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?"

Comments

All of....

[wpiman]

allofmp3.com allows you to pick whatever format you desire.

I choose mp3 because it works everywhere.

Re:All of....

[gurutechanimal]

You know, all this talk of voting with your wallet is completely true. I was once a very large consumer of music; my CD collection stands at over 2000 legitimate, store-bought discs. But ever since the RIAA started taking a very aggressive, anti-consumer stance with their products, I have done a few things:

1) I stopped buying new music discs from stores.
2) I increased my used CD purchases.
3) I increased my concert attendance to give my money directly to artists.
4) I started downloading music.

What does all of this have to do with allofmp3.com? In the last 3 months, I've spent over $250 of my money with them. They provide exactly the kind of service that I would expect from an online music retailer: large selection, choice of format, reasonable pricing. It has totally eliminated numbers 1, 2, and 4 from the above list. It's the perfect solution (although I still buy used CD's when I can't find them on allofmp3).

People are bitching that allofmp3 is:

A) Unethical because the artists don't get paid: Well, they don't get paid when I go down to mall to buy a CD, and they don't get paid when I buy a used CD. Speaking as someone who at one time was under a major-label contract, artists don't get paid from record sales, unless they're already huge.

B) Run by the russian Mafia: the record industry here is run by the mafia, or at least run LIKE the mafia. No sympathy here; at least if allofmp3 is run by the mafia, they don't pretend otherwise. Here, our record labels act like they exist to serve the artist...what a load!

Look, the bottom line is that allofmp3 has it right. LARGE SELECTION, FAIR PRICES, CHOICE OF FORMAT, and EASE OF USE. I know they're doing it right, because I'm finally buying huge amounts of music again. It's everything a music store should be. And its far out of the reach of US law, thank God!

Easy

[Hatta]

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?

Re:I don't buy music

[Saige]

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.

Re:OT: Is Vorbis dead?

[virtualXTC]

Frugal results for ogg turn up plenty of devices:
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=ogg&btnG=Searc h+Froogle&hl=en&show=dd

Winamp 2.7 plays ogg just fine - why go for the itunes bloat?

A couple of players

[ValentineMSmith]

Maybe I'm a little old fashioned, but I generally don't buy individual songs from a subscription service. Instead, I buy the CD's and rip to Q6 OGG for my (and my wife's) players. She has a Neuros 1 20 gb player and I have an iAudio X5 20gb. Both players have internal FM receivers, and both support OGG. Both also report as mass storage USB 2.0 devices. Although the Neuros requires the use of a synchronization application, they're both good players.

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.

Re:Duh... like...

[PeterChenoweth]

WAV-encoded CD's are less efficent than MP3's, that's for sure, but I think the point the original author was trying to make is that you use the CD's as a temporary medium. In my case I just use a CD-RW, so there's no ongoing media cost. I tend to purchase an artist's entire CD at one time, rather than just a few tracks, that makes things much easier.

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.

Re:compact discs

[pla]

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.

Re:Duh... like...

[bluephone]

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.

Re:Duh... like...

[bobdinkel]

Second of all, use your brain, open the preferences and set the importing prefs to 160 kbps or greater.

I think he was referring to the iTunes Music Store. And to the best of my knowledge the iTMS only offers 128Kbps AAC files.

Re:OT: Is Vorbis dead?

[alpharoid]

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:

- Any .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.

- 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.