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UC System Chooses Mindawn Download Service
An anonymous reader writes "In hopes of stemming the tide of students freely sharing copyrighted multimedia files over their campus networks, the University of California (UC) system has selected an online music and video service that supports Windows, Mac OS, and Linux to provide downloadable music and video for its approximately 200,000 student population. Unlike iTunes (which only supports Mac OS X and Windows) and Napster (which is Windows-only), Mindawn works with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. In addition, instead of providing downloads that are degraded by what is known as "lossy compression," downloads from Mindawn are offered in both Ogg Vorbis and FLAC formats." (Vorbis files are lossy too, though my tin ears can't always tell.)
Unfortunately for the UC systems, Mindawn doesn't seem to offer any popular music (songs produced by the RIAA) so I'm not sure that's going to help stem the tide of file sharing.
Not that there's anything wrong with not providing that RIAA stuff...
There are many solutions to this problem. You could either: 1) Convert your files 2) Use something other than iTunes to sync (Like Anapod http://www.redchairsoftware.com/anapod/)
I thought that parent is a troll, so I went and tossed a few querries. Couldn't get any results. So I browsed. It looks like they carry a few hundred of albums. Wow. I've seen personal collections bigger than that. They've got nothing on a university lan.
Virtually every online music store other than iTMS uses the PlaysForSure format (MSDRM around WMA). This format does not work with iPod players. However, Mindawn provides FLAC, and FLAC can easily be transcoded into AAC (*.m4a) which iPod players do support.
So long as the RIAA believes it is justified in charging far more than the market will obviously bear for it's products we will continue to download them for free and we will continue to resist and resent attempts to use our tax-supported government workers as the RIAA goon squad.
And, FYI that's real democratic capitailism in action for you. Now if they provide a *full* catalog of *actual* music at a reasonable monthly subscription rate (vs charging per download) supporting all popular OS's their servers will be jammed with business and their cash registers will ring happily again.
We are willing to spend, but we are not willing to be fleeced.
http://www.cdigix.com/website/press/press071805. asp
It offers popular music as well as movies and TV. Mindawn I'm still kind of confused on.
AllOfMP3 with many [MP3 (LAME/Blade), WMA (7/8/9), OGG (CBR/VBR), AAC (vbr/cbr), MPC, Lossless (Monkey's, OptimFROG, FLAC, PCM, WMA 9 Lossless)] encoding options
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Because FLAC is lossess, FLAC files can be converted into AAC/MP3/whatever at their maximum quality (instead of what normally happens when you convert between MP3s, Ogg, etc.)
Actually it is an application, so it makes the phrase "supports windows, os x, and linux" sound rather interesting indeed.
http://www.mindawn.com/download.php
Did you actually visit the site?
In the artist FAQ it actually says the artists have to pay $50 to get on their site... that's probably the reason no decent artists are on their.
Just to make sure not even the most common popular artists are on there: No "spears", no "jackson", no "madonna, no "metallica", not even any "beatles".
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Mindawn seems to be more like a community site / online record company, rather than a music store in it's own right. *ANY* artists can sign up for $50 a year (or the current special deal of $50 for lifetime) and upload as many albums as they want, with 75% of the sale coming back to them if it's exclusive to Mindawn, and 55% if it isn't.
From the Artists FAQ:
So while they do work with record companies, a lot (most?) of their music will inevitably be from independant artists, and anyone who wants to share their work. From the Customer FAQ:
Not a system for everyone, since many students will be more interested in the big names which tend to get pirated in the first place, but a nice enough system, and the artists certainly aren't hard done by. They even provide software, MARS (Mindawn Audio Ripping Software), for ripping CD, WAV or AIFF to OGG or FLAC format for using with their system. That's not to say that you couldn't use flac/oggenc, especially since it isn't F/OSS, but it's nice that they've provided their own multi-platform utility with a GUI to help out in that regard... not to mention the fact that the MARS documentation says that you need oggenc/flac/cdparanoia installed on Linux in any case.
I think this is a very good move by UC.
The university probably have an obligation to ensure all members of the university can use the services they buy in to and probably also have an obligation to ensure that the deal is fair for the students. As a result they were required to go for a provider which catered for windows, Mac and Linux. The popular providers don't do this and worse they wrap all there files in DRM. DRMed music files would no doubt increase support calls from not technical students to the universities help desk, all those students whose old computers have died and who have managed to copy there music across, only to find that it won't play...(or similar - I guess this is the case, I don't have any DRMed music.)
Mindawn don't carry popular music, but this is probably more because the record labels are unwilling to provide mindawn with them in a suitable form for them to sell (ie. allow them to sell them as unDRMed ogg vorbis files at $0.99).
I think that by choosing Mindawn UC is covering there back, whilst at the same time sending a message to the record labels that they want them to provide music at reasonable price, in an OS agnostic manner, without DRM.
I'm sure this deal won't stop the UC pupils from getting itunes accounts and grabbing all the utter shite pop they want, but at least the university aren't bank-rolling this.
Try telling your average college student that he needs to transcode the FLAC into AAC before listening to the music on his iPod.
Transcoding of DRM-less audio happens automatically once the proper QuickTime filter is installed.
actually that just means you are out of touch with the average person.
you really should get to know them...
how pissed they get when they find out they cant plug a dvd player into their vcr (because their tv only has one set of inputs).
how pissed they are they cant just copy a file for a friend (IM it for instance)
the average person doesnt like drm, they just dont know thats what it is called.
so you just need to stop hanging out with geeks and stop speaking for the people you obvisiously dont know
Yes and yes. MusicMobs, too, but this got started with indie music. Amazon's recommendation service is actually fairly useful but it's not very indie-oriented. CDBaby is a great site but they don't have any music recommendations other than their Editors' Picks, which is so not tailored to my tastes it isn't funny. With my site I want to mix the majors with the indies but it's tough and time-consuming, something the public isn't interested in. They want convenience, baby, and that's what radio spoon feeds them.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Because mp3 is NOT open and AAC is NOT DRMed.