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The Day The Music Died: Windows Media and DRM
SampleMinded writes "The Guardian reports on an early glimpse of what a DRM controlled future looks like. Imagine backing up your files, reformatting your hard drive, then copying the files back over only to find your music no longer works. It happened to this guy. Now That's what I call Xperience!"
It happened to my fiancee. She backed up her music made using Real Jukebox to her D drive. We re-formatted drive C and re-installed Windows. Of course, not having saved the security key, when she restored her music files she couldn't play them.
As always, the honest people suffer.
You don't even have to try to reload backed up data to get bit by this. Not too long ago, I upgraded my processor and was subsequently locked out of all the media files I made using Media Player.
I was less then pleased, for obvious reasons. It was just a minor headache remaking files using other programs and such, but it was a minor headache I could have lived without.
1) Now Joe Public starts understanding and disliking DRM
2) Techies that already hated DRM but are not listened to by Joe Public don't use silly WMP and are not hindered by this.
What's the problem again?
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Whoops, I just checked (www.soundjam.com):
"Casady & Greene, Inc. ceased publication of SoundJam MP on June 1, 2001 at the request of its developers. We believe that SoundJam MP will continue to give our customers long and useful service, and, in keeping with our philosophy of putting our customers first, Casady & Greene will continue to offer tech support to SoundJam MP owners. The SoundJam development team is now working for Apple on their popular iTunes jukebox software, and will continue to work on exciting and innovative products for Mac use"
Actually, his first mistake was not disabling the 'Personal Protection' feature ... this would have solved his problem just as well as using another product.
(Score:-1, Wrong)
When updating my soundcard drivers recently, I discovered a notice of Digital Rig^H^Hestrictions Management from Creative Labs. Apparently copy protected "intellectual property content" causes the digital output of the sound card to be shutoff. Of course this only works on WMAs, so I believe this fits in the context of this article. For more information visit this URL Creative Labs: DRM with WMA
"You can also choose to turn off copy protection when you create your music collection, which can be done easily in any version of [WMP7.x or later].
When you first run Windows Media Player, it will ask if you want to keep copy protection on, and you can turn it off if you wish. If you missed that dialog box, it is still easy to turn off copy protection by going into the Tools|Options menu. Click on the Copy Music tab, and under Copy Settings, uncheck the 'Protect Content' box. In previous versions, this box was called the 'Enable Per sonal Rights Management' check box." Turning off copy protection would seem the best idea.
<grub> Reading
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
It's not shut off, it's emitted with a copyright bit (part of the stream format) set. It's the "client" end (a DAT recorder, for instance) which does the prohibiting. This is all well-trodden ground to anyone who's messed with audio DAT drives or audio CD recorders: it prohibits you from recording copyright-asserted content from one to another digitally.
Peter
Comment removed based on user account deletion
just a general warning, if you convert from .mp3 to .ogg, you'll progressively lose quality, and could end up with strange audio artifacts since both codecs are lossy. whenever possible, re-encode from the source/lossless copy so you only lose sample quality once.
.ogg is the "skinning" feature, where you can, for example, rip your CD's to a 320kbps file for archiving, and (with some loss, but not PROGRESSIVE loss) then "skin" (like onion skin) off the file to be streamed at 64kbps over the net or to a portable player. This will be VERY nice, yes? Don't have to encode the song 4 times...just keep that 320 archived and skin when you want a smaller file.
Sidenote: one thing to look forward to in
-Skymunky
You can turn it off, and as soon as you can't people will start using another media player that doesn't limit their freedoms which is a good thing (IMO). The only way I see this being newsworthy is if steps are being taken to make it a law that all media players must implement this feature, that would be really bad for the windows users. Of course the linux users could just download a GPLed media player and disable the feature by editing the source and recompiling. Wouldn't even be that hard for non programmers most likely, anyone designing an open source media player for linux would probably put something like this into the source:
//ATTENTION: delete the next three lines to disable the annoying copy protection.
so this is really only a problem for windows users, and if you voluntarily use MS Windows as your primary OS then you should already be used to giving up your freedoms.
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article
No, DivX died because the company was trying to sell you a limited use disc that had less features than DVD's that could be bought/rented/re-sold.
"And like that
You take the SOURCE out of the system. (Image it off to a 2nd drive, if necessary)
You Install a new drive, or format the original if you are SURE you have a valid exact image off on the side, load windows, etc... then when everything works great on the new setup, THEN you can trash the source.
(Yes you have to have a spare drive around to do something like that...)
or even better, give KEXP a listen. It used to be the radio of University of Washington, now it is a partnership with the Experience Music Project in Seattle. It has a VERY wide variety of music, and 95% of it is "good" in my opinion. I would bet you have only heard about 3% of the songs they play ever before.
The best thing about it though is that it is streamed in 3 or 4 different formats, plus their website has a realtime playlist so you can tell what you've heard. Oh, and did I mention no advertisments? You must listen!
KEXP
.....
From the Winamp changelog:
Winamp 2.61:
* In accordance with Microsoft's license agreement, we no longer allow you to use DSP plug-ins or alternate output plug-ins when playing WMA files.
So you'd have to find a version older than 2.61 for that trick to work.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I don't like these schemes, but at least SGI has it right.
(I work with them too. Very nice machines with long lives.)
The Number In a CAN is actually located in a part of the SGI that permits upgrades everywhere else. This way you can change almost the entire machine (CPU, disks, reload the OS, Graphics) without any software hassle.
On O2 machines this number is on the PCI tray. Move that tray, and your software will work on the new O2.
Octane has it in the Backplane I think, either that or the MainBoard. It is a small chip that can be moved if you need a new main board, if it is there.
Indy has it on the main board. Dallas semiconductor. Socketed.
Indigo uses a similar chip. Same.
BTW you *can* change the lmhostid on Indy and O2 machines at least. Do a search on changing sysid, or hostid. There may be ways for others.
This system is annoying, but at least SGI thought long and hard about that annoyance factor and tried very hard to make sure the users were able to make the very best use of the licenses they have. A lot of companies don't do the kind of engineering they do and it shows. That is a big part of why an SGI costs what it does. (Worth it if you need to run that sort of software.)
Sidebar: You can get this sort of functionality on a PC, though I don't hear about it much. Get your FlexLM license tied to an ID on a hardware dongle, or better PCMCIA network card. Works the same and you can move your license at will without discussing it with your vendor, who will only entertain the conversation if you have paid your maint. contract in full to date...
So, I guess I could live with some things done this way, but I don't want to. Besides, even high-end machines like an SGI can be cracked so what's the point? Apply this sort of tech to the everyday PC and it will get cracked sooner than later.
We should focus on incentives for people to do the right thing, not technology based solutions that start us down a path of control that we all will regret.
Blogging because I can...
FlexLM works exactly the same way in Sun machines.
And guess what? If you want, you can get a license file and fake the hostid and run any program you want.
Now, FlexLM is great for comapnies dealing with companies. The Sun machine in my desk is my companie's not mine, they can pretty much accept any leonine conditions imposed on them, that is none of my business (unless my expert, personal opinion is asked, in which case company gets piece of my mind).
But in my machine I don't want any spyware and I don't want any company tracking what I am doing.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.