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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?"
iPod, iTune, iTunes Music Store, and MP3 is your best bet - period!
The player is both Windows and Mac compatible. It allows you access to largest and well known music stores in existence. It allows you to access music, video and TV episodes. It allows you to use MP3 from CDs you own or from other sources - wink..wink..
My wife has her iPod with all of our music and she loves it. We have the airport express with air tunes and play all our music to our stereo system, very cool!
I have my iPod, my wifes old iPod and I use it for the office and the car. I have a 1gb iPod Shuttle that I use when walking around, snow boarding and any other time I want to be portable.
Q: I am short, useless and provide no value. What am I? A: a sig
Than buying an 8 track and then they come out with tape, CD etc?
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Simply do not buy into proprietary DRMed format and stick with plain MP3/OGG/AC3/etc. players.
This would pretty much restrict people to smaller online stores, P2P downloads and CD-ripping but at least these formats are freely transcodable and transportable.
Does Vorbis still have a place in the world, or would I be better off re-ripping my music to MP3 - even if I still think Vorbis is technically superior?
I know this isn't completely on-topic, but since we're discussing vendor lock-in, it feels like I've managed to lock myself into a Unix-only format.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Right, because CDs never have anything related to DRM...
(Just to list a few)
And not the copy-protected variety. When new albums come out they are typically priced at $29.99 or $34.99. If you wait 6 months they're $25. Wait another 6 months and they're $20. Eventually they're $10, sometimes even $5. There's still plenty of good music to choose from and there's no rationale to owning the disc when the music is less than a year old; the radio will be playing it to death anyway.
The benefit of disc is you can create mp3, ogg, atrac, whatever you damn well like, If you rip it first to ALAC or FLAC then you don't ever have to touch the disc again but you've got a reliable archive just in case you lose the digital rips.
The online purchasing of music doesn't appeal to me until it's FLAC, it's cheaper ($1.69 a song is pure robbery), and it has no DRM. For $8.99 I can get a 20-song disc delivered to my workplace within 24 hours, so paying $33.80 to get a crappier version with no cover art or disc really isn't attractive. Your priorities might vary but hey, this is Ask Slasdot, I'm telling you what I'd do. Stick with disc and don't give legitimacy to second-class crippled music formats.
I buy from Magnatune, Audio Lunchbox or one of the many other sites that sell open, non-DRM music in MP3, OGG Vorbis and FLAC formats.
Why should I buy things from people who don't have respect for me and my wishes as a customer?
No major label will ever again get a single penny from me until they say "screw DRM" and mean it too. If they don't, that's just fine with me. They can just wither and die for all I care.
Solution provided.
Just to expand on that, it is just as trivially easy to buy a CD online, pop it into your CD-ROM when it arrives & rip it to the format you prefer.
End result:
Although I can see some of the appeal for the itunes store/the various wma stores/sony's online stores, frankly I think they're occupying a rather dangerous middle ground between the (free) high quality tunes you can get from torrents/donkey and the (far better value for money) CDs you can buy.
My pics.
But seriously... DRM on CDs? Not effective DRM. Not unless the content manufacturers manage to convince everyone to throw away their existing CD players.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I'm not really an audiphile, but I plan to get my wife an iPod for Christmas. I don't really like the proprietary format, but with audacity I should be able to convert anything to mp3, as this software has the ability to create an mp3 from anything playing on the soundcard. (I haven't done this yet, I was told about this functionality, so it's possibility not even available). I don't know if this would lose quality, but unless it's obvious, I don't really care. It may be a solution others are interested in looking into.
Others have mentioned burning to a CD and re-ripping, I didn't realize that would be an option, but it sounds like a good backup plan.
A modern day witchhunt.
And what if Creative or iriver releases a new kickass player that blows the iPod out of the water? You're stuck with your sub-par iPod and your large collection of DRMed music that plays on nothing but.
The truth is there is no answer. Apple, Sony and MS don't seem to get the fact that if you're going to go DRM make it standard across all devices. I don't give a crap if its Fairplay or WMA or whatever, if i buy a song somewhere I want it to play everywhere.
So no, I don't want ITMs becuase I don't want to be locked into an iPod.
Until content providers and middlemen (Apple/MS) get their act together, its Limewire for me.
Simple.. do your research to live in a DRM free environment
Digital Audio Player
I researched around for an non-cripled (no DRM) player that would mount as a hard drive, allowing access to the music files without the use of any software.
Result:iRiver iHP-120 (which has better audio fidelity, plays more formats, and has many more options than the iPod [digital optical out/input, FM radio, etc.]) Not to mention I'm running rockbox on it so it's a wonderful experience
Music purchases
I buy CDs! I can rip everything in the FORMAT & BITRATE that I choose, and if, God forbid, I lose or destroy my DAP (& the duplicates on my computer) I can re-rip something. Also, if you search around, you can get CD's online for cheap & without tax.
Allofmp3.com says to me, "I don't give a shit about doing the right thing (supporting the artists), so long as I'm on the right side of the law." Personally, I think that's even more disgusting than outright piracy, since then at least you'd have the balls to risk getting caught and punished for your blatant freeloading. But to each his own, I suppose.
I second this. Being in Canada, I love to take advantage of this when possible. I do not download music at all (either paid or pirated, unless it's free like the Harvey Danger release recently). Rather, I have ripped all of my own CDs to MP3. Nowadays I still buy the occasional CD (which gets immediately ripped), but I also borrow original CDs from family and friends which also get stored as MP3s, and I can even borrow from the local libraries as well. I can make copies for personal use all I want, but I cannot give the copies away (fair enough). But the original disc can be passed around and each person can make their own personal copy.
We do pay a levy on blank CDs which sucks, but with decent fair-use laws that make everything I mention above perfectly legal it feels to be a reasonably fair arrangement.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Even better, buy used CDs. Same music, 3/4 to 1/2 of the price AND you can almost always sell it back (although at a lower price).
You are legally and/or morally confused. However, you begin to understand the horror of the society based on DRM concept paradigm. You will end in jail for any illegal download, even if you buy 10000 of another copies of the same song.
There you are, staring at me again.
The easiest way to prevent the consumer from being locked in to anything, is to offer as many formats as possible. With our music store, we use Ogg Vorbis currently, but in January we will have MP3 and AAC support (with NO DRM). The difference is that we are an indie music provider. However some people don't like indie music, and that is perfectly fine for them. There are way too many mainstream music providers that all do the same thing, and we want to offer something different. Because we are an indie music provider, our business model is also different. Our bands get 40% of the net sale right off the bat. Also if a band sells more, they earn more. The system really does work. I wish the major labels (and the RIAA for that matter) would get a clue and realize that things can be done differently and be profitable for both sides.
I have nothing clever to put here...
What are the legal implications of going through that process?
I'm pretty sure that JHymn, and iRevolt, etc, are all DMCA violators... But to use a functionality that's built into iTunes to essentially remove the DRM from a song... Is that okay?
Of course, if you want to ensure compatibility in the future, you need to purchase songs that don't rely on proprietary restrictions management or encoding formats. the question of "which DRM" is a silly one to ask -- if you're purchasing cryptographically restricted music, then you should not have any expectation of being able to use it freely, either today or in the future.
I just buy CD's and encode all the music myself with grip. Grip is pretty good about adding in the track names and other vitals automatically. If it can't find them it prompts you.
One large advantage of encoding it yourself and using a non-DRM player is that you can play the same file from {Linux,{Free,Net,Open}BSD} and from the portable player. They player I have is a Digital Minds DMC 500. It isn't the smallest player in the world, but it plays mp3's and oggs and takes a normal laptop 2/5" drive. That means you can easily slap a 100G drive in there and carry a few weeks of music on you.
After a 3 years of recording 9 hours of radio shows a week I've finally managed to fill the disk. Unfortunately the disk drive capacities haven't really gone up as much as I'd hoped.
just get tunebite and re-encode your "locked-in" format into mp3, ogg, wav, whatever you like.
.wma files into the more portable .mp3
:P
i'm 3/4 of the way through a total re-encode of all my (70 gigs or so worth) napster
it basically plays the file using wmp or itunes or whatever and records the audio off your sound card. the best part about it is if you have a card that supports it, you can dub at 4x speed so that 70 gigs or so has taken me about two weeks instead of two months
-dk
Dream with the feathers of angels stuffed beneath your head.