as playing the violin as Rome burned. When the RIAA burns, I'll be playing the bagpipes

Phoenix

Re:This will be a good test...

[jms]

bzip2 was never designed for compressing audio, and it doesn't do a very good job of it.

However, there *are* compression schemes designed specifically for lossless digital audio compression, and they work fairly well.

For instance, the "shorten" codec can consistantly compress digital audio to a little over half it's original size -- not quite 50%, but about 55%. The codec works equally well on studio and live recordings. and is extensively used by Grateful Dead/Phish/etc music traders.

Check out etree.org for more information.

But yes, this new media uses lossy compression, which will send the early adopters away in droves.

Jesus H. Christ

[jpellino]

5 Britney Spears album on one un-erasable disk? Oh, the humanity.

Napster comes in, CD sales go up 8%.
Napster goes OUT, CD sales go DOWN 5%.

What in the Sam Hill are they putting in the water coolers at the RIAA?

If I can hear the music first, I'll buy it. If, like in central CT, there are two dozen candy-ass radio stations all following maybe four godforsaken formats, there's a better likelyhood that I'll hemorrhage from hearing "Rock The Boat" seventeen times a day before I'll hear something I want to try.

Of course, if MTV would try playing music again, maybe we'd have another venue for music that wasn't an inch wide and a mile deep. Not convinced? Here's the show list for the plucky little channel...

Andy Dick / Becoming / Celebrity Deathmatch / Cribs / Daria / Diary / Dismissed / Fashionably Loud: Swimsuit 2002
Fear / Icon: Aerosmith / Making The Band / Making the Video Movie Awards 2002 / National Sex Quiz / Now What
The Osbournes / The Real World / Road Rules / Real World/Road Rules Challenge / Rock N Jock
Señor Moby's House of Music / Spring Break / TRL / Unplugged / Video Music Awards 2001 / WWF Tough Enough

Any channel that has The Osbornes, Andy Dick, the Real World and the WWF needs a name change, a new mission statement, and a prescription pad.

Like most people who can afford the necesary bandwidth in the first place, I have more money than time. I haven't the hours nor the inclination to burn everything I want to own. I go buy it. HMV and Borders are on my commute. Or I click and three days later it's in my mailbox, total extra investment of time - about 3 minutes.

I've downloaded much gig of music, and deleted nearly all of it once purchased. It's an iBook, not a server farm. I believe I have at most a half dozen CD-R keepers - mostly the stuff I'd gotten and paid for on mp3.com back when they were sane, and a whole bunch of rare tracks and but-wait-there's-more - the entire TIAA-CREF investment primer library so I can afford all this stuff in the first place (lousy beat, but you can dance to it all the way to the bank).

If I burned everything I ever downloaded to sample, I'd have a large, substandard collection of badly labeled CD-Rs, no life, dead tropical fish, and Howard-Hughes-league fingernails. Not to mention a cataloging system nowhere near the intuitiveness and familiarity of a bookcase, alphabetical by artist.

The RIAA should kiss Shawn's nappy little ass for providing the only true breakthru in music marketing since the music video. But as usual, the industry has figured out how to tie the whole relaunch up in knots because even BMG really doesn't like the whole thing but they smell money. I doubt it was a sanctified "we should be honestly representing our artist's interest" but rather a pant-wetting "holy crap - see these DL logs? can you imagine a dollar sign in front of each of these?" I mean please - it's taken them a year to not get ready, and from the get go they won't be able to write a MacOS client (no mention of any other platforms) and they can't for the life of them figure out how to take credit AND debit cards at the same time. There are one-man roasted cashew operations in East Rainbucket, Maine who can do this.

I gotta go.