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.

Comments

Sony is Schizophrenic

[Fnkmaster]

Sony has become a rather schizo company. Their consumer electronics division seems to want to make cool, sleek gadgets and their music division seems to want to prevent this from happening.

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?

As usual

[JWyner]

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...

Re:As usual

[0x0d0a]

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...

Lots of people might want to have massive orgies, too. If you can look at only the upsides of something, and not the consequences, lots of things can come off as quite attractive.

I don't know how the numbers wind up. I don't know whether it's actually the case that record companies supporting this would be good or bad for them. However, I do know that saying that CD companies would make money doing something just because people want it doesn't mean that it's a good idea, if it puts people in a game-theoretic position where music is a public good -- and stealing it is better for any individual, though it screws everyone over long run.

So you can't claim that "people want it" is a good reason for a company to do something (particularly as people don't have perfect information, and tend to be short-sighted about the consequences of this). Think about the article that was run on Slashdot a while ago about what happened to the Chinese music industry because of mass piracy. It's not dead, no, but it's nowhere near as productive as the US industry, either.

Heck, if people didn't want to do things that were stupid ideas, you wouldn't see people doping up.

Re:As usual

[geekee]

"Because consumer copying, now equals piracy... even if you've bought the original music you're transferring."

No. The real problem is you can't protect against one without restricting the other. Record companies don't really care about backup copies. They're more concerned with downloading 100 songs from Kazaa and burning them, rather than buying the music.

Re:As usual

[kaiguy]

Actually, all any commercial company does is attempt to find out what people want, and provide it to them. We're not talking about a moral justification here, with consequences to consider, and an absolute right or wrong. We're talking about a potential service that a demand obviously exists for, and the music industry being too blind to recognize a potenial way to cash in on this demand. This is Economics, not Ethics.

Re:As usual

[Pharmboy]

No. The real problem is you can't protect against one without restricting the other. Record companies don't really care about backup copies. They're more concerned with downloading 100 songs from Kazaa and burning them, rather than buying the music.

But they are willing to take away your right to backup in order to keep you from using Kazaa. Thats the problem. No matter what they spend, they can not stop it. If they make it impossible to record from disk, then people will make very high quality analog verisons, then digitize. It will still be good enough. But now you have pissed off your customers, who will delight in sticking it to you.

Another problem: Much of the new music coming out on major labels is not much better than private label stuff out of some home studios, and freely available. They can't control that either.

Until they realize that they can't put the toothpaste back into the tube and change their business model, they will have this problem. Someone here pointed me to emusic.com, which has a great model IMHO. Just not the absolute newest stuff. $10 a month for unlimited music.

It's a no-brainer

[Malor]

"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.

See, the problem is...

[MP3Chuck]

... 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...

Face it, sail-makers:

[smittyoneeach]

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.

Dirt Nap

[DreamingReal]

Someone please put a bullet in the goddamn music industry already. If the first reaction from these empty suits is fear of copyright infringement rather than excitement about new revenue channels, then they have overstayed their usefulness. Shit man, 30 or 100 hours on a single disc? The possibilities are endless.

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.

Re:ATRAC3

[ldspartan]

More accurately:
Before MDLP, minidiscs just used ATRAC, which (correct me if I'm wrong) is a psychoacoustic encoding with a compression ratio of around 7:1. At this point an Minidisc, with a capacity of around 120MB, can store as much audio as a CD.

With the advent of portable MP3 players, Sony realized that minidisc would be drastically outmoded if MD could not store more. They came out with a considerably more lossy codec which extended ATRAC and called it MDLP. This codec was a lot more like MP3, as Sony presumed (correctly) that people would be willing to deal with the quality loss, since MP3 is not a hugely high quality codec. At the lowest quality setting its passable only for Audio Books, but it sounds pretty good (in my personal experience) at higher settings.

This MDLP technology is what Sony is using to make up the statistics on this machine. I also bet they're quoting stats at the lowest, hugely crappy setting.

--
Phil

30 hours on a CD around 58~62kbps

[kjoonlee]

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.

Re:Ultra-efficient ATRAC?

[fmaxwell]

ATRAC was heavily criticized in audio publications such as Stereophile

Stereophile refuses to perform double-blind testing and have been taken in by hoax after hoax. They swore that coloring the edge of a CD green (with a product called "CD Stoplight") improved the sound. I used to subscribe but got sick of the $400 speaker cables, magic line cords, and other unscientific "tweaks."

If Stereophile's reviewers go into a listening session and are told that they are hearing audio that has been subjected to a type of lossy compression, they have a preconceived notion that it will sound inferior. They want, desperately, to hear a difference to prove to themselves, their colleagues, and their readers that they posess both superior hearing and exquisite audio equipment. It's no way to do science and should be rejected as a methodology.

Music? Food?

[anubi]

Consider a restaurant run by the RIAA.

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?

Re:ATRAC3

[Ryan Amos]

Well also helping sony here was the fact that MDs are pretty much exclusively used as portables (yeah, some guys like to master to MDs, but that's a totally different market.) Most people using portables have shitty $10 headphones because they use them while working out, sitting on the bus, etc. With crappy headphones, the difference between MDLP4 (think 60kbit mp3s) and ATRAC3 is more or less inaudible. With MDLP4, I can fit 4 CDs on one minidisc. Yes, they're all mono and crappy quality, but I use my MD while working out anyway, so I don't care.

The problem with sony's codecs is that they're not "open." I'm not one of those zealots here, but ATRAC3 and MDLP have a significant amount of DRM associated with them. The NetMD software absolutely blows. Why? Because you have to "check out" your MP3s. You can only have a song "checked out" twice, then you have to check it in (delete it from an MD) to use it on another MD. There are ways to get around this (use Nero to burn MP3s to an image, mount the image then NetMD treats it like a legit CD) but it's largely a pain in the ass that accomplishes nothing.

Also, there will probably never be a program that will put songs on an MD that's not written by Sony. ATRAC3 and MDLP belong to Sony, and you're almost assured to get sued if you release another program that doesn't allow them to use DRM to protect Columbia records (a Sony holding.) If it weren't such a royal pain in the ass, NetMD would probably own the market, but as it is, it's a bit too cumbersome for most people.

Re:Ultra-efficient ATRAC?

[Animats]

Indeed. anyone who makes claims about audio quality without ABXing (double-blind testing) should be ignored compeletely.

Yes. High End audio types are hysterical. "Oxygen-free copper cables", indeed.

Now there are even "high end" RJ11 cables for dial-up modems. Like the five feet from the wall jack to the computer will be where noise gets in, as opposed to the miles of unshielded wire from the jack to the central office.

MP3 is not high quality on comsumer electronics

[Rolman]

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".

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 /.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".

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.