Slashdot Mirror
Barenaked USB Drive
CryptoKnight writes "The Barenaked Ladies are releasing their next album via a reusable 128 MB USB flash drive. From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer article: 'Rather than distribute via CD, DVD or download, the Barenaked Ladies are making their newest selection of songs, videos and exclusive material available on a USB flash drive. Nettwerk Music Group is releasing Barenaked on a Stick beginning today, says the Hollywood Reporter. It plays on PCs, Macs and any other audio product with a USB port -- like some car stereos -- and costs $30.'"
I'd buy this thing...
$30 for some songs?!?
Can I pay more for one without Barenaked Ladies songs on it?
Great music distribution method. Perhaps some SD and other memory card-tricks will follow.
Psst - I went to the web site and there are no naked ladies in the band
I lost my sig...
Ummm... okay, somebody help me out here. Why would I spend $30 to get an album on a USB stick when I can get an album on CD for $16 or on Itunes for less than that? I suppose there's some collector value there but practically speaking, that's an awful lot of money for an album.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
What's the policy on burning a CD from the MP3s on said flash drive? Are they even MP3s or are they copy-protected?
I mean, it's a cool idea, but I'd like to know whether there's DRM included on it.
U don't wanna see the 'Bare Naked Ladies' naked...
sounds like a pretty good deal to me though, content + resuable media.. (is it reusable??)
Do the files contain DRM?
I would think that they do, but it would be great if they didn't.
I'll let you know how it is in One Week.
Signed,
Gordon Maroon.
They're charging $30 for an album with compressed audio? No thanks.
-Nick
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
I was pushing my company three years ago to do this with user docs....they could toss on some promo videos, etc. This is a good idea, as long as they don't pull a Sony.
I dont' care what people say, compressed audio sounds different/worse than straight recordings. If they are compressing their entire CD down to 128M I wonder what the compression rate will be? I'm also curious if I can buy their USB drive and then receive via download, mail, or other the high quality, non-compressed tracks. Does anyone else agree?
Generation Trance: What generation are you?
Is this the death of CD?
This sounds like sort of a nifty idea, since a USB drive can be handy to have.. but if it were released as a regular CD or online download, couldn't I just put it on a USB drive myself? Also, $30 is pretty steep for a CD's worth of music, even if they do throw in the USB stick. Not to mention that in a few years, the handiness of having this USB stick will be outweighed by capacity increases.. no one will be using 128 MB sticks in a couple years' time. I'm just not seeing this pan out.
http://cltracker.net -- powerful craigslist multi-city search
The bare naked truth: I can buy a 128MB USB 2.0 flash drive for $10-12 and put songs I actually like on there.
Shill for rich musicians much?
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Is there any use besides for looking hip? If I liked the band, I wouldn't be tempted at all to buy their new album, I prefer far more a CD since it lasts longer, USB flash drives can lose some data sometimes...
The reason I don't buy from online services is I refuse to pay money for lossless codecs. If I am paying for music, I want to get all the bits, and then determine for myself which lossless codec I use to compress the song.
I would hate to see situations like this, where albums are only avialable in a lossy format, become the norm
Download my free songs!
Girlfriend: Hey, what do you have on that flash drive?
You: Barenaked ladies...why?
SLAP!
We've all been complaining that we don't want to buy a full album for $16 when we really just want a few songs. So the industry responds by making us pay $30 for a full album with a crappy USB drive. Great progress!
This reminds me of getting music on tape. After you got tired of the band, you could just 'remove the protection' (using sticky tape!) and record whatever you wanted over it.
"Barenaked on a Stick" describes what it'd be after I formatted it.
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
RTFA:
"This 128 reusable drive contains 29 songs, including the band's 2004 "Barenaked for the Holidays" album, in MP3 format along with live tracks, in-concert spoken quips, album art, photos, videos and more."
Reusable. MP3 format.
I may actually get it. Granted, 128MB isn't nearly large enough for my BNL boot collection (~2gb or so), but I could use a memory key and $30 isn't too bad a price.. Here's hoping _McDonald's Girl_ and/or _Lovers in a Dangerous Time_ are on there...
Barenaked has always been a great band that does things a little different.
In this case the sum of the parts is greater than the items. Sure the music can be delivered cheaper and a memory stick is cheap. But the willingness to try something a little bit different just to see what happens is worth some applause.
By the way, these guys produce good music. They are worthy of support.
Think of it. With this device you can keep 128MB of raw data under there.
Hah! I just made you say underwear!
Free Conference Call -- No Spam, High Quality
Everyones complaining about the price, and yet no one is happy that mainstream bands are staring to use technology in a cool way. Also, if yourtoo lazy to RTFA.... "This 128 reusable drive contains 29 songs, including the band's 2004 "Barenaked for the Holidays" album, in MP3 format along with live tracks, in-concert spoken quips, album art, photos, videos and more."
Yay, I have a sig.
Oops, I don't refuse to pay for lossless compression! I meant to say I refuse to pay for lossy compression.
Preview is a good thing!
Download my free songs!
Hey, while travelling in France I was taken to a small wine shop that sold wine in bulk; bring your container, they'd fill it up from what looked like a gas hose. Wouldn't it be nice to do the same with music and your flash drive? As long as there will be physical buildings where people go to buy their music, it would be great to avoid all the shipping of the physical media.
Plus I'm sure the music publishers would pass the savings on to us consumers.
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
The term seems more than a bit outdated. Will there be any cool graphics on the USB stick itself? Could be quite a collectible if the edition is truly limited.
It costs more than a CD ... And if everyone released music like this, I'd have 128Meg USB drives laying around my house all over the place.
The audio's lower quality
It doesn't work in my car
That's only slightly more practical than releasing your album on the first 600 meg of a 500 gig drive, for $200 each.
I prefer far more a CD since it lasts longer, USB flash drives can lose some data sometimes
Which is more likely to be rendered unusable in a household with small children who get to your discs before you have a chance to put them away? If you think CD is so durable, then make a CD-R backup of the stick once you buy it, making sure to use "Music CD-R" media to satisfy all requirements of applicable private copying laws.
This sounds like a unique idea for releasing an album and if they pack it with goodies, I certainly won't complain. Including in-concert banter is a great idea, as that's always one of the things I've missed when I listen to a recording - there's less energy in the studio than there is live. They do offer downloads or CDs of most of their live concerts, for a price, which is a fantastic offer I've yet to actually *try*.
What worries me is that it'll be a little too easy to *lose* your music from that drive. Maybe that's a small worry, since you'll *probably* be able to back the music up on your own. Still, it just means that now I have to create a CD of it in order to listen to it in my car. Too many "ifs" to make me feel totally comfortable with purchasing this (even though I totally will). Plus, it'll look like hell on my CD rack. ^)_(^
Heh. I suppose what would've been an even better gimmick would be if they had released this USB drive in a package that includes a blank CD with artwork specific to this album. Then you could record it yourself, or even use the disc to record your own mixes. Include a little album artwork on the USB stick (front/back covers) and you can print out a pretty CD for your shelves if you wanted.
Brendan "Beej" Dery "Only in Canada, eh?"
Some USB flash company has a new offer of 128 Mb USB flash storage at the incredible price of $30. Expensive ? Not when you consider that it has BUNDLED, completely FREEEEEEEE, the newest album of the BARENAKED LADIES!!!!.
Much depends on the way you tell things, you know.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
This could be some fun marketing in the future.
I can't wait for hardware to come bundled with albums, like the prize in cereal box.
Get your Harry Chapin Hard Drives and Phish Phlash drives.
TFA is only 3 paragraphs, yet there are already ~5 comments from people complaining about the price who can't be bothered to RTFA and see that for the $30 you get 29 songs, videos and album art. Oh yeah, and a USB key.
To me that reads as "people being trained to attach little black boxes of music to their computer, with the eventual intention of DRMing said boxes". If people are trained to attach arbitrary boxes to their computer to get music/films, the next step is to have those boxes "streaming" the audio/video straight to a Trusted Output Device [tm]. This probably wouldn't stop piracy, but it'd make backing up your media nigh-on impossible, since you'd no longer be able to copy directly.
This fits in well with plans to make Windows Vista only play DVDs at full quality using the aforementioned Trusted Output Devices [tm]
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
If I am paying for music, I want to get all the bits
Are you getting all the bits even when you buy a CD? Nowadays, most pop music is mastered through a limiter and a saturator to make it sound louder on portable CD players. Sending the signal against the -1 and +1 rails discards almost all the information during a drum hit, making the end result much less natural and less "punchy". See also loudness race.
Wiggum is wiring up Bart to spy on Fat Tony.
Wiggum inserts a tape into the recording device.
Bart: Hootie and the Blowfish?
Wiggum: It's cheaper than blank tape
Well, a label selling straight-up MP3 files of the songs (the very short FA says "MP3" and doesn't suggest any DRM) would be a step in the right direction.
I also don't see the USB drive as a problem. Actually it shows a bit of brain on the part of someone -- it embraces the "do what you want with bits" idea. Unlike a DVD or CD, a USB drive basically says, "Please move these files somewhere else." That's a massive step forward.
Of course, the logical questions everyone else here is already asking:
1) Why $30?
2) Why can't I just skip the USB and get the files directly?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Is it worth it? Probably not unless you wanted a memory stick too. Personally, the memory stick is way too small for my tastes. I'd rather spend my money on 1g SD card that will work in my PDA, computer, camera, etc.
Its just a gimmick to get attention and its working.
Congrats at having a post which has a title completely unrelated to the content of the post. I'll reply to the title.
No, it's not copy protected. RTFA.
It costs more than a CD
The audio's lower quality
You get about 3 times as many songs as you would on a CD.
You can burn it to CD.
This is like them releasing it as an iTMS exclusive, except:
It's not DRMed.
They throw in a 128M flash drive for free.
I got my flash key for school work. I got my flash key for work (which company policy doesn't allow). I got my flash key for my porn collection (girlfriend better not find that). I got my flash key for warez (yeah, it's wrong). I got my flash key for the car. Wait! Was my flash key for music?!
"Barenaked USB drive"
how much porn is on it?
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
BNL are one of my favorite bands, and IMO this is a terrific show of goodwill by the band to their fans, whom they know are rather geeky.
Good move, guys.
I'm gonna buy it.
+++ATH0
I think its a brilliant step in the right direction, backwards. The move back to a point where some tangible artifact represents the product is essential for the music business to survive in its present form. My band were doing almost the same thing, except it would be worth the twenty quid;). For a couple of years now I've been playing with Knoppix remixes, particularly spinning ultra small stick distros. Point is that you can make the whole thing bootable into any system you like, put your own media player on there, include video, whatever. The answer to the myriad fragmentation of formats, all encumbered with rights restrictions and incompatibilities seems do just this, make your product _an_operating_system_, something that takes 30 seconds to boot a cramfs filesystem, setup the audio and video and start playing the show. And you can make it really interactive too. Well after this Sony scandal I realised that it's a wrong move, and decided to use the project (basically an interactive album on a usb stick presented through PureData) as a showpiece for promotion only. It's not good to encourage people to accept data in unknown formats. You see, the music business have demonstrated they cant be trusted. Putting a CD containing just data into your machine is one thing, allowing them to run code on your machine is bang out of question from here on, so imho as someone who has with enthusiasm explored this idea quite deeply I say its an attempt to roll back the clock. Keep your music as data only, so you know what it is. USB sticks _could_ be useful to deliver full bandwidth .wav files however.
I think the real reason for this is a dry run for the case where you WOULD pay $30 for some songs. There's bussniess springinging up to deliver after-concert recording from the sound board of the concert you just heard. In that case many people would pay a premium to get a pristine souvenier/live recording. This is just a test drive to find problems before implementing the on-demand recording model.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
NO WAY!
I hope to god that AOL adopts this distribution method!!!
;-)
This 128 reusable drive contains 29 songs, including the band's 2004 "Barenaked for the Holidays" album, in MP3 format along with live tracks, in-concert spoken quips, album art, photos, videos and more.
Wow, that's a whole lot of material to try to cram into a 128MB drive. I'm guessing the bitrate and resolutions for all of that stuff is quite low...
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
Then this is big news, isn't it?
What's to stop people who buy this from just copying the songs and putting them on the internet? Shouldn't they be trying to find ways to protect their work rather than make it easier to steal?
In the "grasping at straws" department we also have Harvey Danger releasing their next album as a 12 three-and-a-half-inch floppy box set. Also the Goo Goo Dolls are planning to cut a new album on recycled AOL CD's...
Quit saying "well it comes with 29 songs and the USB drive is worth a lot."
Well, as a distribution model the USB is worth shit if you start to get all your music on USB sticks. This is a lame ass attention grabber. Fuck the RIAA, send them to a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
Mostly because I dislike the Barenaked Ladies, but if a band I did like came out with this, forget it. I've spent enough money on my home and car audio that I'm not pumping MP3s through them on a regular basis. Sure, the difference is almost unnoticable on $30 computer speakers, which is where I primarily listen to MP3's, but they sound like absolute crap on any decent system. Even the highest bitrate MP3s just can't seem to get the highs and lows right. They're either cut off, or tinny, or the wrong volume. Why? Dunno.
I haven't tested it with .ogg, but even my friends who thought I was nuts were able to easily tell the difference when I played MP3's for them.
Not to mention, if you do decide to go with some other format, you lose even more quality, and there's nothing you can do about it. If this is 29 songs on a 128MB stick, it's got to be 128kbps, which is just barely passable on cheap computer speakers. I still buy CD's frequently, and sometimes for just one song, but I never have and never will pay for anything in a lossy format.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
And what do you like, Troll? 50 Cent?
AND NOW, METALLICA IS RELEASING THEIR SONGS FOR PLAYBACK ON CAMERAS ONLY USING THE AWESOME SD CARD!!!
hmmmmm...
Well, my camera can do audio... and takes SD cards, so why not.
It think this may be a big step toward the music industry understanding the complex concept of "teh interwebz"
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
I've tried looking for mention of this on their website but unfortunately can't find it.
Perhaps some SD and other memory card-tricks will follow.
Secure Digital cards support the SDMI copy-protection spec (secure from you, not for you), thus opening "a Pandora's box of new marketing possibilities".
Stick to MMC (MultiMediaCard), which is essentially SD minus the copy-crippling mechanism.
"The problem with our economy is that our budget is balanced by people who aren't" - A.E.N.
30 bucks?, good deal, it's made by sony and has alot of extra software on it.... now where did that install to?
This is interesting to me because I think it's a glimpse of music distribution in the near future. No, I don't mean that USB sticks will be the medium of choice in the near future, I mean that music will be released *without* CDs or even DVDs. There's a certain camp of DRM apologists who say, "but I can always just buy the CD and rip the songs myself if I don't want the DRM from the iTunes music store/Napster/whatever, therefore the DRM on those services is OK." Those people don't seem to understand that in a time when CDs are painfully hard for music companies to control (just ask Sony), their sales are plummetting, and iTMS has shown that people are willing to buy DRM-infected music online in large numbers, the days of getting new releases on CD are numbered. If I were a music exec (eew, slimy!), I would be just itching for the day I could do a full-DRM release without releasing CDs at all.
By the way, I *do* understand that in TFA the tracks are unencumbered MP3, but my point is about the limited future for CD distribution. No slight against BNL is intended, though I'm not thrilled that they're only distributing lossy encodings.
-DA
Oh, and by the way, here are a few stores where you can buy unencumbered music electronically:
www.magnatune.com (lossless even!)
www.bleep.com (lots of great electronica, including Boards of Canada)
Well, as long as they're talking about this Barenaked Lady. ;)
The Barenaked Ladies publicists/marketing cooked up a winner here. The truth is that none of us, bar some small minority care about BNL, but it made it to the front page of slashdot. This is called a Press Hit. Their publicists are getting a fat check on this one.
We seem to enjoy missing the point, so we start arguing about whether other bands will follow. I will put this in for kicks:
Some might, but upping the distribution costs that much is not profitable long term since consumers wont pay $30 for the same thing everytime.
2*31*37*263
Too bad they suck so bad I wouldn't even download it for free.
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
"Well it's been five hundred weeks since you listened to me..."
Does this stick anally rape you and then set your computer on fire? I realize this isn't a release from Sony, but you still have to ask.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
2- Yes... Let's push music further and further away from its artistic origins and relegate it even deeper in the "yet another consumer goods" category.
I don't know, next thing you know you'll be getting free MP3s with every 6-pack of beer, box of cereals, oil change... Or maybe I'm just too old-fashioned to appreciate the new way of doing things.
Oh, and I almost forgot 3:
-At least it doesn't come with a r00tkit for free too!
no bare or naked ladies here. move on.
The German punk band WIZO did this a while ago. They claim to be the first to do it.
From their site:
"WIZO-STICK-EP" is the first USB-Memory-Stick from a band, that comes already packed with songs and lots of other data for the use on your computer. You' ll get:
- five brandnew Songs as high quality MP3s,
- one exclusive "live in Japan video clip" (only available on the "STICK-EP"!),
- loads of funny WIZO pics,
- the lyrics to all songs, including chords for guitar,
- one great photo contest (sorry, only in german!),
- cool multimedia menu for your web browser!
The price is 15.90€. I don't know the current USB-stick prices but that doesn't sound bad, especially since it has the band's branding which is relevant to their fans. A more detailed page can be found here (in German).
parasight.de
Are you sure you're talking about the same meaning of "compression?"
I know there are two different kinds of audio compression (as evidenced by Wikipedia's disambiguation page), and they can sit at various points in the production chain:
Slashdot crowd has moaned and moaned about DRM since day one, in every single thread about MPAA/RIAA, music, TV , movie and etc. Everybody complained that they treat us geeks as potental criminal. How everything will be better and world peace will come only if they treat us as customers instead of criminals and allow us to copy our songs/conetent however we want it. Oh, and don't forget how we love to complain that we don't want data on an audio CD.
So what does the lot of slashdot crowd does when some non-indie band release their albrums on mp3, which doesn't have the dreaded DRM, bundled with extra stuff, on a USB memory stick that you can reuse? A whole bunch of slashdot (Not all, but some far alot) wants to complain about how they dislike MP3s or how the memory stick is too small? So what will make the slashdot crowd happy? Free music on ipod shuffle give away? Gimme a break. Some parent post already worked out that they are not making extra on the USB keys, so how about some common sense and be grateful?
If it was a DVD I'd be able to play it on my TV... Besides, at 128 megs, the quality of 30 songs, videos, and pictures is going to be very poor!
No, I will not work for your startup
I think this is quite revolutionary. Since when have the big shops favored electronic distrubution of their music officially? It sounds like a studio is actually embracing the new age of music distribution. This is a happy first step for the industry in what is, in my opinion, the right direction for them to go to survive. If one group is doing this, it opens the gate for others to start. By setting this example I they are doing more to push the industry forward than you might think. Plus, the additional content also adds value just as the added content on most DVDs have done compared to VHS. Interesting...
Nintendo tried that in the 80s with the Famicom Disk System. They quickly gave up because of piracy (and because the system didn't sell so well).
Circumcision is child abuse.
... AOL needs to start doing this, then I'd have thousands of flash drives laying around instead of CD's.
I went to the Official Homepage of the Barenaked Laides (http://www.bnlmusic.com/) and there wasn't a single naked lady on the site....
Can we get them in trouble with truth-in-advertising laws?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
That's so cute..
You should buy one.
No ??? here...
1. Make album.
2. Release in less-than-CD quality on a $8 device
3. Charge $16 extra.
4. Profit!
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Seems like 1/3 of the comments so far are neat idea, 1/3 are audiophiles bitching because each song isn't in looseness format, and the other 1/3 bitching about DRM/it's not OGG/why do I need an overpriced USB stick. Hell, I'm tempted to buy it just to encourage the sales of non-DRM music (RTFA, it's in good old MP3). It's funny, the crowd that is against DRM'd music will never adopt any online distribution system that isn't completely free to them. Yeah, the RIAA sucks, but at least be prepared to fork over something for the music. Problem is, as soon as money gets involved, someone wants it at a certain bit rate/wants it in his or her format of choice/claims that it's only the unpopular bands/claims that it's only the popular bands. Are you sure that all you guys are techs, because reading through all these comments reminds me more of a manager who will spend days going over the format of a weekly status chart.
This represents a milestone in consumers getting what they want. 1) This may be the first time a major band sells copyrighted mp3s without DRM 2) This is the first album on media that can be rewritten to since the tape deck 3) I convert them to mp3 to play in my car anyway I only hope this will be a hit and more bands follow suit.
The Barenaked ladies have always been at the forefront of using tech to get their music out there.
I've bought their last three CD's online (including a solo project by Steven Page) with great ease and little expense. The last two were available in flac format so no lossless problems there. They even came with all the album artwork and lyric sheet info available in PDF format.
When 'Maroon' was released they were one of the first bands to provide dummy versions of the song on file sharing networks. (You could download a 40 meg uncompressed file where the song started up but then to band members came on and started shilling their CD in a good natured way over the top of the tunes)
When 'Everything to Everyone' was released a few years ago, I recall trying to get a copy of it from a file sharing network because here in Australia I couldn't get my hands on the CD for months. They flooded the network with all the tracks from the new album without the vocal tracks, so I had to wait. Now, because of their embracement of selling on the web, I don't have to.
Which means this is quite a good deal - a double album, a bunch of extras, and a USB memory stick (I've been meaning to pick one of those up), for only a bit more than what the music alone would cost on iTunes - and without the DRM, if you're worried about that.
Although, if you look at this photo, you can see the listing of live tracks in addition to Barenaked for the Holidays - there seem to be seven. Plus 20 on the holiday album... That's two songs short. Hm... (I can't seem to find an actual track listing anywhere, that photo's the best I could do.)
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
It is great to see music / entertainment being commercially distributed on another form of media. Of course all the copyright, licensing, and DRM issues are not soon to be resolved (probably never will be), we should be stimulated that a "commercial" band is embracing other forms of media, expanding the digital distribution pool. There is a void that can be filled, that gap between the RIAA and Indies. More diverse the distribution models become, the better it will be for the consumers and the artists. The RIAA and MPAA execs with their lawyers, along with the Sony Zonies, and a wanna-be law school droput DOS coder are working diligently to build their profits at the expense of their customers and artists, by locking down the distribution models. My father was a "priate" because he recorded music off FM radio on to a reel to reel (the music industry claimed that FM radio was evil), and I first became a "pirate" because I used audio cassette tapes (there were congressional hearings about the damage that hi-fi cassettes would do to the industry). The MPAA in an earlier manifestation claimed that Television would destroy the movie industry. An expanding distribution pool is a good thing, after all, centuries ago King Canute tried, but failed to stop the tide.
Forget the USB. Forget the music. I just want the barenaked ladies...
I know I'll be modded troll for this, but here goes...In Soviet Russia...USB pendrive comes on you!
Perhaps the bare naked ladies actually want their music pirated so that they get more tours rather than CD sales......its my view that alot of musicians dont like recording because i dont. If i want to do something musical i try to get gigs etc.....having your music out there is far more advantages as a brand name than having 1 cd sold but making more money because as you have seen with long life bands like say the rolling stones etc is they get COVERED!!!
anyone ever seen a brittany spears cover band? regardless of the style of music if everyone knows your tune your making ticket sales which is what entertainers should be going for....Records were a way to get music onto radio so that you could get more exposure and tour more places....
There are professional recording artists that dont tour...they generally write songs for other people in due course rather than themselves..
My view on this is if you get your music available on enough peoples PCs regardless of profit you will be able to go more places which is what entertaining is about when your in the industry....
so in my view if you give 30 songs away on a device thats somewhat useful and inexpensive and as part of that you manage to gain another XXXXX listners then the general concensus is that some of them will like you enough to ask for your tours and thus get ticket sales which feeds the kids and buys you a house and gets you travelling around more...
so what if its MP3 people want MP3s over DRM although raw audio is more complete you cant say that your missing out on the content if your listening to the melodies and words.
But aren't they afraid that we'll steal their music?!??
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Cool. More Porn.
Why should I pay $30 for COMPRESSED music! It seems that the music industry took a giant step backward in audio quality! Generation "iPod" is happy with compressed music. Of course, with the crap that passes for music these days (including BNL!) I guess it doesn't matter.
Best Buy can have you arrested
The keys to getting me to download instead of buy a CD are: *No DRM *Lossless format *Some method of writing the disk so that it will be recognized by the cddb *Cover Art (Front and Back) for a standard CD case (best if they have it for slim cases as others prefer them) *CD Artwork *Price that take into account that I am now the manufacturer Anything less, and I loss by buying online. Given that online distribution should be noticably cheaper, this would allow the labels to still make their money. While they are at it, they should also have other formats directly downloadable for those that don't care about the longevity of their music.
This really doesn't strike me as a good way to distribute music. Why would I want piles of usb drives lying around? They're too small too make good albums too, I can read the fron of a cd at arms length and recognize the cover art from across the room. But these things are tiny. And cds stack up all nice and neat, am I supposed to put these things in a little basket or what? Yeah that's a great idea, then instead of grabbing the one I want off the shelf I can dig around and waste time (or lose it under my couch). And if I'm really lucky it''l get overwritten. And they're charging $30 for it! People complain that cds cost too much and these guys are charging thirty bucks.
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
I don't have a million dollars. I don't know what kind of music the "Barenaked Ladies" plays, or even if there's a lady (naked or not) in the band.
I do want one of these audio drives.
The music isn't important in this. The important thing is this drive will be a major collector's item if this method of distribution catches on, as I think it will. So what if afficianados don't like the sampling rate because they claim to hear better than a bloodhound can smell. Future releases in this medium can use larger capacity flash chips to sample high enough to hear a gnat fart five rows back.
This is just the start. I'm not worth million dollars, but a thumbdrive music collection that includes this particular "Barenaked" stick might be worth close to that in the future. Honus Wagner anyone?
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
Oooh it's compressed ... well most mere mortals can't tell the difference anyway, and I read about a good test (if I can find the link I'll post it here), where they did blind tests with compressed and uncompressed audio .. the stupid audiophiles couldn't tell the difference.
bleep.com offers FLAC for many of it's albums. If you're into electronica it's a good site.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
Barenaked ladies also sells full concerts online too! You can download any show from some of the more recent tours, either MP3 for download, more for a CD, or (in some cases but not all) just a little more for FLAC.
The MP3's are really decent too, 192k.
The great thing is the concerts are not just the songs, but also the extras (like the impromptu raps) - which are really the whole reason to go to BNL concerts in the first place.
Nettwork is also the company that came out proclaiming something along the lines of them never using DRM on any CD's released by the artists under them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Wow. I started to read the comments here and 9 out of 10 were bitching about "crappy quality" and the compression. If you are so worried about sound quality stop buying CDs and go get some vinyl. I doubt they are putting 96kbps MP3s on the flash drive, so it will sound near CD quality, if not at CD quality, to the untrained ear.
I think its a creative idea and even though I dont listen to the band, props to them for thinking outside the box.
Hallelujah! I wonder if I spelled that correctly...
Barenaked Ladies have always been kind of gimmicky - willing to try differnt things, sing songs that are a little offbeat on a major label, etc. This fits right into the sort of thing they would do. *sings* If I had thirty dollars...
-everphilski-
This is a terrible idea. Only a small amount of people actually own computers and know what a flash USB drive is, let alone how to transfer the songs to a CD. I think that they are seriously overestimating the computer saviness of society on this one. I know a lot of people that would think this is a good idea. But I'm a big geek, and so are all my friends. We're definitely not what you would call average. If I want MP3s, I'll buy the CD, and rip it to MP3. I'm not going to pay $30 for mp3s on a device I may or may not end up keeping the songs on. I like CDs because they provide pretty much permanent storage, as long as I don't scratch them, and I don't have to worry about losing the music when my hard drive dies. I don't see any advantage over offering the music in this format over a standard audio CD.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
That's what they think.
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
They do have the album artwork on the USB stick. :)
I don't know why, but it makes me happy that a few bands are embracing the MP3 concept. First band I heard of doing this was Wizohttp://www.wizo.de/. You can get their "Stick-EP" here: http://tinyurl.com/az6el. I think I heard another band did this before them, but I can't remember who it was.
Here's the link on Amazon.
Awesome idea!
________________________________________________
suwain_2
I saw this last night at the opening show of their Holiday tour in Montreal. They key contains an album of Holiday songs in mp3 format that was released last holiday season in CD format. It also contains all of the extras like movies and pictures and whatnot, so it's probably just worth it for the big fans. One other thing you might want to think about is how they let you go download recordings of their live concerts just days after they were preformed, for something like $14. check it out
30 bucks for a CD and everyone is going "neat"? WTF?
I thought the idea of paying big bucks for music was something the average Slashdotter was against. So you get a flash drive, big woop. The drive is probably worth about twice as much as your average production cost of the normal pressed CD but does that really justify the 10+ USD you're paying for the thing? The drive isn't worth 10 USD.
Let's move on to playability; they try to bring up this idea that it's a very portable format. Uh, hello? CD is the most universal data media today! God, this is a suckers gimick.
This kind of thing is what seperates the geeks from the nerds; the geeks are lining up to buy this crap even if they're not a real serious fan of the BNLs and the nerds are just sitting around asking WTF. I never hoped to think like this but this product more than lacks the cool factor. It smells badly of big business and a royal scam.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Why? Distribute the same content on a data CD and save a lot of dough! CD's cost nothing to stamp! I just don't get the world sometime!
Later,
-Slashdot Junky
.
Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
that Barenaked Ladies sucks, so who gives a shit.
Seems to be a lot of controversy about this 'product'.
But if you change your mind and buy it,
I hope you enjoy my USB,
I hope you enjoy my USB,
I hope you enjooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooy...
My USB stick!
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
Wtf is H.E.L.P.?
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
They've already considered it...
Or so I've heard...
Rumors will be rumors, right?
Looking at the close-up image at Amazon.com, it would appear there's nothing new on the stick. Pretty much a rehash of older songs in either a different format or live. If there had been a new album on there, I'd probably have purchased it.
And this is the hose.
Barenaked Ladies' previous album Maroon contains 12 tracks at about 47 minutes of music. I ripped the CD to MP3s with a bitrate of 192Kbps resulting in about 65MB. That's just over half the available space on a 128MB USB drive.
Just for the sake of argument (this is Slashdot after all) let's say that they release an even bigger album on the USB drive--a full hour of music. That gives us:
That is not bad at all. Considering that 192Kbps is very good quality and 256Kbps is considered to be at least CD quality audio (there should be no noticeable artifacts even to the most astute listener), this sounds like a good deal.
If I were to guess, I'd bet they encode the files with a constant bitrate of 256Kbps. Using this bitrate they could fit about 65 minutes of music on the 128MB USB drive.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
Was I the only one who was expecting the article to be about pictures of some neat hardware in revealing attire?
Am I the only to be feeling slightly disappointed, at the moment?
I can hardly hear my classical CDs in a car, and even on my computer I typically have to put everything to maximum to hear the quieter passages decently.
Classical music, for the uninformed, features a little-used-in-this-age musical dimension called "dynamics", which means it has quiet parts and loud parts, instead of being all loud.
No, Nirvana switching back and forth from soft to loud doesn't count. Much.
First RIAA is bad because they release CD's with DRM to stop us from ripping MP3's. Now BNL does this, which is obviously a slap in RIAA's face, and most of the comments here are pissing and moaning about stupid media or lossy codec?
Damn, folks. Make up your minds.
If you like the music, $30 for better than two albums is a pretty fair price. If you would rather purchase a different format, maybe suggest it to them in a constructive manner. You might be suprised.
- If we aren't supposed to eat animals, then why are they made out of meat? - Steven Wright
You can buy great Canadian un-DRM'd MP3's (some by members of the BNL) at www.zunior.com.
- A satisfied customer.
I know lots of people that actually paid for their entire collection, and they are huge (>20 Gb) collections. Who's gonna want 500 usb sticks lying around? Granted, they are more useful than stamped out cds...
Nope. You have no clue what "compression" is.
"They say that human beings detect 30 FPS as perfect motion, yet nearly all games went to 60 FPS and the difference is noticable."
That's because CRT monitors aren't very good at doing 30fps motion. A CRT monitor is a point of light being scanned rapidly across a screen, not a full image.
"If CD's were perfect audio sources for human ears, why make DVD Audio? Why does an analog amplification of a performance still sound better than a digital capture and playback of that performance through the same microphones?"
Who said CDs were perfect? Only the marketing men. Nobody who knows anything about signal processing would say that CDs were perfect.
No sig today...
The reason I don't buy from online services is I refuse to pay money for lossy codecs.
Then you're just being silly. "Lossy" refers to the data stream, not the sound. "Lossy" does not mean that the sound is audibly inferior or that you could hear the difference in a blind test. In fact, I've administered such tests to a few fellow audiophiles and proved that I could create a "lossy" MP3 that is audibly indistinguishable from the original recording. (The tests I conducted involved skilled listeners in their 20's and 30's using a Rega Planet CD player through Sennheiser SR-325 headphones and a Creek headphone amp. They selected the music. I encoded it to MP3 and then brought it back to WAV. I recorded a CD with several copies of each track - encoded and virgin. They were unable to detect the difference and their results were, statistically speaking, no better than a coin toss.)
That said, most of the online services have substandard, low-bit-rate recordings which do sound audibly inferior to CDs. That's the reason to boycott those services, not because the codecs are lossy.
I was all set to type lefty and everything.
Your post shows (yet again) why a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
"Compression" -- ie lossy data stuffing -- is a totally different thing to "compression" -- ie fiddling the freqs to make a CD seem "louder". I can understand why you'd be confused, since they use the same word for both. Kinda like "bad" meaning "bad" - but also, if you're Michael Jackson, meaning "really really good". English is a bitch like that. "Bitch" as in "bitching" -- it's a vital feature of all languages that words can mean more than one thing.
And far from being a common thing, the misuse of the kind of compression you are wailing about is usually limited to the worst of the worst of throwaway pop music.
Most artists, labels, studios, and mastering engineers are, literally, psychotic about maintaining sound quality, which is one of the reasons a CD that's even just averagely mastered will beat your "well mastered cassette" any day of the week and six times on Sunday.
Simply _playing_ a cassette stretches the tape and starts scrubbing away at the data. And that's not even to mention the difference in dynamic range. From the article that you linked to yet obviously didn't read:
"[with CDs] consumers could purchase a recording in a medium whose dynamic range exceeded that of $20,000 professional tape machines."
I've never heard any recording on any equipment which can compare to the real thing. Go to a church and listen to the organ sometime, or a brass band playing or something...
No sig today...
if only a band which didn't suck enormous donkey-balls did something like this. These fuckups make me embarrased to be Canadian.
Jeremy
BNL is NOT releasing their new album in this format. This is for their older Christmas music and some live tracks. Their new album is currently being recorded and will be released on CD by their own label "Desperation Records" and distributed by Warner.
Ok, lets give em props for trying new things and respecting their fans enough to give them unencumbered .mp3 files. But dude, you just blew off several very valid drawbacks.
> > It costs more than a CD
> yes it does, and has twice as many songs, and extra content. I have been arguing for a
> while that if the labels want to sell recording, they need to follow the lead of movies
> on DVD and have bonus content. Anyway, there are ways to lower the total cost.
Uh huh, Lots of CD sets with 29 tracks selling for less than $30. Most DVD films sell for less than $30 and as you note, they have lots of extras. Perhaps if they used mask ROM they could sell it at a comparable price to CD, but really music is overpriced in general. A CD with an hour or so of music needs to get down to $10 max.
> > The audio's lower quality
> Yes, and I suppose that you are one of those that believe the average $200 home system or
> car stereo can accurately reproduce the high frequencies and other detail that one loses
> when one compresses. In any case, the bitrate is probably reletively high,
Wrong and wrong. If the are putting 29 tracks, videos and other extras on a puny 128MB flash drive they are compressing the hell out of it. And maybe you destroyed YOUR hearing with Marilyn Manson at 130dB or something, but I can still hear the difference between an original CD and a 128KBps MP3 track on $50 Altec Lansing speakers hooked up to a crappy laptop's sound card. Played on my primary home theater system it is painfully obvious. And no, I'm not some audiophile with a $2000 volume knob and 4 gauge power cables hooked to a seperate filtered breaker box. Heck, I have just two words to dispel any notion of audiophile status, Optimus Speakers. Twenty-five year old Radio Shack specials. The amp is a little newer though. It is a decent midrange Sony with 5.1 digital, still nothing special. (I keep using the old Optimus speakers because much of the heavy lifting is on the sub and center on 5.1 content and hey, old real speakers beat those little pussy satelite speakers so popular these days.) The point is 128Kbps MP3 is lame and I'd bet this item features 96Kbps or (horror!) 64Kbps and will sound like shit.
> For instance, download iTunes and import the music.
Never mind, I'm trying to reason with someone 'mindless consumer' enough to use iTunes. Probably a Mac user with an iPod. You probably can't tell the difference if you buy compressed music, Steve gave you a glass of the Kool-Aid and said there isn't a difference and to you there isn't. You certainly can't tell the differnce between unencumbered products and open ones. All I'd do with an iPod if somebody gave me one is put the sucker on eBay and get something that appears as a USB/Firewire drive that I can just drop files on and have it play them.
> If only I had a storage closet full of something as useful as USB drives.
Agreed. Ok, it is a puny drive today and will be darned near useless in a decade, but still better than a box of floppies or 8-tracks.
One problem is if this idea starts to catch on we will see a war over form factors and interfaces. You just know Sony will want to popularize MemoryStick, just as an obvious example. Then there will be the studios wanting to use SD to DRM the content, etc.
Democrat delenda est
I can understand being concerned about compression and dynamic range with a classical or jazz recording, but Bare Naked Ladies? The point of music is not always the quality or fidelity of reproduction. In some cases, it might actually be the opposite. Do you really take a silly pop album so seriously that you need lossless encoding? The main point is the distribution gimmick and what it might point to as the future of recorded music. The de-emphasis of the permanent delivery format (a glass-mastered cd) might actually lead to more spontaneous, less product-oriented music production. It might be great if we could hear a band's album evolve rather than just "finished" songs - releasing the very early versions, and then gradually replacing them as the songs matured. Furthermore, If recorded music becomes cheap and disposable, and people pay more to see performances (lets forget about the evils of ticketmaster for a moment), a shift might occur in the way music is valued. Process, performance, improvisation and connecting to an audience might become much more highly valued than composition and production and packaging.
Get the media, erase the shit that they ship on it and you have a perfectly good storage medium. ;)
The next music format might be ROM cartridges, like Nintendo. This allows for even more elaborate DRM, since the cartridge can have protection circuitry and a CPU in it.
I read the short article and did my own quick google search and I didn't find anywhere stated that the MP3 format was anything less than CD quality (192kbs)...Why is it assumed that since something is new and different that it's immediately bad...on /. for that matter?
-- SMTP: Spam and Malware Transfer Protocol. Also used on rare occasion to transmit e-mail messages.
That's why I like Fiona Apple's new album - going the opposite direction of the mp3 world. It's a dual-sided disc that has CD audio on one side and DVD (video) on the other side featuring the album in 96khz DVD video-audio (not to be confused with the DVD-Audio standard that goes up to 192khz).
Not to mention, excellent album (musically)... I wouldn't have bought it otherwise. I think Extraordinary Machine puts Fiona Apple up with Billy Joel in the composition world.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Why didn't they release it as OGG? Dammit, they JUST DON'T GET IT, do they?
I'm never buying another Barenaked Ladies release again!!!
Maybe it's time to think about a USB stick changer; where you can put 20-50-100 USB sticks in a board and where the player will select the next USB key when the previous one is done playing; let's run fast to the patent office before my thoughts are being illegal at some places of this world ;)
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
It had a terrible name Weee Man. Quite wanky. Details about the project
Not to piss on the parade, but this form of delivery cannot be as good for the environment as a CD delivery.
So try this method out by all means, but sustained delivery like this would be bad. One of the best reasons for delivery over the Internet is that there can be less packaging and production.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
I'm not a big fan of the Barenaked Ladies but I think they've got something good going here. The price isn't unreasonable, the drive would be handy, and for this many songs... I dunno, I just think it's a pretty decent deal. I think the bit rate should be a little better though.
Does anyone know if the data the comes on the disk can be removed? I have a suspicion that it's not the same USB drive you'd buy at the store. Maybe its ~112 MB of Read Only Flash with 16 MB of writable flash. Just a thought.
Well its a novel way of promoting and selling your product.The fact that you are putting music and selling it on USB is somewhat open to debate in terms of audio quality. Why should I go for mp3 recording when better CD quality is avaliable. However, u can use the USB disk later for some other purposes but the capacity is limited to 128 MB. U can get higher capacity for little more.
Moreover, most of the people wont be able to use this idea in their cars and stereo systems.
Novel Idea though but I aint gonna buy it!!
The USB flash drive plays in car stereos??? I never heard of a car stereo that has USB...
Depends on what sort of music you listen to. If it's just "bonk, crash, bonk, crash...ad infinitum" or you're listening in your car then 128kbps is fine. For listening to more complex music on decent equipment in a quiet room, it isn't (and pretty much anybody can hear the difference).
No sig today...
Dude - ripping to any transparent and you can't top that.
I thought this was becoming the way of the future anyway. Its not uncommon for mp3 players to come with albums already loaded, so I dont see why it is a big deal for people to want to distribute their music on a flash disk.
I was shopping the other day and happened upon a rack of portable music players which could play MP3 and WMA files. The packaging had on it, in large letters in the middle of one of those "look at me" star-shaped thingers, "SUPPORTS DRM!"
The word "DRM" is being perverted to mean "can play DRMed WMA files", which is of course a desirable feature. The masses will soon come to think of DRM as a good thing despite not knowing what it really means, and that scares me.
And if you play it and leave the room, does it still make any noise?
TSIA
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.
After a good medium with DRM protection comes in, someone will write a Windows driver to take the digitized sound that's playing and redirect the stream to a file and reformat it as unprotected MP3 (you can already do this in UNIX easily).
Only a matter of time.
Someone want to pick up the Windows DDK and start work on this early?
Not so popular...
yeah, you kids with your new-fangled lossy-compression musical-listening devices!
I can remember back when we had to walk up-hill in the snow to buy the latest cylinder recording! Wrapped in tar-paper because we didn't need no stinking "plastic," and we liked it that way!
Then we'd put all out woll clothes back on and climb uphill to get to the shack we used to live in and listen to what we just bought after thawing it properly becuase the tar-paper was frozen solid! My brother would chop wood for months just to run the steam-victrola to play it, and we liked it that way!
Then our parents would flog us to sleep with sticks and we'd get up at four i the morning to go to work at the mill...
s'wut i sed.
and pretty much anybody can hear the difference
I never mentioned whether anyone could hear the difference. I'm reasonably sure I would be able to hear the difference. The problem is that most of us don't really care about the difference :). There are no obvious clicks, pops, and static like we had with tapes, so I am quite happy :).