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Replace Your Music....Again
sethadam1 writes "I was not at all surprised to find that experts are predicting the death of the compact disc in as little as 5 years. This article over at Ananova suggests the next format of music will be little fingernail-sized cards. As cool as these sound, is anyone else worried that sneaky industry folks might try to distribute all new music in DRM'ed WMA files?" Yeah, this description sounds basically like bigger Magic Gate, that wonderful situation where you can pay more than normal to get DRM. Update: 11/13 16:45 GMT by H : As RobertB-DC pointed, this is sort of a dupe - see our previous article.
fp .. why would they use drm wma? many audiophiles would be pissed at the shitty quality of the audio.
I'll keep what I have - I can't imagine what the benefit of the "upgrade" would be. I can imagine the significant limitations. Ergo, I stand pat.
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
worried, yeah, but there are ways around it. and there's no way this will kill mp3s.
This article isn't about the death of compact discs, it's about that new storage medium they've discovered that was already reported about. Death of compact disc is just Ananova's bullshit spin on the topic.
Jeez, maybe Hemos should RTFA before posting.
Compact discs could be history within five years, superseded by a new generation of fingertip-sized memory tabs with no moving parts.
Scientists say each paper-thin device could store more than a gigabyte of information - equivalent to 1,000 high quality images - in one cubic centimetre of space.
So they are fingertip sized, paper thin, and a cubic centimeter? I'm having trouble forming a mental image of this...
Once again, I'll refer to the old "Only Criminals Would Oppose This" arguement. Obviously the smaller size makes it more convenient for the consumer, right? So, it's only a good thing to us *honest* consumers. Only thieves would be phased by restrictions of fair use. I mean, come on.
You can buy music in a fingernail card in Toysrus with rhe little reader for 10$ (Can) and you can buy card with two or three song for +/- 5$ (Can)
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
will change every decade or so, but no matter what the industry players do, people who love music and wish to share it will triumph. Short of imprisoning people, there is little that anyone can do to prevent sharing of music.
One thing I can't help but wonder is how these changes in the medium we distribute music on will effect the low-budget independant musician. As a musician that's tried to produce albums without the help of a record label I have to wonder if a medium like this could do wonders for bands with no money and big dreams. I know a few years back it was rather expensive just to produce cds in bulk and cds are very inexpensive. But now, if they have these little polymer chips, it should be of almost no cost to the musician. Anyone else follow my thinking?
The guitars sound good, now give me about 10db more on the cow bell.
The technology "might" be available in five years. But we have technology right now that they could do this with - flash, and by then flash has got to be pretty cheap. Nah, I'd have to say CD's will be here for at least ten more years.
We do need something smaller, though.
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)
Does anyone else think that fingernail-sized cards for music is a BAD idea? I have enough problems keeping track of CDs sometimes, these things would be incredible easy to lose.
Of course, the RIAA would love that - "Sorry, you'll have to buy another copy!"
5 years in a very short time on the market as pervasive as the music industry. I still buy videotapes (no, not Betamax), but how long have DVDs been available? Consumer demand will keep CDs rolling until either (a) the quality of this new media is much better, (b) they offer some added value (cheaper?), or (c) CDs are simply no longer produced. I doubt that (c) would happen because the RIAA goes into fits if their revenue drops 10%, how'd they like a 50-60% drop because people don't want to buy chip players (for their homes, cars, walkmans, etc)-- it's too big of a change, too soon. Maybe 10 years...
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
Obviously the slashdotters are not going to embrace some new DRM-based format. But how about the general public? Anyone feel like they've got a handle on the prevailing opinion? I do recall Circuit City's foray into DIVX DVD's (not the codec) which was not well received at all and ultimately failed. One hopes this initiative is for an unencumbered format (yeah, right) and dies the same way.
-cw-
-- Charlie Wilkinson Freelance Deity - Fire & Brimstone in Stock - Smiting While-U-Wait!
It really was only a matter of time before a new format with one or two new features (and a few glaring flaws to be fixed in the next format) would be introduced as the replacement to the compact disc.
In my case, anything smaller than a CD can easily be lost. Think about how easy it will be to lose a fingernail size music album? Just because we CAN make it smaller, doesn't mean we should. Granted, a little smaller would be nice but that is TOO SMALL.
Other examples I can think of are compact keyboards, playstation controllers, many consumer digital cameras, etc.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
No one wants to fiddle around with something that small to hold music... it makes much more sense that we will all have digital players that can download music at wi-fi spots, wherever we are. That way, no fiddling with cards, and if the player has the little cards in it, then it can hold x GB of music, which is plenty until you get to the next wi-fi spot, which will have different songs, etc. :-D
stuff |
Of course they will, but as long as systems have a digital out (or a least speakers) there will be a way to get your "fair use" out of the music you buy.
On another note the technology seems really great, Just think, you could get your AOL "disk" built into a postcard (just pop out the chip), it could save millions for TW.
I wonder how long until you see readers for this technology.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
Does anybody actually buy MagicGate memory sticks? My clie nx70 can use them, but I don't see any point to them. As implied in the article, they cost more and do less than a regular memory stick.
I've wrestled with reality for 35 years and I'm happy to say, I finally won out - Elwood P. Dowd
just buy records at garage sales. you can get thousands of sounds for just a couple of dollars.
Distribution of music via physical means is already dead, except for niche markets. The corpse is just really large and taking time to rot.
As digital media, the CD will simply be replaced by DVDs of various kinds, same size and shape but 10+ times the capacity.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
A DRM format. I won't be able to hook the output up to my computer and be able to save it in another format. Oh wait :(
Old music formats never die, they just become niche markets. Vinyl is still around, and with CD/DVD drives on so many PCs, compact discs aren't really going to go away anytime soon. Moreover, one factor not taken into account is the packaging: what are they going to do, start printing fingernail-sized booklets of the artwork and lyrics that you can only read with an electron microscope?
What happened to SACD and DVDA .. i thought those were to replace the average Audio CD
Hmm. It happens from time to time that I lose a CD and find it back under my bed orso, months later.
Now what about a fingernail-sized thingy? I'd probably accidentally suck it up into the vacuum cleaner... Yeah, very nice. Smaller than a MD or 200M CD shouldn't be necessary IMHO.
I know I've lost cd's before by either beign misplaced, whatever. But now, I'm going to have these little paper-thin devices the size of my thumbnail floating around? Yeah right, I'd lose those before I got a chance to walk out of the store.
Well I think it is quite obvious that the CD is slowly being phased out. But a memory stick is nothing new. And the fact that this would be a permanent storage is the wrong direction. They need to create reusable technology.
Oh and of course downloading music you want is the new fad that will replace CDs. iMusic, Napster, etc are the wave of the future.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
"Do you here that. It's the sound of inevitibility, it's the sound of your death."
Agent.Smith
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
I could imagine that those cards could play the stored music by themselves, to make it impossible to reach the digital data
The Ananova article focuses solely on the implications for music storage. That will, no doubt, be a major application, but the important part of the story is: permanent, reliable storage with a data density of 1 GB/cm^3, for God's sake! This seems to me like a major breakthrough that will have implications far beyond whether we can or can't rip an MP3 of the latest disposable pop star of the week's manufactured hit single.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
finally i can put my music with my coin collection... in the couch.
The researchers claim: "turning the invention into a commercially viable product might take as little as five years". Would that turn out to be true and this device takes off, it'll still take a few years to push CDs out of the marketplace. Though I'm certain the RIAA would love to sell you your music colllection all over again, that task would likely take years more to complete.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
I find SACD much better than files or memory tabs. Multichannel mixes and high resolution stereo mixes are something to be excited about. Surely music execs are taking a long hard look at the movie industry's success with DVD.
It was a big conspiracy when CD's hit the market, now it's a big consipiracy that something else will replace them... Yes, if you want to, you can replace all your existing music with whatever this new medium ends up being... but you don't have to. CD's are digital, and unlike the Tapes they replaced will last in the same quality as they day you purchased them... no need to replace your entire music collection... that's just FUD...
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Well, there could be all sort of fun upgrades, depending on how much the cards store. Maybe they could put DVD-like things on there - special features, commentary, 5.1 surround sound. It might actually make buying these things worthwhile.
"each paper-thin device could store more than a gigabyte ... in one cubic centimetre of space.
How is something paper-thin a cubic centimeter?
I'm always loosing CD's how am I going to sort through a collection of thumbnail sized pieces of plastic, I just know I'd loose everything! Did anyone else notice in the article that the "paper thin" devices can store 1GB in a cubic centimeter? I'm pretty sure something paper thing with a volume of 1cc is more than thumbnail sized. I assume that these 'thumbnails' aren't supposed to hold 1GB?
I swear i just heard about this...
ah yes, here is the link.
Great idea though..
-Henry
--- #@$DF@#2%@^%3^&*$%FRHG%%[NO CARRIER]
Why not just create CD players with proprietary audio-out jacks that aren't compatible with computers. Also ban companies from creating newmusicformatCD-rom drives which support the new CD format. If users can't put music on their computers, wouldn't this eliminate the problem of music piracy substantially ?
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
Scientists say each paper-thin device could store more than a gigabyte of information - equivalent to 1,000 high quality images - in one cubic centimetre of space.
The packaging, however, will be the size of an average storm door.
I'm not worried yet. It's difficult to get folks to embrace potentially limiting technology without changing the medium (see VCR vs. DVD). Besides, unlike cassette tapes, where quality is an issue, my CDs are more or less as good as the day that I bought them. There is no reason for me to buy music I already own on a DRM-enabled chip, only new stuff (and best of luck trying to sell them without selling CDs too), so that will slow adoption considerably.
It's not time for doom-and-gloom yet. Thumbs down on the unecessary commentary in the summary. On top of that, I consider Ananova to be dodgy in general, I've seen too much sensationalistic (is that a word?) stuff from them before.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
... Oh, wait, people still use those. So I guess the CDs will be here for a while yet.
As the size of the copy medium shrinks, it becomes smaller then the neurons that we use to hold it. Shouldn't there be some sort of limit as to the size of something that is copyable? After all we are copying the music to our neurons aren't we :)
I don't want my music on fingernail sized cards. I'd so lose those damn things. As for DRM, that's a real possibility. Though, in all of our experience, how long does music industry DRM usually last against the internet. ;)
Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
They seam to reiterate the fact that this has no moving parts many times... what a breakthrough
No matter what, they'll need to ensure the quality is leaps and bounds better than current CDs - or else no way in hell people will switch.
SACD or whatever 5.1 format you like recorded on a DVD should definitely be the next thing. I can't wait until new automobiles are sold with a THX-certified 5.1 speaker system installed at the factory.. Ahhh
Yes, we all know this article is a dupe, but Ananova slanted the data to look at CDs in particular.
The problem with replacing CDs with this technology is the form factor:
Scientists say each paper-thin device could store more than a gigabyte of information - equivalent to 1,000 high quality images - in one cubic centimetre of space.
I have enough trouble finding my CDs in the car without having to worry about them blowing away in a stiff breeze. If size were the issue, CD Singles would be released on half-size discs... in fact, many pop albums don't seem to have more than 30 minutes of music anyway.
The best way to incorporate this technology in a consumer-oriented music distribution would be to enclose it in a larger plastic enclosure with an interface to the player. Something like this, perhaps?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Not this little black duck.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
The idea sounds like a good one, but not just to replace audio CD's, plus for audio CD's you also have the small problem of how do you keep track of (for some people easily) 50+ "fingertip-sized memory tabs" ~ I know I have been known to lose full size CD's imagine how easy it would be to lose these. However, seeing as how they say that it can store 1Gb of data I can foresee it coming into use in digital camras, and perhaps for software distribution.
This would be just like media play. A DRM enriched small piece of technology that will be held back by the DRM. What's different about this that makes it worth buying over the established based of hundreds of millions of CD players? Nothing at all, short of the recording industry refusing to put music out on round shiny objects that were once called CD's, it's just not gonna happen. Tech history is full of superior technology that never took off because it was either too expensive, or DRM'd. It's simply not enough to have superior technology, a superior user experience is also required.
*sigh*
I know, I know... I'm a luddite...
In the future (actually, our present day!) people won't have to "change" plastic things to switch songs- they'll just hit the next button.
And iTunes (or whatever FSF alternative is better...) will show them that they have 29 days worth of music on their current playlist. And when they want to take their music to their friends house they can simply take a harddrive- be it an external USB 2.0, or just a regular old internal IDE...
I have a portable MP3 player with Smart Media cards- they are small, they look cool, I get neat-o stares on planes. But you know what? Its a PAIN IN THE *SS to switch those stupid cards in and out.
The future is convenience. Hard drives are convenient. Your silly attempt to deny this and bring about a new "media" is comical and quaint.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Dude, with this new technology you can lose your music in your change jar, couch, laundry, through the cracks in your floorboards, etc.. Just imagine trying to change "fingernails" while driving on the road (as if CD's weren't a pain in the ass as it is.. :) ). I think the industry would LOVE this new format as they're banking on selling the same albums over and over to people who misplace their stuff regularly (guilty I am).
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Don't we hear this stuff every 5 years? Yeah CD's blow, but market inertia is such that things don't catch on and replace older tech unless its:
A. Ridiculously better
B. Required to maintain status quo
C. Held up by an extremely vocal niche market
D. Much cheaper
E. All of the above (most effective)
There're millions of examples of this happening. I've heard great things about mini-discs, but it just didn't explode (at least in America). So saying something will revolutionize, replace, blow away something else in 5 years is like saying Dancing Elmo will be more popular than Tickle Me Elmo and Beanie Babies combined. Who knows?
- D
This news comes as fresh amusement because I am on the verge of converting my CD collection to cassette tape. Cassettes are cheaper media, devoid of DRM, and my car came with a cassette player by default.
I don't dislike CDs, but every CD player I've owned has eventually broken, while my portable cassette players from the '80s are still rollin'.
I'm pretty darn sure that whatever The Corporation decides will be The Next Best Thing, I will still be able to dub it to tape.
Don't we already have this? They're called Hit-Clips by Tiger and they look like they suck.
I don't see how the *new, Improved version* for adults is going to be any better.
I think the future of music is that artists will actually come to your house and play, as that is the only way the record company execs will be able to get their kids solid-gold braces.
Launching way OT, remeber that promotion that Master Card was running where they show the record industry intern make his way up the ladder to exec, where he has a fur coat, a private helicopter, and a stripper on each arm? Priceless.
Isn't this story just a reprint of the slightly older HP, Princeton Develop New Memory Material story?
-- "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me!"
these things for software distribution. If they start using this chip as a replacement for CD and DVD ROM and no one can afford a "paper-thin chip burner" how will we copy and redistribute software? Of course, this assumes that the machines that make these chips are expensive and wouldn't fit into a typical home office.
The guitars sound good, now give me about 10db more on the cow bell.
This will only happen if the new media offers the consumer a clear advantage over CDs.
CDs replaced LPs because they offered numerous advantages over vinyl, smaller size, greater music clarity, etc...etc.... If whatever comes down the pipe does not offer more benifits it won't be adopted.
Be like Gilligan
With technology changing as fast as (or even faster) than I can earn it... I may as well live on a island without a single luxury. Gilligan seemed happy enough, Why not?
"When information is recorded, higher voltages at certain points in the circuit grid would "blow" the PEDOT fuses at those points. As a result, data is permanently etched into the device. A blown fuse would from then on be read as a zero, while an unblown one that lets current pass through is read as a one."
Like a sculpturing, the trick is to carefully -remove- unneeded bits. The program, like the sculpture, is already there waiting to get unraveled.
"/Dread"
Does anyone else think that fingernail-sized cards for music is a BAD idea? I have enough problems keeping track of CDs sometimes, these things would be incredible easy to lose.
That's why I'm going to wait until music is distributed on a pill-sized pill. That way, you just swallow it, and the music is absorbed into your brain cells, giving you a permanent copy -- no worries about losing it or it being stolen.
Come to think of it, this should be a cure (or at least a treatment) for when you get a song stuck in your head...you just eat a different song to overwrite it.
And I'm sure the RIAA will be all over this new music format, positively love it: how are you going to share what's in your head? They can't lose!
I'm sure your mother would rather have four dicks in her holes than a crappy CD.
CD quality is good enough for me and the money I am willing to spend on playback equipment. What would this new format offer, other than physical size savings? Size is not enough reason for me to want to replace my CDs (and mp3 and ogg rips).
1cm cubed? Huh, i'll probably miss it and stuff it in my morning, not very awake, coffee.
I thought credit card size and form was about right. Then my memory jogged and I recalled my days at my previous job. How many PCMCIA cards were lost by "accident" by thoughtless management PHBs?
(I reckon I know that more than a few early expensive ones ended up at Crown Casino via Cash Converters).
Yeah, and I'd better be able to get the music off this thing and put it back my Nex-II. AND I want to back this up or gaurenteed low cost ($1 ~ $2 max) should it be faulty/or I already own the CD.
Q:I was listening to a CD in Grip and it sounded horrible! What's up? A:Perhaps you are listening to country music
I think the music industry will lose a ton of money on this if they really push it. Either give us the convinience of owning the songs in a digital format we can shuttle to any type of device we'd like or stay with CDs. I don't see consumers, even the mainstream consumers, going for anything else right now.
Why would I replace the music I already have in digital form? I guess there will be audiophiles that do it, but for me CDs and the music I already have ripped are more than sufficient.
-Pride
Sigs are for people with imagination
The real future of music is this. At home everybody will have multiple gigagbytes, even terabytes of storage. Hard disks are cheap now, and will become so much cheaper in the future. Everyone will have a huge collection of mp3s and divxs and the like. Everyone will carry around wirelessly networked devices that will play audio and video in some way. All the data will be sent from your file server at home to you in real time. And if you try to play a song you don't have, then a transparent p2p network layer will automatically seek out and retrieve it for you.
One step more than this is somebody somewhere make a database of all mp3s and videos, if that's possible. Then everybody will just get everything from that database and it's mirrors. Thus eliminating the personal file server. Or maybe it will work together with smaller file servers, so you only have to store the things you listen to often and the things you have acquired recently. The rest can be streamed and such.
There will be a wireless information network similar to MITs oxygen. All physical data storage formats will be lost to us. No more discs chips or flash. The network will be so fast and will be everywhere that it just wont matter.
One day in the semi-distant future this will be true.
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Sometimes, smaller isn't better...
Why waste money on more expensive solid state distribution methods when we already have a cheaper solution working today?
There's absolutely no need to sell new fingernail sized cards that replace CDs, when they can just distribute over the internet. If anyone needs to carry around their music, then they can just buy memory cards and move their music around on those.
And on another point, if they start selling fingernail sized cards, are they still going to package them in CD size boxes and waste more space than they have to?
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
How's this going to fly with consumers? Are the advantages big enough that people would switch en masse? CDs were smaller and priced about the same as record albums when they first came out. They also didn't wear out like cassettes. There was a definite advantage for the consumer. Are consumers really demanding a replacement for the CD? Or is this a misinterpretation of the general dislike for CD pricing and electronic alternatives?
My gripe with CDs has nothing to do with physical characteristics (I have a tiny MP3 player that addresses this issue). My problem is with the pricing, and to a lesser extent, using the storage space efficiently. I think the next format should be the Affordable CD.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
Why buy another format? I still have my collection of over 500 vinyl records. Some I bought in the mid-70s and they have lasted, since I take care of them and only play them on a good turntable. An LP is a piece of electronic equipment and requires care to last.
Another format to replace CD's? I didn't buy into the 8-track or quadrophonic fads, why should I switch now?
... the music, then it can simply go into the recording soundport on a normalcomputer. Seriuosly, they can't win, since it'll just be recorded in SOME way.
With such a small size of only 1 cubic centimeter (cc), these things are going to require a case of significant size to hold them. You won't be able to read what's on the cube because the text and or picture would be too small to see.
So, they're coming out with a new media that's smaller but will require a bigger case to hold it because it's thicker.
All I can see is people taking these things and ripping the music to a more meaningful media (mp3s on CDs or hard drives) like they're doing today.
Knowing the recording industry, they'll hike the price on these smaller and cheaper devices just as they did with CDs.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
I don't buy cd's now and I will not be buying whatever crap they come up with next. And NO, this doen't mean I use p2p networks. I have just about all the music I want and todays stuff all sucks.
Maybe they could put DVD-like things on there - special features, commentary, 5.1 surround sound. It might actually make buying these things worthwhile.
I noticed that when, for awhile, they tried to do this exact same thing under the name "Enhanced CD-ROM", it was more or less a commercial flop..
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
By singing! Obviously, these pills need to be able to disable singing to prevent file sharing.
on any storage or computer technology that isn't bent into a "DRM MS is teh suck" right off the bat, by whatever troll submitted the article?
Here we have a story about cool solid state tech that can store albums on tiny little silicon wafers. And for no reason at all some wanker conspiracy theory about DRMed WMA files gets tacked onto the end of the submission.
Typical slashdot submission:
"Company X has announced a new quantum processor, as well as a storage medium that can store 12 thousand petabytes on a wafer the width of a human hair. I sure hope MS doesnt use the DMCA to make everybody listen to DRM WMA files!"
Is this still a place for computer geeks to discuss technology, or is it a platform for political rants nobody gives a flying fuck about?
You ever wonder where the trolls came from? They were all contributing users at one time, who lost respect for this site and its politicizing of every fucking tech article, no matter how far a stretch.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
That puts a new spin on going to a nightclub and popping pills.
These people think that music will continue its 'logical progression' of Vinyl-->Casettes-->CDs-->Something_cool_and_small. The point they dont get is that music doesnt need an unique media to be stored anymore.
The concept of music has jumped the physical barrier of having to be stored in one determined medium. Now the medium is no longer important as it can and should be distributed to all types of medium without restrictions. How this affects artists rights, it is the same old debate...
__
Sig: Marine Stock Photos
I am more concerned about (someone else already said it) the size. All right, CDs are way big, and they don't fit my pockets. But MDs do. Also, anything smaller than 2/3 the size of a smartmedia card is way too small. It is quite easy to lose the Palm's memory cards and they're not even close to "fingernail size". Personally, I'd lose anything smaller than a credit card... (that's why I never take the smartmedia card out of my synthesizer, except to transport it, always inside its plastic (big bold one) cover). About the memory size, I think also that'd be great for digital cameras but the fact it is not rewritable would make costs so high (CD-R,RW are cheap, and also DVD-R) that it'd make it very slow to fit in the market. Last, and I think the most important: Are these fingernail size memory devices recyclable? Are they more or less durable-waste than CD-R? Has anyone made any environmental-effect study on the use of such technology? (God please, make it be recyclable!)
'Oh great, now I have to get the White Album all over again.'
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Its not just the death of cds, but recorded music that is coming. Lets face it, there is nothing special about buying a protools rig, some microphones and cruising the highschools for some talent. The recorded medium is already dead. The emphasis will shift away from automatic music generators, autotune, and all the dj's masquerading as talent.
Music was, and is still a PROCESS, not a file, in the system.
More and more musicians, even the electronic ones are adopting the discipline of creating as opposed to REPAIRING music.
For superior event driven acoustic phenomena, I recommend these tools
Why do we need a new media format to ship music? What's the point? You haven't needed to "ship" music for years now. It's a download.
Where have these guys been?
Look at how long it takes to introduce a new medium into the marketplace. DVD-Audio and SACD have been around for a few years now, and they still have not gotten into the mainstream yet.
Hardware manufacturers won't produce cheap hardware because the volume of products sold are too low and there are not that many titles available; and the media companies won't put out too many titles because there are not enough players in the hands of the public. Just like HDTV, all new mediums suffer from the chicken and the egg syndrome.
Granted, everyday there are more and more titles available on both DVD-A and SACD formats and prices are dropping, but it takes at least 5 years for that cycle to happen. So, for this new disc-less media to take over CDs in 5 years would mean that not only would they need to start shipping the first units today, but the industry would have to abondon DVD-Audio and SACD which hasn't even blossomed yet.
And I've had lots of conversations with people who speculate that everything will be "MP3" in a few years and there will be no more CDs. I personally am not about to give up high-quality audio for compressed MP3 or WMA formats. Anyone with a sound system over $100 can hear the difference between an MP3 and a full-range recording on a disc.
People who say "money does not buy happiness" are just people without money trying to make themselves feel better.
As cool as these sound, is anyone else worried that sneaky industry folks might try to distribute all new music in DRM'ed WMA files?
More likely, that's *why* they're doing this in the first place.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
I'm getting so tired of sensational headlines like "CDs 'could be history in five years'". Even if the technology were available today, CDs would still be around in 5 years. But the article makes it clear that the technology might be ready in 5 years...
I would have read the article even if it were called "Potential new CD replacement in development."
With satelite services like xm and siruis I don't need either.
Mammas don't let your babies grow up to be system admins.
"I find it interesting that they're still insisting on physical media."
They need to sell you something tangible otherwise:
1) You can't sell it retail, there's nothing to sell
2) It would essentially deprive them of revenue because once its electronic, its hard to convince somebody to "upgrade" and rebuy the same music
3) If this is a lease, I imagine the laws will change for more consumer protection; something the record companies are not keen on.
So the music companies want to distribute a music on a new kind of media? So it'll probably have DRM? Fine, that's their prerogative. The problem with copy protection on CDs is that it breaks the Compact Disk standard, and you can't call it a CD anymore.
The industry will obviously have to deal with all sorts of problems, like getting the new media readers available in cars, walkmen, home audio systems, and computers. This will be a major undertaking. When the readers are available on computers, then it will be time to pressure the DRM providers for open-source decoding software. If they don't, boycott. The only real problem with DRM currently is the fact that it limits decoding software to proprietary Windows/Mac software.
And remember, being able to store all your legal music on your hard drive is a big selling point - I expect even more so 5 years from now. It just won't sell if that's not an option.
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
"how are you going to share what's in your head?"
By singing! Obviously, these pills need to be able to disable singing to prevent file sharing.
Well duh! I thought that was so obvious I didn't need to state it. Of course the RIAA will be working with Phizer (or whichever pharmaceutical company creates these things) to ensure that one of the side effects of the music pill is weakened vocal cords...
1) Will it sell?
2) Can it stop unauthorized copying?
I'm sure record companies are eyeballing many potential storage technologies to replace CDs. But the article doesn't give one good reason why these chips will be tha annointed one.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
I bought Pink Floyd The Wall on Vinyl in the early 80s, the Double Cassette decade later, and the CD a few years after that. I'm not going to buy it a 4th time. Christ, I wish someone could stop this, we consumers are really getting raped here. I should be able to show proof of previous purchase and buy just a media upgrade.
The key to "mass media success" right now is not the quality of the music, and not even the money needed to produce the thousands of cd copies (even if CD's were made out of gold). The difficulty of low-budget music is that they dont have the millions that bigg companies spend in promotion and publicity of the bands. That is what makes most of the crap bands famous, rich and successful after all. The problem right now, is that these companies are spending big amounts of millions in promotion, and they want their money back with it surplus.
__
Sig: Marine Stock Photos
Are these people smokin' crack?
Who in their right mind would predict any physical media as "the next medium" for music?
I went 100% MP3 in 1999!!!
Not because CDs were too expensive, but because I had to 'change the disc', and listen to 5 CDs at a time, etc.
Now that many people have tens and hundreds of gigabytes of digital music, they expect us to buy into another physical media?
I don't think so!
geeks are cats who dig a certain kind of cool
niiiiiiice, when do you think the recorders will hit sub-$100? cr
See this article at New Scientist. My maths could be wrong but the storage dentisty quoted here doesn't seem to match up.
A DVD has a volume of 13.56 cm^3, and stores up to 17 GB (2 sides, each dual layered). That yields a density of 1.25 GB/cm^3, and I was being generous by including the hole in the volume measurement. Surely they can do better.
Also, seeing as this hasn't come out yet, it will compete with other future products, like blueray, which weighs in at 23.3 GB/side and 3.4 GB/cm^3.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
The RIAA is dreaming if they think consumers are going to go out and replace all their CD players. Past successful format changes have all brought something really beneficial to the consumer. Vinyl wasn't portable, degraded with usage and wasn't user recordable. Thus, 8-track and later cassette catch on. The only advantage that a new format can provide over CD is higher quality due to a combination of more space and better encodings. For most people, CD is good enough. Most the equipment I use to play CDs does not have high enough quality speakers to benefit from improved sound. I agree with the myriad of other posts saying that making the format the size of postage stamp isn't an advantage since this format would be hard to handle and easy to lose. Given the lack of benefit to the consumer, it seems highly unlikely to me that consumers will embrace a new format when they have to replace all their equipment or go back to the hassle of not being able to listen in their cars or rooms that don't have the right equipment. At least before CD became ubiquitous, CDs could be easily copied to tape for listening in the car.
With the current prices of hard drives decreasing everyday and the current capacity increasing, what would be the best is a dockable drive. Picture this. You have a dockable drive about the size of an ipod. $100 for 100gigs, not infeasible, not too expensive either. With this dockable drive, you can pop it in a kiosk in a store and download whatever you want on it, in any format you want. Now this kiosk is going to be hooked up to a private highspeed gigabit network that has the entire music catalog on it. With this dockable drive you could then pop it in your car dash, pop it in your home stereo system, and pop it in your portable player. All your music, Everywhere you go, compatibility with everything.
Let's look at the history of digital storage media and copy protection:
* Floppy Disk - lots of stuff got tried, it all got hacked.
* Hard Disks - lots of stuff got tried, it all got hacked.
* Removable Media - lots of stuff got tried, it all got hacked.
* CDs/DVDs - Still trying lots of stuff, it all got hacked.
* Removable RAM/ROM storage - been around forever, and for the most part has mostly been hacked.
* paper thin thumbnail size media - stuff will get tried, it will get hacked.
You would think in 30-40 years of computer technology that someone would figure out it's next to impossible to secure digital information FROM BEING DUPLICATED.
The paper thin, thumbnail media is cool. DRM is a waste of time and money.
-- $G
Moderators I know this is offtopic, that's why I'm not burning kharma bonus.
I was going to click the link in your sig, but due to the high risk of goatse landmines, I decided to play it safe. What's the actual URL?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Fold it into a cube, or a bird your choice.
So they've gotten it to work with one BLOB of this polymer! I haven't read the Nature article but elsewhere I can't find any mention on how they plan on achieving the suggested density. This sounds like a cool idea but there also seems to be a lot of Marketing Hype(tm) mixed in.
Guess I'll have to buy the White Album again.
:)
(At least these bozos can't patent their format, you can see the prior art right there in the movie..
So, it is nothing more than changing the delivery format from a CD to a chip. But I guess the delivery method is the same, music stores, online mail order etc. Now this chip won't do much unless they manage to pair it with a system where I can buy music online, download it and put it on the chip. and in a perfect quality that is... And the store must be a virtual treasure chest where I can find all that music I can think of, including that has been forgotten by most people.
It does not seem to be any real solution to any of their problems other than presenting the music in a format that will ensure that you are breaking the law if you try to get it out in a non approved device
At least on SLASHDOT, yeah.
But they told me my CD's would last forever. I have it right here on my 1Mb hard drive that I will NEVER fill up.
The public will not fall for such a cheap stunt again. CD is here to stay for a looooong time. Its faults are quite tolerable. The only reason anyone ever put up with the lousy audio quality of walkman tapes was the ability to record your own at home. One of the recordable DVD formats, together with an open-standard audio codec, will be the next logical progression for portables. Uncompressed CD can already stray beyond the ken of most consumer-grade headphones and loudspeakers. If any new format takes over, it will be one we can record at home - and whatever it is, we're not going to pay to replace our CDs with it in the same way we replaced our vinyl LPs with CDs.
Now think about this for awhile. When you buy a piece of prerecorded media, the cost is going two ways. Some is going on stuff that you can do for yourself {i.e. writing to media and assorted logistical matters}, and some is going on stuff you can't {i.e. singing the song in the first place -- well, you could do that, but I'm assuming you want to hear it as performed by the original group}.
We should contact our representatives and push for a new law: Non-Discriminatory Licencing. The gist is, if the group has licenced the record label to sell the music on their media in return for a certain fee paid to the group, then anyone should be licenced under the same agreement to make one copy of the music for the same fee. Furthermore, anyone distributing the content to third parties must make said third parties aware of the fact that they have a right to make copies conditional on payment of a fee, the amount to send and who to send it to.
Fair enough, it won't stop anyone copying without paying; but I think there are many people who would pay a nominal fee in return for not being criminalised, and I don't see for one instant what difference it makes whether or not I involve the record labels, as long as the artist gets their money. Record labels are just middlemen - and expensive ones at that. Everyone likes to miss out the middleman if they can.
Traditional deal: I pay 14.99 for prerecorded CD, record co. takes 14.00, artist gets 0.99 {note these figures may not be strictly accurate as I don't know for certain how much of the purchase price of a CD goes to the artist}
Under NDL: I pay 0.20 for blank CD, 0.02 for electricity, 0.99 to artist, artist gets 0.99.
If I wanted to sell the media I had recorded, or offer the files for paid download, I - not the eventual recipient - would be responsible for paying the artist's fee, and the law should not allow me to disclaim such responsibility.
If anyone cares enough to comment, I'll probably write a more official-sounding spec for my NDL vision that might be better received by government types.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I know without a doubt what the next physical medium will be for me.
Zilch.
After getting used to my 60 GB MP3 player (swapped drives on my laptop and Archos) and ripping all my music into my computer, I'll never get up to go swap a (tape/cd/fingernail speck) again.
There won't be a next physical medium.
Sounds like a new business model based on repurchases due to lost of fingernail-sized media to me!
-Slashdot Junky
.
Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
That skit sounds like the least funny skit of all time.
Jack Kevorkian is funnier than Kids in the Hall.
It's a "there's a radio in my fingernail" car!
I say they should combine these with the Handy Wristwatch Phone we saw a little while back. Then, it really is a fingertip sized music experience.
But now, if they have these little polymer chips, it should be of almost no cost to the musician. Anyone else follow my thinking?
It seems to me what you're hinting at is a future of music without the middle man (i.e. record labels) if artists are able to produce at low or no cost the music they make. Except that artists can do that now, via mp3s or some other form of electronic file distribution, or do as you did by burning their music onto CD-Rs. The real issue isn't so much the cost of the manufacturing as it is the necessity of the record label for purposes of distribution if an artist has "big dreams."
Independent music has thrived through vinyl, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, and mp3s, I doubt a new media format will change the nature of the industry significantly.
"experts are predicting the death of the compact disc in as little as 5 years."
Yeah, right. On what planet/rock/asteroid these experts are living? Eros?
CDs/DVDs are going to be around much longer than 5 years. There is no way in hell that could make the average consumer
to switch to a new distribution media this fast.
-N
ok, what if the progress of technology at some point will allow us to have such fancy storage (music or not)/m^3, will it be accessible (price/features) by Joe Six-pack in a way CDs/DVDs are today? I doubt that the 5 years time is enough to seize CD/DVD production, as it would lead to massive profit losses in the whole industry, and new tech will be surely DRM'd. Providing that people realises the drawbacks of DRM, CDs will continue to be burned all over the world as is the cheapest and more spread medium.
Roses are red, violets are blue, most poems rhyme, but this one doesn't...
I think one of the problems with music nowadays is that CDs contain too much of it. In the old days artists released 10 good songs per album. But now CDs contain way too much filler. And even if every song was great, who has time to listen to 80 minutes of it?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Did you get that idea from the MythBusters TV show on TLC?
When cassettes came along, they offered an advantage that appealed to customers: they were small enough to take with you.
CD's offered improved sound quality and much better ease of use (no more fast forwarding, rewinding, or turning the media over to hear the rest). They also avoid the glitches or pops that other media develop under normal wear and tear - CD's only scratch from mishandling, not from the laser wearing them out. These advantages allowed them to overcome their (artificially) higher price and initial read-only limitation
Other media have been proposed but not caught on. 8 tracks briefly flourished, but offered no advantages over a cassette tape, yet were bulkier and more annoying to use. Mini-discs offer only small size, which isn't enough. Audio DVD's have improved sound compared to CD, but this hasn't proven sufficient reason for anyone but an audiophile niche to take much interest.
On the other hand, MP3 has slightly lower sound quality than a CD, but has gained widespread acceptance, much to the RIAA's chagrin. Ease of use surpasses even the CD, and the portability problem has been solved - a person's entire music collection can fit into their pocket, or listened to across a (high bandwidth) network with no physical media at all. A bonus for the user is the upgrade path. Rather than it being easier for the user to buy all the music they already legally own/license/whatever over again, a CD ripper is all that is needed to move your previous investment into the modern times.
In this landscape, where does this new format fit in? What does it bring to the table that would compel joe user to embrace it at all, much less buy all his existing music over again? Sure, it's small, but not as small as an MP3. Manufacturers might bump the audio quality up to THX level, but that would only give a benefit to those who have both a discerning ear and high end audio equipment. Price could be dropped to entice people to switch, but the RIAA isn't that intelligent. Extras and bonus materials could be offered, a la the DVD, but that would take a lot of work from the publisher and probably be passed on as a higher price, further stacking the odds against acceptance.
In short, I don't see what advantage this would offer would be that is compelling enough to get anyone to adopt it.
If I lose my cool I will loose the hounds!
Farnsworth: "This is a chance for Fry to test out my experimental MP3 pill."
Fry: "I can't swallow that!"
Farnsworth: "Well then, good news! It's a suppository."
The fortunate coincidence of all the copy-protected and DRM based music CD's is that it comes at a time when there is less and less that I'm actually interested in listening to or especially buying. So it's hard for me to get upset about the music industry making even more stupid moves when, as far as I'm concerned, they're already dead.
And I'm sure the RIAA will be all over this new music format, positively love it: how are you going to share what's in your head?
Dateline: Washington DC, 2023/10/15
In a landmark case, the Supreme Court today ruled that telepathy is covered as a copyright circumvention device. The RIAA quickly announced plans to license this kind of content distribution with ``moderate restrictions,'' and created a subdivision called ``PsiCorps'' to administer the licensing scheme.
``I think there's a wonderful and exciting future ahead,'' said RIAA spokesperson Al Bester. ``Be seeing you.''
Why the heck would anyone want something that they plan on handling for any length of time to be FINGERNAIL-SIZED??? Hell, I still listen to my cassette collection every now and then, now they want to replace the CD? Pfft. You won't see THIS guy buying any fingernail-sized music containers at any point in time.
Mr Smith: How come is says "its a small world" on the pill?
Nurse: This pill will dround all the other voices in your head, now be a good patient and take your medicine.
Mr Smith: *goes insane*
2) Rip onto iPod.
3) Play in desktop or iPod. Optimum setup, you can't mention one thing that beats it for large libraries of music.
4) Don't care about technology mentioned in step one.
PS. RIAA, you can replace "finder-nail-sized card" with any other technology you can dream up, and I'm still going to follow the same four aforementioned easy steps. Fuck you very much.
People need to realize that there's no way to make anything fool proof.
"Ho ho, we don't like when people share music, so we'll make the CD obsolete, since our "copy protection" has failed, and come out with something new!"
I don't think they could be any more stupid... they tried to do it with DVDs, but there are tons of apps out that'll easily get around the copy protection just like there will be SOMEONE who will crack these new gadgets, get the music, and share it.
It baffles me why they still bother.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
I prefer the slightly larger Compact Flash cards because of the higher capacity but also because they are less fiddly.
Both are too small to write anything on. I have dozens of the buggers with three letter abreviations of the content because the names are too long to fit.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Just go FLAC like I did and future proof your audio collection.
Revolutions are never about freedom or justice. They're about who's going to be top dog. -- Kilgore Trout
Eventually portable media will become too small for practical use...
just like the cell phone at one point got too small, and has now "standardized" toa practical size.. A paper thin fingernail sized media card would be a little too small to practically use.. hard to pick up, too easy to lose, etc....
I'm sure there's going to be a point when people don't use something because of its size.. IMHO the memory stick duo is probably as small as such media will probably go.
...this isn't news. This is more of a consequence of the earlier article about the polymer/thin-film silicon high cap memory story. Of course all of this may end up being irrelevent in as little as five years- but it may take decades and still not be there, just like holographic storage (which held the same level of promise- and existed since the 50's and 60's...)
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
As developers, we can get behind the MMC flashcard spec, rather than its DRM "enhanced" version: SDIO. We can "design in" MMC cards, and use open security protocols at the app layer, rather than rely on proprietary DRM which consumes MMC resources to make a card SDIO.
--
make install -not war
Isn't Ananova the online equivalent of Weekly World News?
--
Stop Slashdot Flash ads now! Or at least make them stoppable by right clicking and selecting "Stop" or hitting the "Stop" browser button. Or
No you don't. Contrary to popular belief, at least popular /. belief, vinyl still works as long as you don't throw out your phonograph player simply because casettes came out. Same goes for casettes though they wear out if they are played too many times. There is no need to repurchase your music collection on the latest and greatest audio device. Personally I like the physical distribution of music because I can choose how to encode it for my computer or digital music player.
how are you going to share what's in your head?
Use more than one straw.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Maybe they are just a new form of sheet music, on thin paper, that folds up into a cubic centimeter. (How big would that make them unfolded? ;)
Perhaps we're supposed to put them in our computer scanners? That would allow the recording industry to deal with a completely different set of equipment manufacturers...
I, for one, welcome our new overuse of ergo. Oh, I mean our new ergo overlords.
If you read the description of how you write to these things, it sounds a lot like an FPGA (blowing certain gates, etc). That would mean they have to be recorded one at a time - sort of like CD-R (compared to regular CD's that can be pressed en masse). While the chips could become cheap, the duplication cost could easily be more than CDs.
"and for many of them, the amps/speakers they use would kill any improvement."
Of course.
People listen to their iPods on those crappy ear buds and say "Hey, 128kb AAC sounds just like a CD!".
Well, no shit! Connect it to a decent set of speakers and they'll hear. But don't tell them that; when you insult the holy shrine of apple, woe to you!
Think of it in terms of things like PDA's, etc.
While it's not as high as the optical discs out there, it's got absolutely NO moving parts at all and consumes dramatically less power. And the power consumption for writing probably beats the hell out of CD-R, so it could be a solution for professional digital photography. Just because it's not the best density, doesn't mean it's not a breakthrough or that it's not at all useful.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
A finger tip sized recording media is a great thing for those of us who don't like the large towers of CDs and DVDs that have in our homes. For those of us who are organizationally challenged (messy), this is a bad thing. I imagine this thing could get lost everywhere: couches, clothing, eaten by pets. Of course, the media companies would like this aspect as we would have to buy multiple copies.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
but I dont' think it will be replacing CD's in even 20 years... CD's are definately going to be around for quite a while... then again people said that about vinyl...
Yea, one good sneeze and your whole set of albums is all over the floor.
Or Mom comes in; dusts and vacuums everything up.
When will companies realize that there is a too small size. There is a Human Sized Factor here, people.
If the record industry thinks that they can continue to reap windfalls by thinking everyone will replace their entire collection, they're crazier than I thought.
Granted, the Audio CD is imperfect: It stratches easily, many don't live past 25. But, most music recorded between 1985-1995 was done on 16bit 48khz digital gear - so you tell me, how can any music of this era sound any better on 24bit/192khz?
Sure, the record companies would love us all to buy the Beatles/RollingStone/PinkFloyd collections over again - but how can new technology make such dated recordings sound any better?
Let's face it: the Audio CD's sound capabilities exceed just about every recording made prior to 1985. And while I welcome 24bit recordings of certain classical pieces (which would benefit from the increased dynamic range), I cannot think of any style of popular music that would. Rock? Pop? They both have been dynamically compressed enough to be reproduced faithfully at 12bit. Oldies? Classic Rock? Sure, the original tapes might have 105db of headroom, but are you going to miss the bottom 9db?
Notice to RIAA: No matter how bad you make Pop music today, you'll never see a revival in classic rockers again, you'll never see huge windfalls of "catalog conversions". In fact, the last time this happened, you left such a bad taste in most people's mouthes that it began the impetus for file sharing.
Why? Because you scumbags released SHITTY versions of the old recordings. Like the King Crimson album that was mastered for a fourth-generation tape that was equalized for a record press! Do you fsckers really think I am going to buy Dark Side of the Moon again! The first one was crap, the Mobile Audio Gold CD was great, but too pricey, and then you're 25year ann. edition was what you should have released from day one!
So, to summarize, WE HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF THE BAIT AND SWITCH. You screwed yourself with the CD - first you took advantage of people by selling them inferior recordings on the CD, instead of the best master, you used old tapes. Then you took advantage of us again by making us pay more for what we should have got the first time. Now, that we have the premium editions of the old recordings you want me to switch? To WMA no less? Only the worst sounding modern codec? Yes, I love when cymbal crashes sound like squeaky brakes!
Actually you pay more because it's Sony's propriatory format (they claim there are 55 licencees but i've never seen any of them with a product) used in nearly all Sony electrical equipment.
If you want to boost the storage, you have to buy their memory stick and so they can get away with charging you more than you would with an SD or Compact Flash card.
It's got nothing to do with the DRM. More to do with the fact that there is no competition in the Memory Stick space and hence no incentive to lower prices.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Everybody, sing along!
Puff, the magic dragon, lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honalee.
Little Jackie Paper loved that rascal Puff
And brought him strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff, oh
Puff, the magic dragon, lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honalee.
Now that I have shared this song with millions of you, enjoy hearing it in your head for THE REST OF THE DAY! BWA HA HA Ha ha ha ha
you just eat a different song to overwrite it.
So this would be like write only memory. I mean, if you could read it back... eeeew.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Good luck getting FDA approval for the latest Britney Spears album.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Personally i don't think that we'll loose the much loved CD. Considering how many computer users have CD Writers. I produce my own music and the easiest way to distribute it is to burn it on to CD. There are also so many home-studios setup that use CD that unless the new format is far superior in sound quality as well as cheaper, many will just remain with what they have. Perhaps the mainstream "big" artist will release on the new format but i think the independant artists will not abandon such a cost effective and easy distrobution format.
sig censored by america
I was not at all surprised to find that experts are predicting the death of the compact disc in as little as 5 years. [...] the next format of music will be little fingernail-sized cards.
So long as I have a fingernail-sized card reader for my PC so I can copy my horde of MP3s onto it, I'll be set!
-- If we don't stand up for our rights, now, there will be no right to stand up for them later.
how are you going to share what's in your head?
Well, that explains Slashdot.
I have trouble finding my CDs, what makes them think I'm going to go to a SMALLER format that I'll lose even more easily, or lose permanently as my cats/dog/Roomba eats it?
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
Well, since I don't "own" any of the music on the CD's that I have in my posession, I simply and "licensed" to listen to them - I guess I'll just have to download all of the music that I have and burn it onto the new format. After all, I have a LEGAL right to do so...
-- Windows security? Sure, which ONE would you like? -me
i have a hard enough time keeping track of all my cds. i can't imagine keeping up with hundreds of paper thin square centimeters. my cats will probably end up eating half my music.
will we have barbie-doll sized racks for holding all of our music now? how do you even write the name of the band on something that small? is this the end of cover-art?
i think it's neat that they can make something that small hold so much, and i'm sure it has plenty of practical applications - but personaly i would prefer my music in human-sized format.
The original CD spec put the disc in a caddy, but was dropped as part of the spec. Some of the very early CD ROM drives required a caddy for the CD. Many other optical media formats either have always used caddies or have caddy versions as an option.
The Type II and IV DVD-RAM discs can be removed from their caddies for use in mechanisms that don't accept caddies, and they also sell empty caddies and caddyless discs.
What surprises me is why we CDs are so darn easy to scratch; isn't there a better polymer coating they can put on them that will prevent anything from scratching? I know that anti-scratch technology is pretty good for eyeglasses; I've seen several shops that had demo lenses you could take steel wool to and not damage.
It is bound to happen that the format we receive our music in will change. There are several factors which WILL greatly affect what the new format is.
First and foremost the new format MUST make absolute sense from the human engineering point of view. It can't be too small to see | find | use. Doesn't matter if a 12 year old can use it, if mom and dad have trouble with it don't bet on success. Think fat fingers and keeping track of it.
Furthermore, the implementation of the new format will have to take into account the human nature. I personally have over 300 CDs I've purchased. I am unlikely to want to 're-buy' even a fraction of that music. Furthermore, I will not accept any robber-baron attempt to restrict where or when I can play/listen to it. And I'm just one person. Imagine the wants, desires, demands of the other 5+ billion of us!
This report is interesting. Gets me thinking. I doubt the CD will be "dead" in 5 years. I do expect a major change of the RIAA well before the demise of the music CD.
You know how printing took off when Gutenberg first published the Bible in German? Well, someone got their hands on audio versions of loads of Mormon literature and converted it all into MP3 format and is selling it all on CD-ROM. They've also got just the basic scriptures (Old Testament a.k.a. Torah, New Testament, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price) available.
Why is this important? Gutenberg didn't invent the printing press, but he did popularize it's use and contributed to the Reformation by using it to print the first Bibles that weren't in Latin.
Once enough people buy/borrow/copy these MP3's on a completely legal basis, they'll begin wondering what's so special about all that stuff that's not God's Word that they should be able to listen to just as freely. :D
(Yes, I am aware that Mormons and mainstream Christians don't get along much. That's not the point, and I'm not going to argue about it or any related topic.)
It's also gratifying to know that some companies out there actually use the MP3 format instead of being afraid of it.
I have no tag line
A data header that acts as a toggle and states, read my 0's as data or my 1's as data, the other will be blanks. This way on any static partition of storage you can make your time-to-burn quicker by burning that which there is less of, 1's or 0s.
.. yahooDOT
having to think of the blown or not blown fuse as one thing.... better to have the option to invert it logically. Same difference as putting a disc in right-side up or upside down. This can be done 'automagically' so users never now.
From the article:
"When information is recorded, higher voltages at certain points in the circuit grid would "blow" the PEDOT fuses at those points. As a result, data is permanently etched into the device. A blown fuse would from then on be read as a zero, while an unblown one that lets current pass through is read as a one."
gokonex
bull shit.
the only people that envision this happening are those that have invested in this new format.
to claim that it would take as little as 5 years to make this a comercialy viable product is just smoke being blown up someones ass.
get over it.
the cd/dvd will be the last of the hard product used to distribute music on wide scale and they will continue to be the format of choice amongst the major studios/record companies.
it takes a lot of money and resources for a studio/lable to change formats. i watched it happen first hand at a record company. to think that in 5 years this new paper thin thing is going to see the light of day, let alone be a viable format and be the end of the cd is unfounded.
Instead of fighting to get airtime on local radio stations, simply rent one of those propeller planes that flies over cities with a trailing banner at large events.
Pool the money among several local bands to pay the cost of the plane.
Fly over outdoor concerts, parks, etc., and drop thousands of these paper thin records. Banner just says "Rock Drop" or some such thing, or the names of all bands included.
If they can make them bio degradable, there might not be too much damage to the environment.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
They're called Hit-Clips by Tiger
And I thought for SURE this said "Hip Clits", which I think would be a really successful products. Little music cards that kids can trade that have pictures of various hip celebrity clits. I'd collect them!
As soon as they come out with it, people are going to figure them out and find a way to rip them as well. All the industry is going is wasting their own (and our) money trying to make it crack-proof. What'll really happen is the independent artists will be liberated by it all when they abandon these DRM freaks.
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
I don't think these will replace cds. Why not replace CDs with DVD or something more practical? Whatever it is it MUST be lossless because no artist will tolerate the original distribution being in a lossy format. That's crap1
The revolution in music will be towards hardware independence, not towards some random proprietary format and a specific hardware platform. The convenience of having all your music be always available is just too big for customers to ignore. Computers will become more ubiquitous in terms of reliable storage space and connectivity. As a result more and more people will realize that shuffling hundreds of pieces of media around isn't worth the effort.
Of course it will take more than 5 years to drag the RIAA kicking and screaming in that direction. And I don't doubt that standard fingertip sized ROMs will remain useful for small devices in the near future. But consider why you would want to carry around a bunch of media if you had a flat rate 128kbps+ wireless connection? You would want some flash memory to cache music for the occasional jaunt outside of the wireless range and that's about it.
It's my prediction that all manufacturers that are in anyway tied to copyrighted material will flock to DRM architectures.
In five years music will become a service instead of a product.
The downside is that it will be nearly impossible for the average consumer to steal music.
The upside is that it will be braindead simple to listen to what you want to anywhere and anytime and it will cost peanuts (pay per play).
In ten years, the teenagers won't even know what a WMA or MP3 file is. They will only know that the little gizmo they got for Christmas allows them to play any song they want anytime they want to hear it and their parents will get a subscription fee debited from some entertainment bank account.
I see movies following a similar path.
Personally I don't care. When I have a car stereo that can understand me when I tell it to play "My Sharona" or "Paradise by the Dashboard Lights" and the song starts immediately, I'll be a very happy consumer. The pricing may start out rocky at first, but it will modulate itself over a few years until the market is set. Then the services will make money on their catalogs and increase revenue on new material. It will be a good thing.
Then there are added potentials. That poetry you've been writing for years can get published and if anyone uses it for commercial purposes, you will automatically get paid. Royalties for the masses for your artistic endeavors. This too is a good thing.
My two cents again.
http://chicagodave.wordpress.com
The one thing I haven't seen discussed is that people need a compelling reason to switch to a new media. With CDs, there were a few, including a smaller size and higher reliability. So the reasons to switch from vinyl/tape were obvious. But with CDs, the industry also introduced a format that would last my entire lifetime (even if I'm not technologically savvy and can't copy files from one format to another). This was a first, since both records and tapes break down much more quickly. Given that my current media will only break down after I'm dead, why would I want to switch? And remember, this is a first in the industry - we've never had a "lifetime" format before. And this means that it's difficult to predict what would happen. I believe that any attempt to switch to a new format will meet with limited success, and will mostly succeed with "new adopters", such as teenager who haven't settled on a format yet.
When you're talking about archiving millions of pages of scanned legal records, such as birth certificates, etc., you wonder if the access time is better than the current methods. For large scale operations, not only do you have media rotation and seeking going on, but the cute robotic arm picking the correct WORM disk out of the silo, etc.
The advantage of having anywhere near ROM-chip level access times to a nice cubic meter of this stuff would be great! Additionally: multiple, concurrent access to the same or different stores should be an improvement.
Until they have a chip implanted in our head we can't hear digital...
sound has to be analog at some point and that can ALWAYS be recorded....
Let em waste all the money they want on security... it's useless... completely.
That would be great news. Think about it: Do you know how much good music there is out there, pressed on DRM-free CDs, that I've never heard? This would just make it cheaper, so I can buy more of it.
Brent J. Nordquist N0BJN
Now all the comments I read come with farnsworths voice. :(
Will code a sig generator for food
I believe that CDs are the last of their kind, and will not be replaced by anything similar. Rather, the wave of the future is network distribution of the music files, either as AAC, Ogg Vorbis, MP3 or whatever you like. Once CDs are done, no one will ever go to a store to buy music on storage media.
A little over two years ago, I bought a satellite receiver with a built-in PVR. At the time, I had plans to buy a DVD player, but never got around to doing so. I don't have a DVD player, (well, my computer has a DVD burner, but I've never watched a movie on it,) and don't miss it. Why? Because I find that the electronic distribution of movies and TV shows directly to my PVR's hard drive is superior to renting DVDs.
There are restrictions, of course. My aging PVR only holds 30 hours of video, which rules out long-term archives. I have to program what I want recorded ahead of time, etc. However, as technology advances, these restrictions will go away. All that is needed is increased storage space, faster transfers, and some sort of ability to network PVRs together. All of those things can be accomplished today by enthusiastic home-brewers, and can be reasonably expected to show up at Costco before the decades out.
In my picture of the home of the future, there will be a large raid array of hard drives somewhere in the basement between the furnace and the hot water heater. It will be wirelessly accessed by various devices throughout the house, such as audio players, televisions, cameras, scanners, etc.
The important part is that no one will have to make two trips to BlockBuster for every movie they want to watch!
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
Okay. So apparently we've all just given up on a quality analog format? And we've all just agreed that sampled and compressed is good enough? I'll be excited when they come up with a new analog format that doesn't break/scratch/melt/erase if you look at it the wrong way.
can these chips be as durable as cd's? cd's can be read by non-software systems... these chips will need some sort of software to run them, and not to mention they can even have limits put on them so the industry could easily force you to buy a new chip with all your favorite music on every month, and charge you as much as they damn well please.
So, I'm not throwing out my cd's just yet.
I don't understand DRM storage media, because common sense says that once you can read the data, you can do whatever the hell you want with it. Say you play a song with an audio player.. can't it save the output PCM stream to a file after it decodes it? Then the DRM is completely fruitless!
plz explain thx lol.
who gives a shit how many copies you make you fucking
dipwads
Allow me to summarize the Slashdotter response to an topic such as this (no, we won't read the article either):
I won't buy a CD unless:
- It's $2.99 pre album and comes with a free iPod.
- I can make unlimited copies for all my friends.
- My neighbor's garage band gets the same shot in show business as Nelly.
- I get free tickets and airfare to the concert included with the album purchase.
Yes the radio is full of crappy stuff but good artists who promote themselves well can still get signed if they have a following. Hey guess where Static X and Alice in Chains were before they got signed? Playing empty clubs on Tuesdays just like everybody else.
I understand smaller is better, but this might be too small.
pedotofil? naaah... waaaay too close...
__________
Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace!
death of CDs? im still using vinyl.. well, im a DJ so i buy about 20 NEW records a month. i hope vinyl never dies..:P
My ears have never been able to hear the difference between CD-quality and the various super-audio formats, which I've always regarded as being appropriate for the editing stage rather than me as an end-listener. I'm not going to replace my CDs for quality reasons. For any future "upgrades" to my music collection why on earth would I not just rip my CDs into whatever digital format is most convenient at the time? This will suck for new music, but the "upgrade" problem seems over-played to me.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Maybe if the plan were to distribute the files electronically and have them stored in bulk on one of these things the way you'd use a flash drive, but a fingernail sized format as the primary physical medium of music distribution? How on earth would these things be packaged and stored? We could have miniature jewel cases for them, or little binders, but what about the labels? How would you fit "The Mighty Mighty Bostones: More Noise and Other Disturbances" or "Beethoven Symphony No. 7, Movement 2, performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Christoph Eschenbach"? And what about track listings?
Can you imagine having an Altoids tin of tiny little chips labelled with teensy-tiny ittie-bitty text, and trying to find the album you want to pop into your portable music player, while standing in a subway car or say, while driving? Can you imagine how easy it would be to lose one of these things or swear profusely as a strong gust of wind just blows them out of your car window into a fluttering confetti of $10 albums?
I'd much rather see larger-sized storage mediums with greater capacity and do away with physical distribution of music altogether.
when someone has a combover, they know that they're losing their hair, and the people that see them know they're losing their hair. Combovers are an attempt to deny reality - everyone can see what the underlying truth is (they're losing their hair) - but the person using it is hoping that if they deny it no one will notice.
The RIAA has attempted to silence people who have said that anything digital for viewing or listening by humans can be copied. We know it, they know it, and they know we know it. The RIAA hopes that by denying the reproducibility of digital media, we'll forget about it, and then see duplication as unnatural and evil when it happens. DRM can be circumvented, and it only has to be beaten once. If the DRM can't be beaten, then listeners can feed the analog input into a digital device and convert it to digital with no DRM. (DRM is effective at controlling computer-only media, as long as no one takes a photo of the screen.) DRM is likely to be as effective at changing the underlying reality of digital media as a combover is at changing my hair growth (or lack thereof).
Of course, to get to the point where the media companies with try to encase this new media with DRM, someone has to show that it is more effective than what is around now. From other posts, this may not be the case (blueray DVD, etc. are likely to have higher storage capacities) - so worrying about DRM is somewhat premature with respect to this storage medium.
Oh great. Now the voices in my head get to do karaoke.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Go ahead - let them distribute it in any format they like, I say. As long as it's digital, it can be manipulated, and as with everything else, someone will come up with a way to hack/crack it so that it's deemed usable by the average-joe.
As long as a computer plays music, it sends it to speakers via some sort of speaker cable. As long as this relation exists, it is completely impossible to protect songs, despite any protections on any media.
So what if they make a CD that is completely unrippable? I'll just either play it to a file instead of speakers, or at the very least play it to the microphone slot and record that. I just don't get it I guess.
I used to think it was weird that every band I listened to had snakes doing backup vocals. I knew all those metal bands liked to have pet snakes and shit during concerts, but I thought it was weird having them actually on the tape. I thought all that was pretty bad ass until I heard the snakes on my sister's Whitney Houston tape. Then someone explained that fucking tape hiss and it made a little more sense.
Fucking tape hiss. Long live digital.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
The more I listen to music, and the more money I spend on music, the ratio of cd's to vinyl is quickly teetering the other direction. I buy more vinyl than anything now because I feel the sound quality is just superior and overall I get a better value (liner notes, funky looking records, booklets, etc.). It almost seems as though that with all this technology in the world, the RIAA keeps getting things backwards and making stuff worse than original. I've yet to hear a cd which sounds better than vinyl... but hey... that's just my opinion. in 5 years, I'll still be buying vinyl.
What folks fail to realize, and these companies especially, is that the CD format, as originally envisioned, did die a horrible death. The CD-R completely changed the landscape and started to effect people's perceptions of CDs in general. What was originally an expensive to produce one-to-many delivery mechanism had transformed into a many-to-many cheap DIY revolution that was a logical extension of what came before while maintaining backwards compatibility. "Wow! I can play this in my CAR?!" This whole escapade should serve as an object lesson. The CD revolution that we are still experiencing is the direct result of a ubiquitous and formerly closed technology being opened up without restrictions to common, and decreasingly technical, folks. If the introduction of CDR had been highly restrictive or less versatile it would have never taken off to the degree it has. I could go on for hours as why CDs are here to stay and the new DRM enabled and proprietary media formats are doomed for failure - (which is more than obvious to the /. crowd). What I find truly interesting is that introducing new DRM-ish media and formats perpetually tempts large companies. I think the main appeal is controlling the playing field followed by selling new electronics to support new formats.
There is also a weird percolation of pressure between the consumer, the media giants and the electronics companies. All of them, ostensibly, wield political influence. The marketplace (consumer) does not want to be locked in. Like they used to say, it's hard to go back to the farm once you've Paris. The electronics companies - want to sell more electronics. CD burners, DVD players, PVRs etc. Selling new features and extending open media formats seems a safer play than introducing restrictive DRM enabled formats from scratch. Creating players to play media with non-standard protection schemes or media has burned them in the past. The big media giants are completely freaked out. They like being big media giants. They believe in letting the marketplace decide as long as it decides in their favor or, at the very least, doesn't question the fundamental assumptions of why we need media giants. They will bend over backwards and do anything to maintain their control - including putting massive pressure on electronics manufacturers to create more DRM enabled products.
This creates an odd dynamic where media pushes DRM, electronic companies get their toes wet introducing it slowly, customers push back and get angry with the media companies for the hassle, electronic companies get cold feet and pull-back. And on and on and on and on.
All the while folks will be ripping CDs to listen in the car.
-_-
i find the idea that they are going to continue physical distribution at all, within 5 years, pretty startling... they just do not get the whole "internet" thing, do they?
"Ain't I a stinka..." - Bugs
there are more CD players than people who believe in god(s) in this world. the format is not going away any time soon.
I have a hard enough time not losing CDs! Imagine trying to keep track of fingernail sized cards. You'll probaby suck half of them up using the vacum at the car wash because you dropped them under the seat while you were driving and trying to swap to another card.
RIAA labels will stop producing music in CD format.
Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon. And for the rest of our lives.
Of course, first they'll need to get market penetration with the new format. Easiest way to do that is simply allow the new format to be competitively priced with the real costs of production. If you had the choice of a CD for 14.99 and a Music Wafer for 2.99, wouldn't you be tempted to get a Wafer Player?
Especially since you can USB the wafer player into your computer, new stereo, or whatever else you happen to have with a USB connection and speakers (assuming it doesn't have it's own wafer player). If it has a screen as well, it'll show you the video if you want.
Once enough of the market had those, they could scale back on CD production, thus making it so that everybody else who hasn't switched already has reason to.
Once you've switched over to wafers, the reasoning to re-purchase your music in that format becomes stronger. Even if it's at only 2.99/wafer, that's an extra $2.99 that they wouldn't have seen before.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
of Grandpa Simpson, "It'll be a cold day in hell before I recognize Miss-ur-uh as a state!"
For this instance, replace missouri with "anything but CDs as an audio medium"
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
I have a prof who recently explained the marketing behind a lot of technologies. Those nifty USB flash hard drives, you know, the keychain ones, can be made far smaller. The problem marketing sees is that people will lose them. Thus, they are made larger to please consumers.
Remember when "thin" desktops were "in"? The tower quickly took over because people tohught it looked faster.
The point is that people won't buy something so freakin small. Looking at 8 track, casettes, and CDs, they're all about the same size (order of magnitude, that is). Consumers want something small enought to store, large enough not to lose, and durable enough to survive in a car in the sun. CDs are too well established at the moment. What we'll likely see develop is something like DVD-A(udio) (I just made this up).
Now, to go try out my new Betamax.
What need is there for a new music format? CDs *are* too big and prone to scratching. Mini disks would have been a superior format because of their size and enclosure, but they pretty much failed like the digital audio tape. The need for a new storage medium for music is just not there, we have iPods and other similar personal audio devices that can store a whole library of music and plug into just about any system. Home and car stereo systems will just have a firewire, USB (or Bluetooth) interface for personal audio devices, which will become much cheaper as online music stores advance and become more popular. Those who don't have computers available can just download music directly to their personal audio devices via a wireless web interface and build a portable library. Bigger libraries will require a computer or a home stereo system with a web interface for browsing/buying or subscribing to music services. We already have universal digital audio formats, DRM and universal device interfaces. Most likely wireless phones will incorporate every aspect (pda/phone/music player/web browser), and communicate with nearby devices (home/car stereos etc) via Bluetooth or a direct hardware link. There does not require any technological breakthroughs, and many manufacturers are moving in this direction. CDs may last a little while longer, so there is not much need for an interem storage medium as described in the article, especially if the medium required a technical breakthrough. R&D, marketing to hype the medium and manufacturing overhead costs would not be recouped for a long time, time enough for existing technology to make it unnecessary.
TallGreen CMS hosting
go ahead, create another format - we'll still find a way to copy it.
I'd have a ball copying all those songs for free. I am psychic you know!
If they could find a way to make these little things rewriteable, it could be a huge boon to the computer industry. At such a small form factor, there might finally be a replacement for hard drives. Dont get me wrong, there are huge techinical difficulties to overcome. The whole process seems inherently permanent. Just think, a credit card sized iPod.
the new napster is WMA files, and they don't play on most portable mp3 players.
You must not have fought in the "Vinyl War", there was never a lack of demand for records just a lack of supply. If someone decides they know better than you (read: can profit more) then your CDs are history. Back in the ninties I was a DJ and we had a tight little community that petitioned and complained to anyone who would listen about the death of vinyl. It didn't matter. There was a huge amount of music that never went digital and was lost because of perceived lack of profit. WHat will get lost in the new formatting? If someone decides raw materials for video tapes cost too much or a corporation can profit more from the "new and improved" format then your tapes are gone too. This is no longer supply and demand, this is greed. At least voting with your dollars still counts, but in a chess game kind of way.
I've often wondered if that's the real reason why the CD sales have dropped off - people are pretty much done replacing their old vinyl.
just some new way to make us hate ourselves for spending the money to buy equipment to create/listen to music that we love. i for one will not purchase this new medium until the recording equipment comes down in price. (remember paying 400$ for a cd burner?)
And then there was E
Yes, I'd love to have a removable media storage device that doesn't suffer from laser rot or all the archival problems that CDROMS have.
"sic" is used when quoting a source that contains a misspelling or other error. It's used to show that you, the one doing the quoting, are aware of the error and that you did not introduce the error.
Personally, I think that by going smaller I will have more of a chance of losing the darn things. Right now I have cd case that I'm not worried about losing; its either on my desk or in my backpack and I know when I open it up all of my cd's will be in there. Why would I want to switch my media to something the size of a fingernail? Think about it... how often did you lose Lego pieces in the most random places? The smaller the object, the easier it is to misplace it.
Also, in the article it says that the new technology would be easier to operate than a cd. How is placing a cd in the tray difficult? it seems like trying to manipulate a very small piece of paper would be a little more difficult. Not that it would be hard, but I like being able to press a button and put a cd in without looking or thinking about where it has to go. I believe the cd will be around for much longer than five years, regardless of what new technology comes out.
In the end, it comes down to ease of use.
Each of those cubes hold 1 Gig, right?
1 DVD holds 4.7 Gigs (@ $1-$2 each)
7 CDs hold 4.9 Gigs (@ $.20 each, 700M disks)
5 New storage cubes hold 5.0 Gigs (@ $.20 each??)
Unless they're incredably cheap to make, they're not going to win any price wars with CDs or DVDs. Even at $1 each, they'd cost over twice as much as DVDs for the same amount of storage. Their only advantage is they're skip proof.
Even size isn't an advantage if you need 5 cubic centimeters to store as much as a DVD.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
If CDs get replaced in five years, it'll probably only be by DVD-A or SACD, not by anything smaller than a 120mm shiny disc. There's a very simple reason for this. It's not practical. It's psychological.
No one's going to spend $15 or more on an album if it's smaller than that. It just won't "feel" that expensive.
I don't think so. A format takes longer than that to gain miniscule market share. If anything replaces CDs in the next 5 years, it'll be DVD based technology like DVDA, since there are a lot of players out there already.
-no broken link
CD format is already being removed. All of the major music makers are putting out new works in DRM format on CDs that won't work on old players. It is easy to imagine them no longer offering normal CDs and equipment makers no longer selling CD readers.
The important part of this equation is not the media but what's stored on it and the bad laws that back it. The move to DRM'd formats and crap like WMA is what will force you to replace your music. Bad laws and anti-competitive practices have exasperated this. Due to expansion of what's considered "publishing" it's virtually imposible to convert other people's media as a service. Just try opening an LP store with CDs in each record and you will find yourself in the same hole as MP3.com. It's still possible for people to convert their music to free digital forms themselves and each person must chose between time and money. Indeed, friends can still exchange music with each other via CD ROM and devide their labor. New DRM's content will remove those choices and that ability. WMA reduces the quality of the sound at the same time, nice eh?
The fate of those still using non-free software looks worse every day and that's great. This gives free software and hardware that works with it great competitive advantages. Already, it's much easier for me to use a Zaurus with ogg encoded music as a juke box than any comercial alternative. It uses normal CF and a simple script plays music from lists at random. I can exhange CDs or CF with anyone I want and completely avoid nasty BS like the NET act. It's almost as easy and much more flexible than tapes used to be. A laptop with an ftp server is an even easier way to share my music. Musicians and artists who promote themselves outside of the RIAA's clutches will enjoy similar advantages. I rarely listen to the radio, I will pay for recorded music and I will go see concerts. The advantage in promotion is returning to the local scene. The RIAA, with it's dying gasp, is helping to eliminate non-free software. Their inflexibility will destroy them as well.
Eventually, things will normalize and it won't be a crime to share recorded music. The RIAA business model is simply obsolete and they will die.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
sure I'd be interested in that. With the DRM issue... really, shouldn't take more than a day or two to crack that. If I can't legally download a crack, I'll just crack it for myself... then I'll rip the new albums to AAC or even raw WAV (disc space is cheap) and I'll be set.
:)
:)
I really think the whole DRM thing is great.. after all, what's better than convincing the music studios to sell higher quality music with the hopes their precious DRM won't be cracked. I figure that if the data can be sent to a D/A chip, then I can easily figure out how to wire in an FPGA instead which records to file instead.
Don't bash the technology... embrace it, crack it and let's all live happily ever after
heheh BTW... I live in a country where cracking DRM is not illegal if you're only doing it for your own personal backup purposes
Open Zaurus, Debian, Ogg-Vorbis and some CF cards are all you need. Here's a quick howto. If you can't master the Debian install, use Knoppix. Move your music to free formats and never mess with DRM BS again. If you can't read it and move it to a free format, don't buy it. The RIAA is going to lose this one. The harder they suck the easier it is to be free.
Yeah, you might have been joking. That's OK, I like the chance to sound off about free goodness.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Doesn't mean everyone has one:) I still don't...not on my computer, not on my tv.
And I'm sure the RIAA will be all over this new music format, positively love it: how are you going to share what's in your head? They can't lose!
Maybe you and some of your friends could recreate what you're hearing in your head by attempting to duplicate the sounds in your head with the sounds made by musical instruments.
And maybe you could invite another 20000 friends over to your arena and let them listen to you recreate the sounds in your head on musical instruments...
Ain't no media like the vinyl I got.
I think it's far more likely you'll start seeing new player devices that appear to operate with the same feature set as existing devices, but that have some new characteristics that won't become apparent until several years later when everyone has such devices. At that point, the industry will start releasing new media in forms that will only play on these devices with restrictions-- you can only play it for some period of time, or for some number of plays, or you can't play it on certain types of gear. At that point you'll already HAVE the piece of crap player so you can't decide not to buy it because of the disabling feature, and the old gear won't play the new stuff.
Microsoft is attempting to transition it's OS in a similar way, gradually evolving to a position where they can charge a periodic "upgrade" fee or their stuff stops working, and more closely track the installations.
It's all part of industry attempts to close the floodgates that have opened up now that digital is everywhere and is inherently copy-oriented. To what extent it will work is hard to say. There's always plenty of sources of "old" media that can be recycled (though presumably, not legally), and there's always the possibility that rogue content creators may decide to release their content in more "open" forms and that could become popular enough that "protected" media could be seen as irrelevant. But big-budget Matrix and Terminator equivalent movies and of course MS products will be released in restricted formats to be sure, the question may become will enough of us live without them (I certainly will) that will send the industry a message that such reduced value media is unacceptable? The problem is, an awful lot of fools will step right up and buy the latest thing and do whatever the MPAA/RIAA/Microsoft/etc. want them to do.
audio dvd? its su[pposed to be better and the audio philes here in europe seem to love it.
I can barely keep track of where my CD's go. These things'll get lost by the dozens.
"As cool as these sound, is anyone else worried that sneaky industry folks might try to distribute all new music in DRM'ed WMA files?"
When the music cd 1st came, there was no DRM. There was not even much talk of DRM until people started stealing music online. So why are consumers pissed off that the music industry doesn't trust them anymore when it was consumers who broke that trust.
Apology, you meant the album "machine HEad" of course, not the modern band. Not enough blood sugar.
At some point the software is going to run it through a speaker, and speakers so far aren't DRM capable. Even if they were, you could stick a microphone right near the speaker, record what played, re-encode, copy to blank disk. Lost quality, but hey... it would work.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Who has CDs with Kazaa so popular these days. After all, isn't that what's killing RIAA's business?
-Tim Louden
Your mare specifications won't ever be covered by DRM!
It would be sad and silly if you had to replace all your recordings of music yet again.
It would be a disaster if the music itself were threatened.
although it has nothing to do with the magic discs. I swore as an employee of sony I'd never tell anyone this if they didn't figure it out on their own. Sony's software which actually rips the songs and gives you the capability to transfer them to magic gate and sony portable players, limits you to "checking out" 5 copies of each song you rip. However, if you rip an identical song twice it considers it a different song.
Hardly what I'd call effective DRM.
Totally offtopic... but, I am VERY glad that marijuana is illegal. I don't want my kids to be constantly bombarded with peer pressure at school and through the media that these filthy, unregulated, unhealthy, pschyo-retardant drugs and their irresponsible use is completely ok.
Guess what? Marijuana is easy for your kids to get. Its easier for them to get than alcohol. Why is that? Because its illegal, therefore a black market is created allowing anyone to buy and sell it. You're kids might even be selling it. A lot of kids do, its easy profit. I even know of one guy who sold it when he was a kid, but didn't actually use it. The black market that is created by it being illegal allows for this.
As for media exposure it already exists. Don't your kids watch movies, TV, and listen to music? Don't your kids use the internet or read other types of media? Don't your kids get taught about drugs through school drug education programs? Drug education programs are teaching your kids just how cool drugs can be, more than anyone else. The fact that these drugs are illegal makes them even more appealing to kids. It's "cool" to be a drug dealer to them. If you tell an 11-year-old that LSD will make you see what you hear, and hear what you see, (that's one of the things that I learned from drug education at that age) don't you think that child is going to be curious as to what that feels like?
Kids are curious. They know about this stuff, its not hidden from them. They will learn about it, and they will find it and try it. Just steer them away from the dangerous hard drugs, that's all you can hope to do.
It is not ok to waste yourself away in a stupor, believing to have expanded your mind when in reality you've done the opposite.
Spoken like someone who has either not used it, or does not know how to use it, or just didn't enjoy it. That's fine, but don't be so quick to say people are wasting themselves if you haven't the experience. I could go into great detail about how its useful (therapeutic value), but I won't bore you with all that detail (unless you're sincerely interested). You can easilly say anything is a waste. You can say meditation is a waste, or listening to music is a waste, or having fun is a waste, or seeing a mental health counselor is a waste.
Do you think alcohol should be illegal too? Do you think prohibition in the 1920's worked then? Do you think its working now?
Regardless of whether you think using marijuana is worthwhile, do you really think the creation of a black market and the crime that surrounds it is a good thing?
Do you think drug users are criminals? More specifically, do you think marijuana users are criminals?
I'd love to hear what you and anyone else has to say about this.
Zoot!
It's 16-bit signed raw data at 44.1kHz in t channels. WAV or MP3 is no more digital.
Shit, why am I posting this? The parent is at +5 and nobody will ever read this. The /. steamroller
of ignorance strikes again.
I don't think Music Chips will take off. You can't play them in your computer, you can't copy them, you need to buy new hardware to use them, they're probably *too* small to use, and there's no reason to believe there will be any change in sound quality.
In short, if these things take off, it will only because the music industy won't release music legally any other way.
And I hope they do.
CD-Roms have been around since 1991 - one of the reasons they were so popular a format for data and music is because a CD-Rom can be used for either data OR music. Want to play a CD in your computer? Sure! No special technology required.
The real reason for the change is that these new music whachamacallits is that they're probably not going to be usable in a computer. Meaning it's less likely that Joe Newb can rip & share them.
I'm surprized that they haven't done so already.
Whatever. Indie bands will use CDs - the much more useful and popular format - and they'll prosper.
-- Funksaw
as ogg files on my hard disk. The record industry can change the formats all they like now...
... and they would still have to package it in a bloody huge cardboard box to stop people from stealing it :rolleyes:
In my next incarnation, I hope to come back as a code monkey.
The compact disc, though not very compact by our 21st century standards, will be next to impossible to push out of the market. If it will be, it'll be done with backward compatible "bridge" formats like SACD. But in form, be it full size or CD single, the "disc" will almost certainly live on.
For the average guy who values convenience much more than sound quality and cost, it may be OK.
But I doubt most people are going to rush out and replace their CDs (and *gasp* vinyl records) with the new stuff.
Being a serious audiophile and music lover, I'm sticking with my large collection of LPs and CDs. SACD maybe some day, if they make it sound better than it does now. Meanwhile, good used LPs are by far the cheapest way to get a lot of good music, and for at least some people like me, the best format.
This is actually an excellent step forward from a software perspective: not only will products be sellable with lower quantities of packaging material, but the actual disc medium itself is tiny. This is obviously a step forward for the environment. Storing your solid medium on chips of that size would greatly cut down on size, although the cost is going to have to be pretty low to get the market to convert quickly (it took a good five to ten years for the market to start embracing CD). Another excellent side effect of this technology will be its influence on the price of CDs. If it's fully marketed, the average sale price for a compact disc will drop significantly, both due to the fact that producers favor the newer format and also stores cleaning out their inventory. This is what's happening with vinyl now: lots of people are selling their records for TWO DOLLARS a pop, and people who still feel that the sound quality of CD is inferior to vinyl are having a heck of a time. This is bound to happen with CDs. Good deals will be found everywhere, etc. The only thing that's bad about chips like this is the chance to re-write the rules, so to speak, and design a system from the outset which embraces copy protection. Remember, CDs weren't designed from the outset to have foolproof copy protection as the problems were not realized for quite some time. Giving companies the chance to design a music format FROM THE OUTSET with digital piracy in mind would lead to perhaps unbeatable (correction, pretty darned good) copy protection. Of course, whatever companies do, there is one grand rule: you MUST appeal to the high-end market when starting a new format. This is how CD got going back in the eighties: because of production costs, only the audiophile one percent of the market was worth looking at due to sheer quantity and per unit costs. Only after the high end community purchased the new format did it finally filter down to average human beings (anyone remember the extraordinary costs of the first few CD players?). This is leading somewhere: in order to appeal to the audiophiles, the format must SOUND GOOD. CD sounded passable and thus gained a foothold. If copy protection degrades the sound quality (.wma etc) then nobody in the high end market will even look at the new format and it will die. Honestly, I don't think this new mini-flash type format is going to be any problem at all for the end user who wishes to copy it.
I wonder, what if people don't want to upgrade to the new media that doesn't have any significant benifits? Will they just look on the internet and pirate the music they want?
Our brain and musical skills.
Most proficient musicians can sit down, listen to the music, write it down, and play it back, for further distribution, "illegal" or otherwise.
What I am saying is tha the recordign companies are wasting their time, should give us what we want (access to their hughe libraries of music without DRM crap, they have a competitive advantage that will last for a while, tehy could in the meantime figure out that the only ones making moneys will be the good artists and then realize that their only legitimate role in the future may be is as a PR company or managing agent, not as a distributor or copyright holder.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It would seem and I think I may have also fallen into the trap that we think of fair use as being a blurred area outside the law that people get away with.
Actually, reverse engineering of patented techniques has always been not only legal but pretty much pointless, since the whole point of the patent law is to have the detailed explaination publicly available for people to study so everyone could be able to implement the idea as son as the patent expires.
The same is the case with MP3. See mp3/mp3PRO Patent and Software Licensing Information. From the developer FAQ:
That's why LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder but a GPLed patch against the dist10 ISO demonstration source, otherwise it would be just as illegal as a GPLed WMA encoder. In other words, MP3 is as evil as WMA. That's why artists should be using Ogg Vorbis.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
USB key disks (or something similiar) may be the next big media. Blockbuster will be walk-in store and drive thru. You take your key and plug it in to their terminal, download a movie and take it home to watch on your usb media player. usb keys will eventually store many gigs and be very cheap. PVR takeover would be nice... but I think we are there yet...
This technology seems like it would be much more applicable on the next set of video game systems, if anything, as it could be used to store the game information on cartridges (like they used to do on previous systems) but this solves the previous physical size issue (and price issue) and it has no loading time.
I still think vinyl, when I listen to it, sounds better. I have a few albums which I own on both vinyl and cd. At the end of the day, I prefer listening to vinyl more than the digital recording. Is there a word for that? Or can it be explained scientifically? You'd probably know... All I said is as far as I'm concerned, vinyl sounds better. And, even though your post was a good essay in length, all you said was that you thought cd's sounded better. The only difference between you and I is that I'm not telling you you're wrong or trying to belittle you.