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Music Companies Bemoan New High-Cap Portables
An anonymous reader writes "New Scientist reports: 'The music industry this week condemned the launch of two recording systems that will let people copy between 30 and 100 hours of music onto a single disc.'" The Sony system is supposed to use "ultra-efficient data compression system used in MiniDiscs" to fit "30 hours of MP3 music" on a CD-R. (I thought MD used ATRAC rather than MP3, and that ATRAC's standard bitrate was 285.3 Kbps -- can some MD gurus bring us up to speed?) Philips' system skips CDs, and instead uses a DVD burner, with the resulting disks playable in a to-be-released portable player. I wonder what kind of DRM features the companies will use to cripple each system.
Yeah, but it's hardly the first time hardware companies mix their tech terms, is it...?
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
so phillips is going to charge me a good deal of money to 1) buy their dvd drive 2) buy their inevitably propriatary media and 3) buy their player all so i can listen to a ton of music on the go? hey, it sounds like an ipod or archos or nomad can accomplish that already.
Minidiscs do use Atrac3 but the newer MD players have adjusted the atrac encoding format (called MDLP) to allow for longer play times with marginal quality losses. try minidisco for a great resource and more info.
MDLP recorders use high-density recording to record 2-4x more data on an MD, but it seems unlikely they can adapt something like that to CD-Rs...so you can pretty much rule that out unless they've managed to shoehorn some funky blue-laser to write extra data to existing CD-R media (or they're just lowering the bit-rate and blowing smoke out their asses)
Temple priests criticize the distibution of paper.
Printers try to squash the invention of the typewriter.
Music companies try to licence tape recorders.
We used to have fire, but the inventor died.
I used to be a huge fan of MD, and shortly after I got out of the medium, a new version of ATRAC came out. I think it allowed for MD-LP. Is this the efficient version of ATRAC mentioned in the article, because for years, ATRAC was heavily criticized in audio publications such as Stereophile.
So what? Unless they have some sort of legal grounds against it condemning will be old news in hours. It is as if they are admitting being dealt a blow.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
Read: "ultra-efficient data compression system" == ATARC. They're just saying MP3 because it makes people go "OOOOoooo!" and buy it.
In other news.....
Apple Released a 100 GB iPod, to much fanfare
Philips' system skips CDs, and instead uses a DVD burner
More importantly than DRM is how much will this cost? DRM is important, don't get me wrong, but no matter how little copyright protection is on the thing, if the DVD audio player costs $250 in addition to the rest of the audio system, not many people are going to buy it unless it sounds better than all else.
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
My favorite quote from the article speaks for itself:
Mike Tsurumi, a president of Sony Consumer Electronics in Berlin, insists that the move makes sense. "The music companies need to change their business model, he says.
This is an executive within Sony talking, mind you. Fucking amazing. Is there any centralized coordination? Isn't there a CEO of Sony corporate who keeps his divisions in line with the goals (i.e. bottom line interests) of the company as a whole?
The record companies never learn. People want portable music. People want to choose which songs to listen to, instead of carrying an entire CD with 80% crap. So, of course, the industry will try and destroy it. If the record companies were to allow, nay, even financially support this kind of work, they would make much more of that green stuff they so desperately desire. Stop living in the dark ages, damnit...
"Owning a computer is like having your very own TV -- with a built in radio!" - Ed Helms
The music division of Sony has sued the consumer electronics division multiple times. The CE division is no longer allowed to make MP3 devices (like an iPod).
"Owning a computer is like having your very own TV -- with a built in radio!" - Ed Helms
Never mind, I didn't know what I was talking about (despite owning a couple of the damn things). Guess my Japanese isn't as good as I thought...
"It's a no-brainer. Anything which lets people enjoy music too much is bad for the industry. If they can just move their songs around anywhere they want, how are we supposed to make money selling multiple CDs? If music is too convenient to transport, we can't sell people whole stacks of different CDs at different locations. They'll be able to listen to all of their music anywhere they are. Can you imagine?
"Further, we believe that people that listen to their music too much are also depriving the artists of revenue. If you listen to an album more than 10 or 12 times, you're morally obligated to go buy another copy. Anything else is stealing food from the mouths of starving artists."
When asked whether artists were deliberately kept starving, the spokesman refused comment.
I just find it totally amazing what neat little gadget come out that are actually usefull... Just to be squashed by by media companies or crippled so they become useless. All in the name of copyright protection. Give me a break... Unless I can listen to music on my terms and where I want, I am not interested. And I am not talking about stealing music but using what I purchased when I want and where I want.
How does this help me get my 90GB collection into a portable device?
Nothing to see here; Move along.
You sound like the bitch from Willy Wanka. "I want it now! I want it now!" Sit down and shut up.
... they automatically assume it's going to be used to pirate music, and that it somehow makes pirating "easier". What if I want to put all of the MP3's I legitimately downloaded from MP3.com or 1Sound.com or Ampcast.com or Besonic.com or JavaMusic.com or... (see where I'm going with this?). Or even from someplace like like emusic.com where the music is paid for and everyone gets makes out well!
Mike Tsurumi, a president of Sony Consumer Electronics in Berlin, insists that the move makes sense. "The music companies need to change their business model," he says.
Seriously, if the industry hasn't gotten the hint at this point, I doubt it ever will...
Who doesn't like free music?
I'm sure most people have seen this poster...
When you pirate MP3s you're downloading Communism
But I was inspired to update it to reflect the current administration's agenda...
New and improved!
Only, I'm having some difficulty deciding who to put in the background, so I thought I'd let the Slashdot crew help.
Who should star in this new public service announcement?
A) A generic arab
B) Osama bin Laden
C) Saddam Hussein
D) Richard Reid (aka the Shoebomber)
E) Write-in: Please nominate someone
As for the top right symbol, I think that should be up for debate, but to start the ball rolling, might I suggest a flaming jetliner? Or the twin towers?
Thanks, I can't wait to finish it!
PS Please take note, it's a work in progress, so cut me some slack if you notice some minor flaws...
that music industry realizes that they should charge the music, not for the media where it could be.
I'm a big user of minidiscs, however I'm not a profesed "guru", but here's what I understand of ATRAC and MD:
Sony is currently using ATRAC3. It is capable of encoding up to 320 minutes of stereo audio at a bitrate of 36kbps.
To quote from minidisc.org: "[ATRAC3]differs substantially from the original, existing ATRAC system, having twice the transform window size (1024 samples [23.2ms], vs. 512 samples [11.6ms]), encoding tone components separately from other spectra, splitting the input signal into 4 bands instead of 3, and using Huffman coding on the final bit stream to squeeze out redundancy." However, Sony has probably gone to a new version of ATRAC3 for this new application of writing to CDs.
Sony has basically scrapped the idea of using minidiscs as a data storage medium, at least to the genral public. However, Sony did release a digital camera that wrote to MDdata discs, and there are some professional recorders that record multitrack MD data discs. It is interesting that they're only now starting to apply ATRAC technology outside of the MD format.
For more info on MD and ATRAC encoding, i reccomend Minidisc.org
Steam propulsion will revolutionize the sea.
You can keep building your clipper ships; we'll admire that intersection of form and function for years to come, to be sure.
Ultimately, smart money will evacuate the market before it is crushed by better technology.
Dumb money will stand around whining, or, worse still for all, attempt to prop up its impotence with lawsuits.
Easy for me to say; it's not my career.
Nevertheless, let common sense and long-term planning be your guide.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Mini-DVDs. Like the small format mini-CDRs you can burn with ~200 megs of MP3s. I love my Memorex mini-CDR/MP3 player, for the portability of the discs, which I can easily carry 4 or 5 of in my jacket pocket when I go skiing. If they made mini DVD-R/MP3 players, I could fit my entire music collection on one mini DVD-R. And that would convince me to finally buy a DVD burner.
This article claims they can fit 30 hours of music on a CD using MiniDisc compression, which from what I've read only provides a 5:1 compression ratio, or about 6.7 hours on an 80 minute disc. In order to compress 30 hours of music into 700MB you'd need to compress it at about 53kbps, which I don't know of any compression format which provides decent audio quality at that rate. Even the claims of 100 hours of music on a DVD (assuming a standard single layer 4.7GB recordable DVD) would only allow for 110kbps which is getting kind of low.
at the top there that should be 96kbps, not 36. guess i didn't recheck hard enough.
Philips has come out strongly so far against "crippled" copy protected CDs. As a pure hardware company, they'd have no reason to put out a player loaded down with DRM. If they make a simple, functional portable SlimX type player that plays a DVD-/+RW filled with mp3s (oog?) it will become The Next Big Thing, and drive sales and adoption of DVD-/+RW drives. Lets hope the lawyers don't screw it all...
-Hiro
The RIAA sucks. Record labels suck. Payola sucks, and pretty much everything about the music industry sucks. This completes the technical analysis of the music industry...
The popular music industry uses a unique business model. Talented (and untalented) people create songs. They then hire a manager or promoter to get them shows and introduce them to and represent their interests with record labels. The manager takes the artist's(') songs and sells them to record labels. Record labels help the artists record these songs onto some form of salable, distributable media. Record labels hire big name producers to assist the recording and creation process. Record labels then enable the artist to receive exposure on television, radio, and whatever format du jour that looks good. This promotion enables artists to sell hundreds of thousands of copies of their songs instead of just hundreds of copies. The money generated from these sales is divided three ways between the record label, the producer, the manager, and the artist(s). Why does the artist, who is creating the product, get the short end of the stick?
Answer: If an engineer creates a product for Company X, and Company X sells this product and makes millions off of the idea, the engineer will not see a large percentage of the money generated from his/her idea.
If an engineer came up with a brilliant product idea, but after one widget was sold, consumers could infinitely copy it... The engineer might be slightly upset if that began to happen.
If an engineer creates a widget that sells millions of copies, and this widget was copied because the original widget broke, the engineer might still be upset. If you broke your widget, then you should have to pay to replace your widget. If you need a backup widget, you should just buy two. If you can't use your widget, then why did you buy it? Remember that if there is enough demand for alternatives to widgets, then someone else could create a wadget and sell to this new market.
The music industry does not like this new technology because now it is not possible for an artist to sell a CD that is full. Have you noticed that some store bought audio tapes can hold up to 90 minutes of music? CDs are a bit of a step backwards. And, even though people recognize the superior audio capabilities of several audio formats, they are not being used or widely sold. Admittedly, that could be due to format wars. But, I would love to go to the store and buy a CD with every single song ever recorded by an artist. This is easily possible with MP3s. I might even be willing to pay more than $20, especially for prolific artists. I could live with the lower sound quality because of the quantity provided. This is not happening. I hate the music industry, which is determined to suicide by means of terrible public relations.
Webmaster Wanted - Entropic Reactions
Alteration is fine, but at least leave in the bit for the original copyright holder, modernhumorist.com.
I bet you rip GNU licenses and copyright notices out of the source code people give you too.
Not only do I see this being passed in a crippled form, but when it is; I fully expect to see the media we're currently using crippled even more.
I'd imagine anyone who was using vynil when they made the push to CDs knows what I'm talking about.
How about the Billboard Top 100 Singles by year on a single disc. As a huge fan of 80's music, I would rather drop $50 for each disc to get the hits from '84, '85, and '86 rather than several hundred dollars on individual discs or crappy compilations that are 80% filler anyway.
How about releasing a band's entire back catalog on one of these discs, complete with liner notes, lyrics and videos for $100. The Complete Pink Floyd. The Complete Led Zepellin. The Complete Iron Maiden (no snickering).
How about releasing The Essential Tour Compilation. Take the top 25 live shows from a band's previous tour and add travel diaries, interviews, and massive picture galleries. I'd drop a c note on that.
The best part is that this will fit seemlessly into how I already use my music. I curse those stacks and stacks of CDs that take up space in my closet, no longer used because I prefer the freedom a 24x CD-RW drive, dual 100GB hard drives, and a RioVolt that plays MP3 CDs give me.
The music industry has had its collective head up its collective arse for way too long. The technology is there just begging to be used in new and interesting ways, but they're still crunching the numbers with an abacus! Give me a fair price, flush the DRM bullshit and stop calling me a fucking "pirate" and maybe I'll help save your pathetic industry.
We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat
- Ministry
...MiniDisc.org.
Y'know, like WalkMan and DiscMan. Give me a DVD-Man with 7 or so CDs worth of MP3s. Now yer talkin. Cheap and reliable (in theory).
Sony's unit will probably use OpenMG for DRM, just like the NetMD enabled MD units do. What this essentially means is that the tracks on the disc will be encrypted in a way that only allows them to play on YOUR player, and "uploading" tracks will only be possible to the desktop machine that they originated on, and then only if there's still an encrypted backup of the track stored on the hard drive there. Even with that much restriction, the NetMD MD players limit the number of times any particular track may be downloaded onto a disc.
Expect as least that much hassle with the Sony unit. Do a search for "OpenMG" for the full horror story.
-P.
A CD is 1411.2kbps 44.1kHz 16bit stereo PCM, with basic error correction codes, with around 74~80 minutes of maximum capacity.
30 hours means 1800 minutes, divide 1800 with 74, and you get 24.324324324, so that means 24x times compression. Divide 1411.2kbps by 24.324324324 and you get around 58kbps.
One more try, divide 1800 with 80, get 22.5, divide 1411.2 by 22.5, get 62kbps.
So basically, they use they're saying they're using approx. 58~62kbps ATRAC3 on a CD. Doesn't sound all that nice to me.
Anyone know whether this is remotely competitive with ogg vorbis? I really don't see it as likely, but one never knows...
May we never see th
Indeed... and it in fact makes great corporate sense. If you see the opportunities, attack/compete with your own company - if you don't, someone else will and you will lose all.
- Hosting Guide http://www.mirical.co.uk -
Children in the back cause accidents. Accidents in the back cause childr
There are many more ways to compress audio than just dropping the kpbs...
I look forward to reading more about the respective positions of Sone Electronics and Sony music with regard to these types of products. The article cited provided no further insight over and beyond what is esentially a product announcement. This raises a larger issue. As journalism covering technological subjects becomes more provasive in line with new technologies themselves, it appears that the calibre if journalism is declining at an ever-faster rate. Vary disappointing...
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Codec is used in Sony's Minidisc recorders and the RealAudio 8 compression format.
Versions used by Minidisc:
There are different implementations, they are called:
They have the same bitstream syntax (ATRAC1), but different quality (like MP3's Xing vs. Lame). ATRAC-1 had many problems (pre-echos, metallic sound, 15 kHz bandwidth). The ATRAC-3 implementation was the first with good quality.
Versions used by RealAudio 8:
Links:
> What if I want to put all of the MP3's I legitimately downloaded from MP3.com or 1Sound.com or Ampcast.com or Besonic.com or JavaMusic.com or...
You don't seem to get it. The RIAA doesn't acknowledge the _existence_ of legal MP3 files (or any other type of files - divx, etc.). To do so would make people see the gaping hole in their 'proof' that file-trading is the same as stealing a CD. Don't _ever_ expect the RIAA to 'get it'. They get it - and they're lying their asses off (and likely PAYING off) hoping the legislators WON'T get it.
Yes, they could make shitloads more money by making use of new technology - that's not the point. The RIAA know this. Their big thing is CONTROL over the entertainment products (and the artists that create them). This is all about control, not the initial revenue. AFTER they have grabbed total control, THEN they can choke the money out of everyone. It's just like MS - they'll take a massive monetary hit in initial revenue to take over a market and destroy their competition. Yes, Xbox, I'm talking about you.
Compression is, by definition, dropping the kbps..
Lossy compression works by dropping the file size in a way that's meant to be difficult to perceive.
I have no idea what you're trying to say : )
> Erm... since when was burning a CD illegal... or risky
Dude, at the speed and heat levels those new CD-ROMs operate at, a flaming, spinning CD could come flying outta there and cut your head clean off! Sure, the heat of the CD would cauterize the wound, but it wouldn't matter
And if that's the case, then you're suddenly in violation of the DMCA - two people sharing one CD - that's piracy! Doesn't matter if one person is a head with spiderlegs and the other is a body (sans head) with a gaping maw with teeth where the head used to be. Two peeps, one CD = piracy.
Really, you just can't win. Either you're dead or you're an alien in violation of the DMCA. That just blows.
Maybe the RIAA doesn't want people burning their own CDs because of the safety factor. Yeah, that's it - they're really just concerned about your health!
Sony does food
F -8&q=sony+food
= story&webzine=htt&publication=htt&articleid=CA2287 51
11 restuaraunts in the Metreon
http://www.metreon.com/dining/index.html
and take a look at
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UT
Sony does textiles
http://www.hometextilestoday.com/index.asp?layout
Culver City, CA -- Sony Pictures Entertainment property Spider-Man Merchandising L.P. has forged licensing partnerships with four new licensees to help the property expand its stable of home textiles goods.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Y'know, I'm perfectly happy with "only" being able to put 10 (or so) hours of music onto an MP3 CD. If I need to have more than 10 hours worth of music on me at any one time, I'm traveling *waaay* too far from my house to be driving.
Its just got to happen:
Sony sue's itself due to percieved copyright infringement
Sony uses the DMCA against itself in America.
StarTux
"It's a no-brainer. Anything which lets people pirate more music like this has to be very bad news for the music industry," says a spokesman for Britain's record industry trade association, the BPI.
"It's a no-brainer. Anything which lets people enjoy their music on-the-go on their own terms is a good thing," says the general public.
Why Sony should want to launch a recorder that might make piracy easier may seem surprising, as its Sony Music division makes and sells CDs. While Sony Music did not want to comment on its sister company's launch, Mike Tsurumi, a president of Sony Consumer Electronics in Berlin, insists that the move makes sense. "The music companies need to change their business model," he says.
As if that was really news...Mike Tsurumi needs to talk to the head of Sony Music.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
I personally love MiniDisc, and I must say that if they plan do use the lower bitrate for ATRAC3, I dunno.. Because it's not that great. Anything higher is great, just the lower end of the spectrum can't hold up at all. Now, for piracy, I don't know what to say about that, but remember that if you assume that a cd comes with 80% crap, you'll think that it's 80% crap.
...is getting all beat up by those technology bullies. Ah, poor little music industry.
Only one of those bullies is SONY who is also one of the world's biggest music companies. But, I know, I know, just because two departments are in the same megacorp doesn't mean that they still do not compete.
But the ole dinosaur of the old totalitarian music industry is dying. Let it be buried and it's body rot and evole into oil. Time for the next wave!
First, we will duplicate and distribute all information for next to nothing.
Next, we will duplicate and distribute all goods (replicators) for next to nothing.
And finally, we will duplicate and distribute all services for next to nothing (robots).
Money is doomed. Paradise is coming.
I mean c'mon Neo!!! uses them in The Matrix to give away (well actually sell) all his super 1337 hax0r shit! I know I ran out the next day and bought a drive just like he had.
Didn't everybody else?
But I thought...
Nevermind
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
A single DVD can contain 57 hours of 192kbps mp3, as you can imagine you could just hear the yells from the RIAA 20 blocks away when this beauty was released.
They serve plates with ten things on it.
You get no choice on what food goes on which plate. If you want fries, you get nine more food items as well, whether you want them or not, and pay full price for all.
So you want a burger, fries, and a coke. That's three plates. Fries come on one, the other has a burger on it, and a coke comes with a third. You get a shitload of asparagus, beans, corn, some sort of goo claimed to be edible, along with other unwanted items.
Tell me, honestly, would you eat there?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
I'm not quite sure how all of these codecs compare to Ogg but from my experience with it, I found it to be quite good. It was about 1/3 smaller than MP3's and the same quality. (At least as far as I could tell) I just wish the P2P community would trade more music as ogg's.
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
The constant bass'rs that drive by my house really piss me off.
Please copy as much as you can. Buy nothing. Kill the music industry so I can get some sleep!
You know, 4.7GB is probably a bit too much storage for a single disc. I'd really like to see one of those 1.5 GB mini-cds put to use in a small portable. It would be competition for the iPod, anyway, and much needed one at that.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Phillips' MP3/DVD portable may be yet to be released but the Sony MPDAP20U has already been out for a couple of months. It seems like the Holy Grail of Portables: 24X/10X/24X CD-RW, 8X DVD-ROM (plays MP3/DVDs), USB 2.0, LCD remote, no DRM, and oh yeah, it has a Memory Stick slot, too. It's a little spendy at $299. Page 33 of the User Guide confirms that MP3 on DVD-R/RW is a go (and via Memory Stick as well). Here's a review.
Free content is only free if your time is worth nothing.
Piracy LEGALIZED can't compete with commercial businesses. There is no incentive to work many hours a day to offer a complete range of "products" when there is no compensation, and bandwidth is too expensive to give away. Two immutable laws that no amount of rah rah rah can overcome.
If "customers" could type a search term and have it serve up a direct download link to a 200kbps server, then the warezzzzzzzzzzzzz approach might be able to compete.
But it ain't happenin'
See www.emusic.com/bem/new_signup/terms.html
If someone misuses your account, it's your fault even though they acknowledge that the login procedure isn't secure. Similarly your CC transactions. And see www.emusic.com/help/privacy_policy.html for details how they'll let every spam the **** out of you, and sell you info to anyone. And they can change any of the conditions by posting the changes on a non-front-page of the site, without guaranteeing to email customers these changes. However they are prepared to let 'partners' spam you. Thanks Vivendi, but no thanks. Just a BIT loaded your way...
Actualy the analogy analogy fits depending where you eat. Fast food people do not know there is a diffrence. When you go to the restraunt, you actualy hire the waiter, the bus boy, the dishwasher, the muzak in the background, the wine stuard, the .... Just because I don't like wine doesn't mean I won't have a wine stuard. It's true I do have the choice not to tip him if I don't order wine. ... It is included in the price.
When I go to the record store, I do have a choice between Motzart and The Backstreet Boys. You still hire and pay for the cashier, the lighting, the stock boy, the heating/air conditioning, the window washer
The Fast Food a-la-carte model is missing from the RIAA lineup for most on a budget and looking to pick and choose. If everytime I had to eat out, it took 2 hours and cost $60 + per person, I certanly would find an alternative, just like with music. However the full deal is nice once in a while. (Some albums are great, but they are far and few between)
The truth shall set you free!
No, I wouldn't eat at that restaurant -- but that has little to do with the service being offered. At the risk of belaboring your analogy, the Sony portable player would serve the purpose of a large doggie bag -- having already payed for the thirty entrees proffered, the player simply allows me not to eat the ones I don't like.
Granted, a user can choose to infringe on copyright, but this glorified mp3 player hardly enhances his ability to do so. I mean, with it, he downloads an mp3 and puts it on the player. Without it, he downloads an mp3 and puts it on his iPod, Archos, or Rio. Or he could burn it to a CD, or listen to it on his computer. How this device promote piracy any more than a high-capacity mp3 player?
you people whine way too much about having to buy an album when you only want one track.
...
can i buy a titanium ibook case alone, to use as a legal pad holder?
can i subscribe to cable one channel at a time?
can i pay for only the interesting lectures at defcon?
half a serving of fries at mcdonald's?
half-shot of expresso at starbucks?
it's a fact of life that not every product is distributed in the way you prefer. it's not a divine mandated right that products must be delivered in the form you demand.
some claim to be willing to pay more for distribution in ways that they prefer. that's a start, but are you willing to pay *enough*?
if bill gates offered $1 million a track to get his music one track at a time, would the riaa not jump at the opportunity and embrace single-track distribution? if not them, then someone else.
but when some slashdot drone offers a whopping fifty cents a track, how can we be shocked when nobody bites?
paying more is not enough. you have to pay enough extra to make it worth their while.
some guy said he'd gladly pay a whopping FIFTY DOLLARS to buy all the greatest rolling stone hits ever on one uber-compressed cd.
right. and we still wonder why the riaa see's no reason to embrace this new technology.
I vote for Cowboy Neal... ;)
If the RIAA were reasonable and expected reasonable compansation people would pay but instead they get $0 instead of $50 when this reasonable consumer is willing to spend money they do not give him an option. They demand we do not pirate but also demand exorbant sums of money. Why should I drop $275 on a bunch of 80s CD's when I want maybe 50-100 songs, go through the trouble of finding them ripping them making compilations when I can go spend a fraction of the time, probably when I am on the job a few hours spread over a few days, burn them and it costs me maybe $10. It will continue like this with DRM because people will be able to circumvent it, always.
And afterwards it's like there's a really intense vacuum in your guts! Great stuff! I'm thinking of setting up a website with pictures and everything!
The RIAA is retarded, everyday the recording losses money, people have made it clear and that is what matters. Piracy will occur and be prevailent regardless of DRM measures, only giving consumers what they want will slow piracy, it becomes a situation of convience and a little bit of money is worth less than being inconvienced. So here is my statement to the RIAA, either you stop the shit and get paid or continue and don't get paid.
Frankly, if you buy cds with only 1-2 songs you like, or even download only those 1-2 songs you like as mp3s, you have SHITTY taste in music. There's plenty of music out there where the entire disc is good.
Get away from all the pop BS that's on the radio and find some real music.
DVD can be double sided...ie you need
to flip them over. This was put in the
standard from the begining. As such
4.7 and 9+ GB can be fit on a single
blank full sided DVD. The smaller
DVD's also support fliping so they
hold even more then most think.
Yeah, and they'd probably want me to Pay Every Time I Eat!! ;)
APE is a non-lossy format, like FLAC. Generally you're lucky to average better than 50% compression with any non-lossy format.
Ogg Vorbis at q=( -0.5 ) would record around the proposed 58~62kbps rate, not with audiophile quality. It would be adequate for the sort of listener that always recorded cassette tapes with Dolby NR turned off, but I'm betting that most consumers hold "digital" sound to a higher standard, and would lose interest in the product when it got out that the sound was audibly degraded.
(Thanks for the Obligatory Ogg Post opportunity.)
...that will let people copy between 30 and 100 hours of music onto a single disc.
I was getting sick of changing CDs on road trips from Miami to Anchorage.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
I'm a singer in an original band. If you ask me, this would be a great way to get music to the masses. We're already savvy enough to deal with the RIAA, and we also feel that P2P filesharing is a great way to get our music out.
Yes, we own all the copyrights. But we don't mind the music being spread around for free. Four words: Word Of Mouth Advertising. Works wonders for any business. The more people hear it, the more people show up at gigs and buy CDs, T's, etc.
A device like this is a musician's dream. When you want to move music around, you're limited to the capacity of CD-Rs and RW's. Well, us po' musicians, anyway. LOL. But I digress. A device like this would save us a WORLD of trouble. All band members record whatever they work on, passing it back and forth via handheld devices such as this, and their computers at home.
The format to record and compress should be open standard, DRM-free codecs, like anything Vorbis. Since I'm the singer, but also something of a geek, I would much prefer Open Source options. Linux-based onboard OS? We know Sony's at least halfway Linux-friendly. They did put out a PS2 kit...
That'd most certainly be something I'd use. Screw DRM. Oh no, I'm going to pirate my own music! Better stop me before I can! I don't want a whole bunch of encryption crap in my music, just the music codec itself. That's just being a pain in the ass, and you know Microsoft is going to lobby for proprietary control. No, no, a hundred times no. Open Source, DRM-Free.
Oh wait. I'm sorry. Everything I stand for isn't what the RIAA/MPAA/MS want. This technology gives me more freedom, allows me to absorb some of the cost of getting a break, and makes things easier all-around. It lessens their involvment, and thus lessens the amount of bucks they deserve. That's bad, isn't it.
I'm just a dumb, awe-struck-by-the-business musician, what do I know...
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
I have to agree almost completly with you, I wish the recording industries would just learn that people want easily accessible music, and only certains songs, not whole albums. I wish they'd move on to a new business modo. Though it's understandable why they're so reluctant, they're really the first of it's kind to being pressured to change a business structure to such an extreme. For example, where do we buy food? At our local supermarket or corner store, it's been like that for years.. can you see yourself getting food any another way? (aside from having your own farm...) Though we could all easily say that if these food distributers had an easier cheaper way of getting their product out, they'd do it.. But what about all the corner stores and supermarkets. Their importance is demeaned and then they go bankrupt. And there aren't just a couple supermarkets in the country, we're FLOODED with them.. This seems to be the same with the recording industry, say what you want, though you've been distributing music for years succesfully in one way, have established stores / sources that buy your music to sell in their stores (stores such as HMV, Sam the Record Man etc.) And then you're being pressured into giving up this reliable TRUSTWORTHY source to buy and LEGALLY sell your music. It's not going to be an easy transition in short, and I wouldn't be so willing to change my self.
Yeah, and they'd probably want me to Pay Every Time I Eat!! ;)
I'm sorry, sir -- your friend is going to have to cough that french fry back up.
When debating about lossy formats with variable parameters, it can easily get to the point of making a flamewar of "quality vs. bitrate", "MP3 vs. OGG vs. ATRAC vs. whatever".
/.er noted, the MDLP and NetMD features were created by pure marketing necessity, Sony basically noticed some people are too stupid and don't give a damn about quality when presented with silly figures like "X hours of music on a disk".
But you're missing the point. You are talking about Sony, a big consumer electronics company, not about esoteric command line parameters.
On a regular Minidisc deck, you don't get to manage the ATRAC compression parameters and bitrate, and you get a very good quality and a real "guarantee" that if you are using all-Sony equipment, your recorded Minidiscs are going to sound just great. This is simple, and users love it.
Now, MP3 is a format that almost nobody but experienced people understands. As you said: "MP3s encoded at 128kbps CBR (constant bit rate) using an encoder such as Xing WILL result in poor-quality mp3s". Want to bet how many people sharing their MP3s collections on P2P know that? Popular MP3s on the 'Net are of average quality, at best. Most of them are real crap (well, some songs may not deserve any better).
ATRAC is a format users DON'T NEED to understand. Minidisc is a user-end oriented product, and a really good one at that. ATRAC even has full forward and backward compatibility, meaning you don't need to know which versions of encoded discs and decoder players you have for them to work perfectly.
Now, as other
MDLP and NetMD are there for a reason, it's comparable to the quality Kaaza lusers are used to from their crappy MP3s, while keeping the simplicity of the Minidisc format.
- Otaku no naka no otaku, otaking da!!!
Let's get this format war bull over with. I'm a street vendor that burns on the spot CD's and DVD's of music for customers using a laptop and a large hard drive. I can offer up to about 375 or so high quality songs on a DVD disc, but unfortunately, most people have CD drives, not DVD drives, and the CD stereos they have can only play back wmp format. We need portable and home stereos to adapt to mp3 playback, and need to get DVD drives everywhere asap.
I can get about 55-60 songs on a CD disc in a high quality (256) format for $10, and as mentioned before, about 375 songs in the same high quality format for $25. The demand is incredible. The only problem I have is it takes so long for customers to choose songs. Grouping everything by genre and band helps, and for the DVDs, it's less critical on which songs are included, due to the large number that my customers like, and the simplicity in which the program I created makes it easy to select/deselect the songs, then burn the discs right away. The discs are so popular that I hailed a cab the other day, and the cab driver was using a CD player resting on the car seat that plugged into the car stereo, and she was playing back a CD that I had burned for maybe her boyfriend or husband the previous week. Or maybe she copied it. But I noticed the unusual mix right away.
Let's get this format war over with. This is America. It's hurting my profits.
One name like...C...
file size, divided by play time.
so what I was saying was: compression is the reduction of file size.
Mysteriously enough, most audiophiles hear what they want to hear. Somehow I trust the real double-blind studies I've seen with real audiophiles, with real audiophile equipment, that don't know if they're listening to a CD or an mp3 (up front I mean) much more than an audiophile that pops in a CD in his $$$ system and says "well listen to *my* system and you'll hear the difference.
And those studies say a good mp3 encoding (192k/s VBR / 256k/s CBR) is as good as the CD. Worked on a couple of friends of mine at least... was shitting mp3, but they couldn't tell them apart when I encoded to mp3, decoded to wav and burned in random pairs (original/mp3 pair) on CD.
Also as for b), blaming the PC equipment is very much redundant, as any serious half-audiophile will use the digital out to connect to a much better sound system than a PC audio card. Just don't start talking to me about gold plated radiation shielded bubblewrapped digital sound cables, please?
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If memory serves its not so much the unshielded cable that causes problems for modem lines as the junctions between cables. Each spawns a reflection on the wire, most pronounced when changing media, e.g. from copper to aluminium. So, buying Monster's 5-foot cable will likely help not at all. However, buying a single 15-foot cable to replace two shorter ones may do.
Why does the artist, who is creating the product, get the short end of the stick?
;)
Because in short, the actual artist is rarely something *that* unique. Remember all those 13 to a dozen boy/girl/undecided-bands? The record companies control the advertizing channels, and so they can push prices, since without them the artists would be nobodys. Every time the subject comes up on slashdot, they say that artists should put up mp3s and sell it themselves, get it played on streaming radios etc. But the fact is, I don't know of *one* single artist that has managed to become rich and famous using that business model.
If an engineer creates a widget that sells millions of copies, and this widget was copied because the original widget broke, the engineer might still be upset. If you broke your widget, then you should have to pay to replace your widget.
The physical medium is of basicly *no value*. What value there is, is in the intellectual property contained on that file. So if the physical medium gets broken, I should have to buy the IP all over again? That's like saying you should buy a new car when the tire blew, even tought the tire is a fairly irrelevant part that can be detached from the rest of the system and replaced, in much the same way the IP can be transferred to a new physical medium. To facilitate that, you need a backup. Oh also, most widgets don't permanently disappear if you accidentally hit the delete button, like say a downloaded mp3. Does widgets come with a button that doubles as a self-destruct button? I doubt it.
But, I would love to go to the store and buy a CD with every single song ever recorded by an artist. This is easily possible with MP3s. I might even be willing to pay more than $20, especially for prolific artists.
Why should they, when they can make people pay X cds at $20 each instead? Usually you get a discount (say Y%) for buying large, so the price would be $20 * X * (1-Y), but still way past $20. I'm pretty sure they have their profit point well defined, and that any lower or higher price would get them lower profits.
That is one thing the whiners here complain about, that when you get to buy track-by-track, it costs as much or more than the pr. track price of a CD. Well of course... it's a discount, just like the "15 CD pack for the price of 10", "15 track pack for the price of 10 (chosen individually)" If you accept those two as identical, a natural consequence is that pr. track charges will be higher than for a full CD, not cheaper. But heh... I talk too much sense for being on slashdot
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The development of a new interstate highway system is being condemned by leading automobile manufacturers as "a deadly blow to the industry's lifeblood". Manufacturers fear that without the income from the frequent repairs cars currently needs as a result of trying to use rough, unimproved roads crowded with sometimes dozens of cars, the industry will crumble. Says a spokesman for Nash, maker of the popular "Rambler", "These new highways are smooth, roomy, and safe. By making it easy for vast numbers of cars to go long distances with a much lower risk of accident, these Interstate Highways threaten to reduce the need for service and replacement parts drastically, cutting into the vital after-sales market the industry depends on for its revenue stream."
How come that Sony Corp keeps shooting itself in the foot this way?
JeR
Presumably if you locate the MP3 file in question, copy it to another file and change one of the ID3 fields in the new file, the music manager software will think it's a new file that you can then copy a further two more times?
Just a thought. Can't verify it since I don't have a NetMD (I did have a first-generation MP3 CD player, it was quite a novelty at that time), but it might be less painful than having to do MP3-CD-MP3-MDLP conversion.
Regards,
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
Is this anything like the old 8-track players?
jeezus. all of a sudden these fat slobs go luddite when the same technology they depend on gets better.
evolve or die has always been the way the world works - they need to go re-read every decent history book ever penned.
they are fast becoming irrelevant, and need to realize they are fast approaching the point where you can always find a awy to keep music out there - right now it's a detent, but push a little harder and i'll bet the rest of the world spends their spare time undercutting their model in a way that will make napster look like marconi.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
You don't have to change ID tags, just reimport the song into the software that comes with a NetMD Minidisc player. You can check out 2 copies of each MP3 import copy.
A big drawback of this whole deal is you are essentially taking a lossy compression and compressing it again with another lossy compression. It sounds decent if you start with a pretty good MP3, but low quality MP3s recorded onto a MD player sound like crap. CDs ripped right to the MD player sound tight though.
Most of my listening is done two places, either walking with a portable or driving in my car. My portable is a Teac mini-CD MP3 player (plays ISOs with MP3s on the small CDs), my car is the CD player that came with it ('01 Honda CR-V).
While walking outside, there's so much background noise and my headphones (either the earbuds or my Koss Porta-Pro juniors) just aren't good enough to be able to tell a "really good" MP3 from an OK one. I have a ton encoded with the Xing encoder (most were done with VBR), and I couldn't tell you which ones were which, they sound fine to me. I can tell *damaged* MP3s (those with skips, bad warble) but not "bad" ones.
It's even more true in my car. My car CDs are audio CDs but made from MP3 files. The car is such a noisy environment, that I don't see how you could tell a "good" MP3 from a "bad" one (again, damaged is another category).
I think you'd have to do some serious, high-quality headphone listening in a really quiet environment to be able to tell the difference. I think the vast majority of people might be able to tell the difference in some places with A/B listening when coached, but if you just put the MP3 on and played it they'd never say "that sounds off, is it a 128k xing?"
I have a studio in my basement and a relatively worthless audio engineering degree. I can hear the the difference between radio shack 12 gauge and radio shack 14 gauge cabling on good gear halfer + infinity. Yeah, ohms law says that I should not even be losing more than a single decibel but the bottom end is tighter on the 12 gauge cabling and I bet you could hear it too. My testing is done with the same cable ends (gold radio shack bananna clips) so it must be the cabling. The system is 250 watts rms a side. I think that you could hear it too. I tested with 24 bit by 96khz audio, cd audio and Rekerdz. I would agree that most audiophile crap is utter bullshit. But, if you go to an audiophile store the gear there sounds light years better than Best Buy crap. I would not spend money for crazy cabling, but I will buy the better radio shack crap.
When you're flying on airplanes you're supporting terrorism?
Seriously, with HD-based MP3 players, why would you want to swap discs any more? I started off a few years ago with an AIWA CDC-MP3 that would play MP3s on CD-Rs, and that was great. Trouble is to update your CDs with new music you have to fiddle with buning each one. Even if I only had 9 or 10 CDs it was still a bit of a hassle.
But now that I've gone to Dension DMP3 HD-based player, I've got 40GB of space in one big chunk. Last I checked I've only got 20GB of music, so I'm in good shape for a long time.
It's called satire. If you don't know what that is, blame your teachers. Or maybe is isn't their fault, because you are the moron.
Thank you!
The editor actually read the articles and contributed something more significant than the story submitter for once!
The repair shop/construction industry in NYC solved this problem with the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The BQE has been under construction for the last 30+ years that I've been on it.
And the potholes on it still knock your teeth loose.
How is this a troll? Aren't there any user-capitalists that care to defend my stance that Communism overthrows the individual? You guys are always saying that in no uncertain terms...
If I could preview a lo-fi stream of a track, then buy it for 50 or 75 cents, I'd do this. One of the biggest reasons I feel somewhat justifeid stealing music is all the times I got hosed by a CD with one good track and the rest garbage. I figure the R.A. and I are about square as of now. But 1.49 pounds for a track? They're dreaming.
Tell me, honestly, would you eat there?
I'm going to ignore arguments about whether the metaphor is accurate, and point to a real world example -- people buy music. They're willing to do so. Zillions of CDs are sold each year. They may prefer to simply download and hand around music, but if the providing company can't make money from doing so, it's not going provide this as a service.
May we never see th
The music industry is people too, and they "want it", just in this case something different: DRM.
The music industry would love nothing better than to not have to deal with DRM. The music industry wants to make money. The only reason they flirt with DRM is because people fail to pay if they can pirate.
The irony is music was a public good until the entertainment industry used technology to make it a commodity
No, I disagree. Sheet music or phonograph records are at *least* as much of a commodity as a CD-ROM.
You mean before international IP agreements existed? Sure, and that's where the phrase "starving artist" came from. People regularly stole stuff and screwed the artist over.
Allowing such a trivial, disposal industry to set global guidelines on storage capacities and data transfers borders on comical.
What, precisely, are you referring to? I don't seem to recall the RIAA complaining about the size of my hard drive...
Looked at dispassionately, it's probably the Chinese music industry which strikes the right balance and Hollywood's obscene excess that's out of whack.
And yet how much music originating in China do you listen to versus how much from the United States?
May we never see th