Slashdot Mirror
Stations Can't Play Crippled Music Disks
arb writes "The Age is reporting that some radio stations are unable to play copy-protected CDs. It seems at least one radio station is facing problems transferring CD tracks to their digital playout system. Is the lack of radio air-play a price the record labels are willing to pay in their efforts to stamp out piracy?"
Umm, the direct URL for TuneTracker should be: http://www.tunetrackersystems.com And let's not forget the URL to the story I mentioned.
- Not multiple stations
- It's not that they can't, they just dont want to
- The article isnt much longer than this post, so you can read it yourself.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I work in radio, and since WMP's little DRM fiasco, I've been on watch about this kind of thing. So far, afaik, we haven't had any problems with copy-protected CD's and ripping (or at least the FM people haven't come and whined to me yet....). But many stations have had problems with not being able to play "unblessed" mp3's. One of our content providers sent out a memo about a month ago telling stations how to fix their XP and 2k machines that'd been DRM'd. When the EULA change came about, I consulted with our operations manager, and the decision was that WMP would not be installed/upgraded on machines that have anything to do with audio production.
What's more disgusting, however, is the amount of hassle that's involved installing broadcast and/or production software these days. Hardware keys, bajillon digit serial numbers, activation. You think turbo tax is bad. I guess, however, my users never really have to struggle with that sort of thing like I do.
Steve Jobs, if you're listening, there's money to be made in the radio automation business using the Mac platform w/out DRM.
This sort of thing is going to hit the public consciousness very soon in the UK, cos over the last two weeks there's been a new TV advert, touting the release of Pink Floyd's 30th anniversary edition of Dark Side Of The Moon using the new high quality SACD (Super Audio CD) format.
Though they mention SACD, no where does the advert mention anything about copy protection. Some people are going to get a rude shock.
Well it seems that at least in some situations the record labels are in a very funny cycle of self-flagellation.
Agreed. To see just how far this can go, take a look at this article (yes, I edited it) illustrating the situation in Germany. The Germans are currently dealing with near 100% corrupt disc releases, and people really are not at all happy. Perhaps this is worth bearing in mind considering Arista's recent announcement re US corrupt disc releases. Does the record industry really want to create the same destructive downward spiral in the US as there is now in Germany? At least Sony appear to have seen the light and have given up with corrupt releases, but EMI still appear to be believing Midbar/Macrovision propaganda.
I ripped the same CD (but a pre-release) over here (OS X / iTunes /Superdrive). Slower than imports from "standard" CD's, but still it works. It has the "copy controlled" blurb on the back of the cover.
Seems that this protection works on some models (couln't import on iMac -> crashes) but not on others. Go figure...
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
The publisher of the german computer magazine c't has started a database on copy-protected audio CD's. They call them "un-CDs' (roughly 'not-CDs'). Unfortunately so far this is only in german.
s =suche
Query page:
http://www.heise.de/ct/cd-register/default.shtml?
Master page:
http://www.heise.de/ct/cd-register/
Feedback to
cd-register@ctmagazin.de
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
The german computer magazine c't has even started a database to allow people to enter and identify 'un-CDs', (rougly: 'not=CDs') as they call them. So far only in german:
http://www.heise.de/ct/cd-register/
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
First off I haven't heard of any problems at our station so far...
However, we're quite flexible in how we can populate our playout system, Dalet in our case. We can use good old analog from a regular CD player, rip directly from CD or get them off a digital distribution system that runs in the UK called Fastrax.
Fastrax involves each station getting a machine and an ADSL line with the client software. The machine connects to Fastrax and allows you to download tracks that the record companies have chosen to distribute
My uncle is a DJ for a station in NY, and he says that EVEVY song they play is an MP3. Sure, they only play 60 songs, but all of them are MP3's! (This is a very popular Top40 Station in NYC)
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
I used to! I ran several Internet radio stations and paid license fees to ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. I downloaded most of the music from Napster because either finding the CD was too difficult or expensive, or the record companies just hadn't sent it to me yet -- (I got about 50 discs per week anyway) .. Anyway, then the RIAA got all up in arms and decided to license Internet radio stations differently (read: way more expensively) than a traditional broadcast station, and that sort of killed those in the industry that couldn't afford to wait out the legal battles.
Although technically, "making a digital copy" of something you already own or license by downloading someone else's digital copy has not (afaik) been tested legally and may be outside the terms of "fair use" that everyone is always flaunting about, I believe that radio stations using this service was one of the very few legitimate use of Napster that there ever really was.
I firmly believe that someone could start a membership P2P service where people pay a fee necessary to license about anything they want to listen to for a year and then can download freely from anyone. The fees for small broadcast stations that don't make any money are very reasonable (like $200/yr).. This is the same kind of license that department stores and whatnot have to buy to play CD's in their store. It's very cheap and available to the public. It's kind of funny that my slashdot submissions on it all get rejected (with links directly to the damn fee schedules on the respective licensor sites!) and we have all this bottom of the barrel shit on here constantly.
~GoRK
Just tell them to use ISO buster :) That way they can rip the disk and save it to a proper CD.
;)
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Wow, I'm not sure who in the world moderated you up for that "Interesting" post, but they must have been drinking heavily.
1) The CD standard is published. There is no reverse engineering rquired to understand it.
2) CD's aren't encrypted in any way, shape or form.
3) CSS is something used on DVD's containing copyrighted video. Now, while a DVD and a CD are the same physical size I hope you realize that they're actually very different in their implementation.
Yes, that much is quite apparent. But the really stupid thing is that they blindly pretend that this small loss by going through an analog phase is enough to discourage copying, while at the same time they are agressively fighting mp3 users. Mp3's do vastly more harm to the audio quality, even at high bit rates, than a pass through the analog world with good equipment will ever do. They are willing to fight mp3s, when an mp3 user just might go out and buy an album to get a good quality copy of the songs, but at the same time tick off buyers with legitimate uses of the product they bought, and some of those will turn to making analog rips that will be far higher quality than if someone was given an mp3 file to preview a music group!
Of course, their ultimate goal is to have DRM in every A to D converter in the world, so that no one can use them to re-encode audio. Not very likely, considering the legitimate uses of A to D converters that would not work well with this, and the huge number of existing A to D converters out there. So instead they just tick off the consumer and complain that sales are not growing fast enough to suit them.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
That depends on your source. If you're using one of the P2P services, that's probably what you'll get. If you get your music fix from alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.*, though, it's more likely you'll see high-bitrate (often excessively high, like 256 or even 320 kbps) MP3s encoded with LAME or other decent encoders.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.