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Dealing with Digital Music and Vendor Lock-In?
rahuja asks: "Buying and using digital music is a far from easy decision today - there are various competing and incompatible formats, stores and players out there in the market, primarily Apple (AAC + iTunes + iPod), Windows (WMA + various stores + WMA-compatible players), and Sony (Atrac3 + Connect.com + Walkman). How do you then ensure that the music and player you buy today will not be incompatible with your player, online store or the OS?"
"Burning to audio CD and ripping back is always possible, but it is a painfully slow process and all tag information (song, album, artiste) is lost in the process.
In the past, I've used Sony Connect [Ed: IE 5.5+ only] (thanks to a $10 card I got with a Sony CD Walkman), which locks you in to Sony-only devices, and later, WMA with MSN Music and a Creative Muvo Micro N200. My player just died, and I'm too scared to lock myself into a new player/format/store now. iPod doesn't have an FM tuner yet, and my WMA tracks will be useless if next year I switch to Mac once the new x86 Powerbooks come out. I'm not sure how real Real's Harmony is, and JHymn doesn't support iTunes 6 yet.
In an ideal world we'd all have OGG-based players with FM tuner, and access to DRM-less music, or at least a universal, compatible format.
How are you dealing with this issue? Or is it just me?"
In the past, I've used Sony Connect [Ed: IE 5.5+ only] (thanks to a $10 card I got with a Sony CD Walkman), which locks you in to Sony-only devices, and later, WMA with MSN Music and a Creative Muvo Micro N200. My player just died, and I'm too scared to lock myself into a new player/format/store now. iPod doesn't have an FM tuner yet, and my WMA tracks will be useless if next year I switch to Mac once the new x86 Powerbooks come out. I'm not sure how real Real's Harmony is, and JHymn doesn't support iTunes 6 yet.
In an ideal world we'd all have OGG-based players with FM tuner, and access to DRM-less music, or at least a universal, compatible format.
How are you dealing with this issue? Or is it just me?"
With the few tunes I have from ITMS (mostly free ones), I just burn them to an audio CD for safekeeping. Then they can be ripped back in any time in a DRM-free format.
I choose mp3 because it works everywhere.
How do you then ensure that the music and player you buy today will not be incompatible with your player, online store or the OS?"
Easy, only buy music from people willing to let you listen to it. Places like emusic and magnatune sell completely unrestricted music files. And shit, archive.org gives away thousands of hours of music for free.
Vote with your wallet. If DRM is unacceptable, don't buy from people who would push it on you. There's plenty of music out there that's not DRM'd, and it's mostly better than the RIAA crap. Good musicians can afford to give music away, there's plenty more where that came from.
If you were treated the same way in a physical store that Apple or Napster treats you online, you'd storm out angrily and never shop there again. Why should online stores be any different?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Apple and iPod look cool and all that, I'm just not big on paying their premium to be cool as it were. Instead I got the same basic product for $100 less.
60 gig iPod - $400
60 gig Creative Nomad zen - $300.
"In the game of life, someone always has to lose. To me, if life were fair, that someone would always be Oklahoma." -DKR
Don't you think "same basic product" is a little bit of a stretch, when the Apple product has the advantage of a color screen, video playback, and charging over USB?
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Last.fm is a great way to expand your musical horizons, and introduce yourself to new artists that you're very likely to find enjoyable.
I've been using the site for a year, and not only finding great new music, finding it on smaller labels (such as Projekt), and even independent artists (Hungry Lucy, Collide). In fact, I'm finding a lot of these artists that I like better than just about any RIAA crap, because the ones recommended to me are very tailores to my tastes by the site.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Frugal results for ogg turn up plenty of devices:c h+Froogle&hl=en&show=dd
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=ogg&btnG=Sear
Winamp 2.7 plays ogg just fine - why go for the itunes bloat?
Neuros Audio is very community oriented and has been mentioned quite a bit on Slashdot recently, and are known as being very friendly to open source.
IAudio isn't quite as friendly to open source as Neuros, but having a player that had USB Host functionality and would play OGG, FM stereo, Video, and (if I feel the urge) WMA 10 based files from Rhapsody or Napster was too good to pass up.
Bottom line, if there is any music I hear and want to keep, I go to the used CD store, buy it, rip it, and move it to my player. No DRM, no loss of audio quality as part of a conversion, and, since both players report as mass storage devices, OS compatibility is not a problem.
Karma: Chameleon - mostly influenced by bad '80s New Wave music
I buy CDs. I rip them to FLAC and then make copies in ogg-vorbis. If my Rio Karma dies and I have to get a player without Vorbis support, I just go back to the FLACs and run them through LAME. What's the big deal?
And no, I don't buy downloadable music. If I wanted pop slop in a crappy-sounding format I'd just get a $5.00 portable radio. I'll consider buying downloadable music when I can get unencumbered FLACs for half the price of the equivalent CD.
Sorry, I'm a writer. That makes you raw material.
well, there was no color screen or video playback ipod when I bough mine, and pretty colored song titles wasnt a big selling point for me either way. Video playback? Maybe. I dont know a whole lot about how it works, but I dont really use my mp3 player in situations where I can concentrate my focus on it. I listen to my mp3 player while walking to my apt, or when I was walking to class (or occasionally while I was in class) usually, if I want to watch a video I'll go to my tv or computer with bigger screens. The charging over usb sounds attractive, but I went with the Nomad because it has a detachable battery, and I can buy a new one for less than $50. Plus the thing has been durable. My girlfriend dropped it down a sewer and it still works fine. I have no regets about my decision.
"In the game of life, someone always has to lose. To me, if life were fair, that someone would always be Oklahoma." -DKR
1.Buy & Download from Napster|iTunes|whatever.
2.Use their software to burn a CD of what you just bought, put the tracks in the same order that they are on the real CD. Napster likes to reverse the order, so you have to manually adjust that before you burn the CD. iTunes usually keeps them in the correct order.
3. Rip all of the music back off the CD using your favorite CD-ripper & encoder.
4.If you bought all of the tracks from a specific CD, and if you set up tracks in the right order, most of the time your ripping software will pick up all of the Artist & Track information automatically from CDDB or Gracenote, so you don't have to manually tag everything. Otherwise, you now have to re-tag/re-name files.
5.Erase CDRW.
6.Enjoy your DRM-free audio files.
Windows Media Player for Mac OS X is not a useful solution. I am on a number of Mac fora, and I can't count the number of times I've seen posts about it not working, not playing particular files, etc. When it does "work," people are tearing their hair out at it....
What I say does not represent the views of my employers, my friends, my cats, or myself.
Plextor still produces sensible CD-ROM drives that have bulletproof digital extraction and will ignore any of the multi-session based DRM tricks.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Yeah, but if you like listening to CDs on your computer, you're going to be butting heads with DMA before long.
You say that as though:
A) Circumventing DRM actually took some effort, and/or
B) I cared about obeying laws bought-and-paid-for by corporate interests.
As neither of those holds true, I'll second the GP's response. I deal with attempts to lock me into vendor-specific formats by buying uncompressed media either with no DRM or with losslessly removeable DRM (which currently means CDs), and ripping it losslesssly (to FLAC).
I can then transcode to whatever format my current player prefers without incuring serially degraded quality from using lossy compression (as much as I don't care for MP3, everything currently supports it so it makes a good choice). When my current player dies, I can get another and at worst (if it doesn't support old-player's-preferred-format), I'll need to let my PC run overnight transcoding from the original FLACs to the new-player's-preferred-format.
Amen.
;)
I work for a fairly big independent music distributor. We provide digital distribution as well as physical.
I wrote some scripts for ripping from CDs (with cdparanoia & friends) and entering metadata in XML which feeds into our, er, really advanced content management system.
Then we just encode out to AACs, WMAs or raw WAVs for delivery to retailers.
I've visited other digital services people who do just the same (for example, if you want your stuff on MusicNet you either provide them WAVs and metadata or give them retail CDs to rip. Ditto with iTMS and their iTMS Producer app).
Just buy CDs, because that's what you're getting your AACs, etc. from anyway - trust me it really is!
Oh, and if you're having problems with the "copy protection" then get a Real operating system
If you object to rootkits on your CDs then don't buy the CD. Write to the record company and artist telling them why you are not buying it. If you buy the CD anyway because it won't harm your Real OS write to them anyway telling them they are dorks.
If they are not giving you what you want then don't buy it and tell them why you don't want it. It's not like it's basic foodstuff or anything. You *can* live without carrying around 10 billion tracks with you all the fricking time you know.
You can also buy music from stores that sell their music in DRM-Free MP3 and Ogg formats like AudioLunchbox, Mindawn, or MP3Tunes ;)
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
"1. Start with an MP3
2. Decompress and burn
3. Rip and undecompress to reproduce the original MP3
As you can see, there is no lossy compression step in this sequence -- no information is discarded."
There exists no way to "undecompress" an MP3 or other lossy file in the way you describe. If you disagree you are invited to link to software that actually exists that can do it, or even a paper decribing how to do it.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
Except your end product has now been twice compressed, and thus has lost even more data, and sounds worse than the DRM copy you originally bought - er, licensed. While I did exactly what you describe for the "Come And Get It" EP that I was allowed to download for free when buying Liz Pahir's self-titled album a couple Januarys ago (It came as one big WMA, so I had to DL the WMA, burn to CD, import as WAV, chop it up, then re-encode it), I was still displeased about the lack of MP3 or OGG support, and would never have paid money for the WMA. The only reason I went through that process is because it was free, and the music was good.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
I think he was referring to the iTunes Music Store. And to the best of my knowledge the iTMS only offers 128Kbps AAC files.
A publicly traded company exists solely to make profits for shareholders.
I realize you're being facetious here, but for the benefit of the uninformed: "Plays for Sure" would be better entitled "Plays for Now", since you'll lose your music when you upgrade your computer or reinstall the operating system more than twice:
I don't really understand why you want to play anything through iTunes. Why not just use xmms or Winamp? Either will play ogg vorbis and plenty of other codecs.
Also you should check out Rockbox http://www.rockbox.org/. They are even working on a port of that to the iPod now. This is my answer, coupled with buying CDs. Rockbox supports multiple codecs, so I am not hamstrung by the vendor's proprietary firmware. And it's open source so you can contribute to making it better if you have the desire and skills.
Speaking as an owner of an iRiver ifp795 player, I'd be wary about buying an iRiver player especially for the vorbis support. I did exactly that, and found that the entire ifp7xx and 8xx series have ogg support problems such as:
.ogg file plays at a noticeably lower volume than MP3s. If you mix oggs with mp3s in your playlists, you'll spend most of the time with your finger on the volume knob.
- Any
- Only ogg files of 96kbps average and above are supported. If you want to save storage space by playing low-bitrate ogg files, this is not your player. And if you save a lot of stuff below vorbis quality 3, you'll have to reconvert them.
- Older models may skip, play noise or crash the player if the ogg file drops below 96kbps at any point. This is not the case for my player.
I know there are some iRiver models that play oggs without any of these restrictions (especially the HD models), I'd avise a thorough check on the Internet before buying one. I didn't, and ended up with an ogg player that is so minimally useful for my purposes that I just use it for MP3s.
A classical work, such as a symphony or a concerto is composed of several individual pieces of music called movements-- each of which can stand alone.
You're going to hate me ;)
A lot of rock music, like Pink Floyd and Queensryche have the very same property, and I want it for my stuff.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"