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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?"
I burn an audio CD out of iTunes and voilà?
No worry there.
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
solution provided.
2 1337 4 u!
WMA won't be useless under OS X. There's always window media player for OS X, and if you don't mind some chance of quality loss, you can convert WMA to MP3 using free tools.
Just buy a digital audio player that supports mp3 or ogg, and don't buy from the vendors that lock you in.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Than buying an 8 track and then they come out with tape, CD etc?
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Unless you keep everything as a mp3 or some other format without DRM, you are doomed.
You want it easy(iTunes, DRM whatever) you get locked in. Eventually, things will go south and you will lose that investment.
I have hundreds of CDs that I should be able to rip again and again. Maybe someday I will upgrade to 256k rips, or maybe I lose my HDs and have to re-rip... Either way, I own the CD and it is mine to do with as I please.
Five copies and you can't move it again? WTF? Crazy that you even bought into that stuff.
I don't steal music, but I don't buy it either.
It's my way of sticking it to the RIAA.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I choose mp3 because it works everywhere.
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.
you pirate
companies exist to serve the consumer, not visa versa
until companies figure that out, you don't use them
you pirate until the companies figure out that trying to own you is a turn off
and if they never figure that out, then fine, they die
the point is: you are the consumer, you are king
don't agree to any arrangement that makes you subject to something proprietary
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's a simple solution really, don't buy into any of the 3's "unique" solutions schemes. If you absolutely must have that one hit wonder song and don't need the rest of the cd then after you have given over your $.99 to the devil then simply convert the song to a more open file type and move on.
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?
I just say no to DRM, it doesn't get any simpler.
Wanted: Clever sig, top $ paid, all offers considered.
Just buy a player and CDs and rip the music yourself. You have your CDs as a backup and you can rip them to whatever preferred format you want. It may be more expensive than most of the other models, but I have a format I can use to shift into any other format anytime I want.
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!
I think your real question is not about why you can't convert music from DRM format to non-DRM format. Honestly the fact that DRM music exists is what makes the only online music purchase possible. Did you expect the recrod companies to publish the music in any other way in our changing world. I forsee a time when CDs are phased out, because they can be copied easier than DRM music downloaded from an online store. Originially CDs and albums weren't that easy to copy when they were first introduced.
I guess your real question is why isn't there an open standard for DRM? Beats me. I think it is ultimately very self defeating for companies to maintain closed standards.
I work in the field of live pro audio, and there standards are openly published and manufacturers readily adopt them because a) it is a selling point by itself and b)in that industry its widely assumed that your company doesn't make the best product of everything an end user needs. In other words, they know that you are going to be using ABCs product together with XYZs or Blah company's product. Therefore they must adopt open standards in order to even be a consideration.
I guess in the computer industry that attitude doesn't exist and everyone thinks that their product is the shit or whatever. Frankly that needs to change, and what its going to take to execute such a change, I do not know.
-Mikey P
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.
Yeah, but did the Apple experience turn you into one of these--i.e., an intelligent, well-rounded aesthete with a sense of style? My guess is no. You've either got it or you don't. So if you weren't born with that special je ne sais quoi that makes a Mac user a Mac user, don't even bother trying, because in the end, Macs are for different thinkers.
* * * gallery updated Nov. 5, 2005 * * *
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.
They pay the fee for the music. The police in Russia checked their licenses in response to an RIAA complaint and they're all in order.
Globalisation doesn't just work for corporations importing cheap shoes, it works for you too.
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, but I would NEVER throw them away. Why? Because I like the ability to go back in a few years and re-rip everything at higher sampling rates as storage space increases. Why get locked into a 128/160/192kbps version when you may find yourself with room for 256/320kbps later? Or heck, when storage gets cheap enough that you can rip CD's in straight-up WAV format? Only when every single bit of data is copied off the CD would I ever consider actually getting rid of them.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
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.
Personally, I own hundreds of CDs and all my iPod music is 100% legally ripped from them. Many of the CDs are used, many are greatest hits compilations, both of which save money, and I've purchased them over many years. I also buy my ipods when the new version comes out and the old version drops in price so I get a good deal.
If you want to "pirate" to "make a point" the only caveat is this: any time you commit civil disobedience (breaking the law to embarrass the legislature into changing it) you have to be willing to face the consequences of breaking that law (fines and jail) in order to make your point. Remember, Gandhi insisted on being jailed (I think it was for making his own salt) in order to embarrass the government. In Canada, Mortgentaler went to jail repeatedly to uphold the right of women to abortion. In your own country, Doctor Death did the same.
Otherwise you're not a crusader, you're just another whiny punk who wants everything for free immediately. Considering you could do what I do, there's an obvious alternative to pirating to avoid DRM.
There's only two real choices nowadays: WMA or AAC. Microsoft or Apple. That's pretty much it, really. Each has advantages and disadvantages...
With Microsoft, you have the whole enforced compatibility thing with their "Plays For Sure" initiative.
-Pros: Yes, this stuff does actually work, and fairly well at that. There's a few minor functional problems, but they're really minor. The integration with Media Center PC's is nice, as is the complete XBox integration if you have one of those. As long as you stick to Microsoft products, and Plays For Sure compatible player devices, you won't have any problems.
-Cons: You cannot use anything that isn't Plays For Sure compatible, not with the online stores or subscription services. Want to play those Napster downloaded songs on an iPod? No dice. Microsoft is very vocal about blaming Apple, but the fault is not Apple's, it's Microsoft's *incredibly* restrictive Janus DRM licensing. Not only would Apple have to implement WMA, but they'd have to implement a secure methodology such that the files cannot be copied back off the the player *at all*, and an expiration methodology such that if you failed to sync the player to the computer for a time period, the files would expire and/or delete themselves. Apple's not willing to go there, and frankly the hardware design of the iPod precludes some of that capability anyway. Oh, and Microsoft's DRM has yet to be cracked in a good way/
Or you can bite into the Apple for your music. They have the iTunes Music Store and the most popular music player devices.
-Pros: High quality AAC music support (AAC is much better than WMA, anyway). A pretty lightweight DRM that's easy to work with and somewhat easy to work around if needed. MPEG 4 support becoming very standardized. Apple is (mostly) sticking to open standards, basically, which is always nice.
-Cons: Drink the Apple cool-aid only. iTunes works with iPod's, but not with anything else. iPod's do have lots of other support though, from Real and many free and/or pay programs. Even the XBox 360 will support them, in a sense. You also pay the Apple tax, as everything Apple is a bit pricier than the competition. But this stuff is popular for a reason, you know.
In the long run, it seems more likely to me that Apple will win this war. They've been awfully stingy with licensing their FairPlay DRM, making it difficult for vendors to add support for iTunes Purchased Music, but that hasn't stopped them from being the only music store to show a profit. The subscription model (ala Napster) doesn't seem to be picking up a lot of adherents in the long term. People bought CD's at stores and didn't much like CD clubs either. Same principle, really. Not to mention that the evilness of the Microsoft Janus DRM is readily appearant if you make the mistake of buying into it and using it for a while. And vendors seem to be falling all over themselves to add iPod and iTunes support to their gear, even if they can't play iTMS purchased music. MPEG 4 is also the wave of the future, as the standard becomes better defined. Divx and Xvid and other variants will eventually fall off the map, as Apple has a fairly solid base system going there, and everybody is going to be rushing to be compatible with it. I expect a device more dedicated to video than the iPod Video is to be introduced by Apple within a year. Maybe they'll partner with Sony for video support on the PSP. Dunno.
But WMA is dying a slow death, and with the death of Microsoft and Blu-Ray, they're being left behind, really. WMA might be the format used on the next new disc format somehow, or Microsoft might have a hand in it, but Apple is getting into the digital distribution business over the internet in a big way and ignoring the business of data on physical medium. Apple's moves seem smarter to me.
Oh yeah, there's also the Sony option, where you buy nothing but Sony equipment because all Sony's stuff *only* works with other Sony equipment, but frankly that option has no pros to speak of, so it's just best avoided.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Same thing with Linux users.
http://www.allofmp3.com/ lets you buy DRM-free music and instead of paying per song, you pay per bandwidth... you choose your format that you want and you choose the compression rate. It's pretty sweet. It's based out of Russia and is legal to buy from.
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.
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...
"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.
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.
buy vinyl. steal the mp3s off the internet. that way you have a physical, high quality analog copy that nobody can mess with, an mp3 file that has no vendor lock in, and the artist and his or her label get paid.
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:
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.
"I typically don't buy "used" CD's, because 90% of them are from people doing something wrong"
Oddly enough you could make the same argument for new CD's, because 90% of the record companies are doing something wrong (i.e. screwing the public and the artist, payola, buying lawmakers, refusing to pay artists royalties due to them, etc), and so by that argument you can never buy a CD because hardly any of them don't come with some sort of legal or moral baggage.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
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"