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Microsoft Preps 'Janus' Music Copy-Prevention Scheme
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft is expected to unveil copy-protection software this summer that will for the first time give portable digital music players access to rented tunes from all-you-can-eat subscription services -- a development that some industry executives believe will shake up the online music business." Janus is the Roman god of doorways, gates, passages, preventing people from copying music, etc.
Yes.
"The only downer is the fact that if you lose the licenses you're screwed."
Start Media Player. Pull down the Tools menu, then select License Management. Choose Back Up now.
Tada. You're no more screwed than anyone else who doesn't backup.
Has Apple iTunes been hacked yet? As in giving people un-encrypted, un-watermarked AAC files?
actually, i think someone did. there's also i think a windows/itunes app that captures the stream. but more importantly, the whole drm thing is moot. you can go
aac -> cd audio (for car, etc.) then go cd -> aac/mp3. the resulting aac/mp3 is drm free. (i kow becasue the mp3's play fine on my linux box as well as my ibook). and i haven't noticed a drop in quality from aac w/drm -> cd -> aac w/o drm. so the whole cracked scheme is not important. all it takes is a $.25 cd and a few minutes.
note: no, i did md5sum the two aac files, becasue they would of course be different. but, if someone has audio software to measure levels, etc., i'd be curious.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Everyone I know who thought DIVX was a good idea was not aware they had to go to the store and buy a disc they would have to pay for every time you watch it. They thought it was on-demand streaming. The moment I told them they had to go buy a physical disc they agreed it was stupid. The liked the rental model, and didn't care about anything else you mentioned. They just thought it would save a trip to the rental store.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
Perfect software name for Microsoft.
" Janus head is a popular phrase for deception, that is, when action does not match speech."
From: Wikipedia.
IMHO, the best online store out there is www.allofmp3.com. This company is Russian based, and because of their somewhat lax copyright laws and much more lenient recording industry, they offer non-encumbered downloads at cheap prices. Basically, the site is pay-for-bandwidth. If you download a song at 128kbps MP3, you essentially pay a penny per minute of audio.
The other awesome thing about that site is the ability to selecte your download format from WMA, MP3, OGG, FLAC, etc, plus the particular quality settings. For most downloads the audio is converted on the fly from a high quality archive (~400kbps), and for others it is actually converted directly from the CD-DA source. In "Advanced Mode", it's almost equivalent to selecting your command-line switches for the transcoder of your choice!
I'm in no way affiliated with these guys, but I love their service. It's actually faster and more reliable for me to download music from these guys than it is to try and venture out onto the P2P networks. Heck, for quality 7 OGG music, I'm paying roughly $0.02 CAD/minute. Plus, they let you pay with PayPal, so it's not like your sending your credit card info to some random Russians.
> Janus is the Roman god of doorways, gates,
> passages, preventing people from copying music,
> etc.
Janus is also two-faced.
From Wikipedia:
"Janus head is a popular phrase for deception, that is, when action does not match speech."
It started with recording songs off the radio with a tapedeck...
Now all you need to do is just play the song and record the output of your sound card to a file using the "What U Hear" function of modern sound cards and re-encode that to a file and you got a non-copy protected file.
There's no way around copy protecting sound, it's like trying to copy-protect spoken word, you can't do it!