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iTunes, One Billion Suckers Served?
Thomas Hawk writes "Apple is out hyping their one billionth iTunes download today, but is building your music library in a format that could be obsolete in the future really the best strategy? Will the consumer once again have to someday replace their iTunes track just like they had to replace their LP, cassette, and CD only to get their music on their hot new non Apple mp3 phone of the future? "
you can burn all your itunes tracks to AIFF or MP3,
and then backup that as many times as you would
ever want... so what's the problem??
I understand how media can be obsoleted when players for that media are no longer available. However, it's much more difficult to make a data format unuseable.
Surely that can only occur if the format can only be read by a non-open source application that is only available in binary format and where the hardware to run that program becomes unavailable. I suppose it could also happen if the media you use for your iTunes storage becomes obsolete and you don't remember to copy your music to another media format.
I think a billion downloads (and counting) will ensure that iTunes music will remain playable for a long time to come and will sound just as good then as it does now.
But when the sun explodes your music won't play whatever format it's in! And what does Apple do about this? Nothing!.
It's a class action suit waiting to happen.
as long as there are format wars, there will be translating. I'd convert to good ol' WAV myself, it's the Red Book standard encoding as found on CDs worldwide.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
This post is just stupid. It's full of lies. How did this get onto the main page?
I think part of people's willingness to upgrade is that they see the obsoleteness of the older format. Its a little bit harder to see that CDs are lower quality and less durable than DVDs or mp3s. mp3s would probably last longer because they would just move from hard drive to hard drive and never lose quality.
... and post something ranting about DRM.
Blogger admits he has never used service. Does not address the fact that you CAN covert to another format if you wish.
Is iTunes perfect? No. But I have purchased 20x more music than what I would have otherwise.
And even if iTunes shut down tomorrow, I would lose 0% of my music.
Only thing I wish is that it would serve up a higher bit rate....
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Look, I have an iBook, but have bought very little from iTunes Store, however I think everyone understands Apple's decision to go with an audio format that would support a DRM; which they see as key to keep the people coming to them for tracks, and not to someone else who just bought them. It *is* annoying that you can only play the tracks on 'authorized' systems, and the other contrastrants, but people know this. By your arguement then people that bought games for Nintendo 64 were 'suckers' because they bought a game that was 'locked in' to a certain platform and wouldn't play on the Gamecube.
In this throwaway society of ours I really think that for most people the idea that something they buy might not always be around forever is OK. Hell, I guess we could start talking about other things too, cars, cameras, hot water heaters, etc...
fak3r.com
...to the world of free software. If ever the iTunes format becomes obsolete, someone will just write a conversion algorithm that will convert your entire library to the new format.
And, since I seem to recall that copyright law allows you to convert any digital media you purchase from one format to another, this will be a perfectly legal activity, regardless of how much DRM the software writer has to break through to do it.
Converting to any other format is going to cause a loss of quality. Even if you go to WAV or CD Audio, if you ever want to rip it back into some compressed format, you're going to lose quality.
Also, if you rip to WAV or CD, you lose all the meta-data for the track. So if you want to know the Artist, Title, and Album, you're going to have to re-enter that info on your own.
There's also no clean/easy way to export to MP3. Even if you jump through the hoops to do it, though, you're back to loss of quality.
I just went through the hell of exporting all my iTunes-purchased songs into Oggs so that I can play them on my Linux box, which has the nice sound system. That took quite a few burned CDs and I still haven't gotten the Oggs all retagged yet. Plus there's the quality issue, which while I've only noticed anything in a couple songs, that's still more quality issue than I would prefer.
Why not just run your purchased songs through Hymn to remove the protection?
I always find it amusing to hear people use the word "sucker" when talking about a person paying $0.99 for a bit of portable entertainment they like from a musician they respect... as they drive in their car - which they'll never fully own, on which they'll pay thousnds in interest - to a friend's house, where they'll talk about how smart they are ("Ogg Vorbis, dude!") while they drink $2.00 imported beers that will only be in their collection for about an hour.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I haven't had to replace my turntable, cassette player, or CD player to listen to my previously purchased music. All of those songs on all of those medias play just fine on the appropriate devices (well, the tapes aren't all so hot - least reliable media, indeed).
No format is "obsolete" as long as you have a device to use it on, or have an adapter... or in the case of digital music files, have a converter. You know, like the converter that's built into iTunes, the one that turns AAC files into MP3 files?
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
I stopped reading right there. It's kind of hard to criticize a service without actually ever using it.
Heh... I guess more purpose is served by that than by me bitching about it, so I'll shut up now.
1) Burn to audio CD
2) Rip
3) ???
4) Profit
I'd call anyone who gets their music from the internet but pays for it a sucker.
Call me flaimbait, and call me troll, but the fact of the matter is that getting music from the internet for free remains both incredibly easy and still carries an absolutely minimal chance of getting caught.
I'm perfectly happy letting other people legitimize an online business model of music distribution, because that means it'll only be easier for me to get mine for free.
The songs bought in iTMS are DRM protected. They cannot be played on computers or devices that are not authorized by iTMS. So, if iTMS ever goes under, or you somehow lose the ability to access iTMS (only machines that run iTunes can do this), your songs will then only play on the devices they've been authenticated on. And when those devices are obsolete, you're stuck with no way to get the songs to play on your new devices, unless they're Apple-approved.
Your assuming that mp3 will be around? Or what about being able to read standard CD's? Copy protection is ruling out your basic CD player.
Kind of tangent to your point. Libraries and archivist are worried about how do we read formats that are 5, 10, 50 years old?
Why is this guy always submitting his blog entries to Slashdot and Digg? Whining about being ripped off by a camera shop, whining about iTunes...
You expect everything to last forever? You can't take it with you! And I'm sure your great-great grandkids aren't going to care that they won't get your precious copy of "My Humps" by Black Eyed Peas.
What utter nonsense.
My vinyl records didn't self-destruct when I got my CD player, and my CDs didn't quit working when I got my first iPod. I bought some albums on CD that I already had on vinyl because I wanted a non-perishable copy, but that doesn't make me a "sucker" for buying those records in the first place.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
You call me a sucker?!? Wanna step outside? ...
"Will the consumer once again have to someday replace their iTunes track just like they had to replace their LP, cassette, and CD only to get their music on their hot new non Apple mp3 phone of the future?"
What, so you mean, we all expected Apple to break the cycle from the dawn of the gramophone? Music quality will continue to get better, music portability will continue to get better, yada yada yada. No-one forced people to upgrade their music libraries from cassettes to CDs, they did it because they wanted better sound quality. Soon enough, iTunes AACs will be superceded with something worthy of a switch, and we'll all buy our libraries again.
As much as I love Apple, I have never confused them with some sort of magical beast that has technology that will last for all time. This is a very silly story designed to stir the pot.
mod parent -1 flamebait
Hey. Different story. Different aspect. Not a dupe.
The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive Ass Slippers
> Converting to any other format is going to cause a loss of quality.
> Even if you go to WAV or CD Audio, if you ever want to rip it back
> into some compressed format, you're going to lose quality.
the quality you get from converting from aac > aiff will BE what you hear,
because the aac file has to decompress for you to hear it!! -- so it is not
less quality doing your aac backup to AIFF (and then you could convert
back to apple-lossless encoding if you want to save some space).
your second point, however, is correct -- you will lose quality
if you convert back from aiff TO some other lossless format,
due to dithering and artifacts.
in short:
i) lossy (aac) -> lossless (aiff) = no quality loss
ii) lossy (aac) -> lossless (aiff) -> lossy (mp3/ogg/whatever) = quality loss
burn to cd and convert back to mp3, make it into avi, ogg, whatever
i really don't understand the arguement that the format will be obsolete. Just convert it to whatever comes out.
Maybe this will cause me to get nailed by mods, but I feel that it needs to be said.
.99 and get that one song.
The blog rant that is linked to complains that apple's DRM is "terrible." I simply don't understand the argument. The DRM is as lax as possible while still keeping the music industry from having a fit. Sure there are limits to how many times you can burn a playlist, but if you change the list by only one song you the counter resets. How many times have you burned more than a couple copies of the exact same playlist anyway? Perhaps the sound isn't exactly the same as a CD, but it is good enough that it really doesn't matter on most sound systems. What the blogger really misses is the fact that itunes gives you what you can't get at the CD shop. The ability to buy just one song off of a CD. If an artist makes one good song and the rest crap, you only pay
Since you can burn your ACC files and then rip them to mp3 if you want, there is no danger of not being able to play your music in the future like the blogger claims. Yes you have to pay for the songs, yes there are some restrictions to prevent piracy, but itunes is still a great thing. It should be something that slashdot readers support, it gives us cheap music and DRM that has plenty of flexibility.
Got something better[1]? If so, don't just bitch...do it!
[1] Something that meets the needs of both the user/consumer and the creator/owner.
No.
It's trivial at this moment to convert iTunes music (AC3) to MP3.
The submitter is a paranoiac. Come join us in the real world, dude.
I am not a sucker -- I have not consumed the iPod Kool-Aid. I do like the iPod from an embedded-systems point of view -- good use of resources, space, and they have a good design. Unfortunately, the unit does not have the features I want (FM Radio, FM Transmitter, Scheduled FM recording, Line-In recording, mid rec). My El Cheapo Cowon U2 player works just fine for my needs.
No, I don't download MP3s, and I don't have a big CD collection. I mostly listen to SomaFM's stations, and the news FM station. No need for wasting disk space...
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Thanks, Captain Obvious!
That's like just your opinion, man
i'm not a fan of itunes, i prefer to buy and rip cd's. yes, that's more expensive than itunes, but isn't that the point? if you want something cheap and legal, you take the restrictions. if you want to immunize yourself about changes in the future, you buy a cd (sans drm).
so, basically, i guess i agree with the article. apple isn't cheap enough for me to justify taking their restrictions so i buy cd's. i don't think apple is evil, but i think purchases from them are similar to downloading games for my cell phone. they are only meant to last a couple of years till i replace the phone. i prefer to have my music around for years, especially so i can mock my musical tastes later in life.
RIAA: YES!!! (ka-Chiing!)
There will always be a more efficient (by efficient i mean storage-wise) format. LP's were very efficient when they first surfaced. Now mp3's are becoming relatively inefficient as new formats are created. There are no suckers here, just music appreciators.
And what's next, I won't be able to read all that crap I wrote in vi either? Dumbass.
46 & 2
Presumably, based upon history, it's a case of will be obsolete not could, but that's not the issue. This argument could applied to any form of digital media collection: why store stuff on CDs/MP3s/vinyl etc. after all they could become obsolete and then you wouldn't have any mean to play them sucker! This is nonsense, we'd never have any collections of music based on this kind of insight (or indeed films or even data files). It's an ill-founded argument at best and scaremongering at worst.
Here's something that could shock Mr. Hawk too, I like buying music from iTunes and because of the way I use it I don't find the DRM constrictive. Now, I appreciate that some people do and some people make a reasonable choice not to purchase from iTMS because it is right for them. What I haven't done is created an argument name calling the people that don't agree with my choice and stick it on the front page of slashdot. I have tons of personal views on the computer industry, why aren't they worthy of the same attention?
It's incredibly important not to get locked into any single format, so you probably don't want to be using that newfangled MS Word program, either.
Actually, some lossless encoders tend to *enhance* artifacts that wern't previously there. So sometimes, they do sound worse.
Sig
Who wants that crap music preserved anyway? Do you really want future civilizations sifting through pop music? Or National treasures?
is dictated by what the RIAA and the studios are willing to accept in order to make the music available, and since they have a history of happily selling the same damn music over and over again as media becomes obsolescent, I'd say that, yes, buying Apple's proprietary format is a bad idea if the long-term survival of your music collection is an issue for you.
... again.
Sure, you can "rip mix burn" and put your tracks on a CD, but let's be realistic: the bulk of iTunes users (particularly those with an already-large collection) won't bother to back up their collections to raw CD PCM or MP3 or some other format unburdened by DRM. They will, however, be royally pissed when the day comes that their files won't play anymore, for whatever reason, and they have to go spend money to replace it all
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Screw that. Even if a new service pops up, if it has any level of DRM I know all I need to know about it. So no, it's not unreasonable to me that this person commented on Apple's service even if they haven't used it.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Sorry, but I'm having a hard time thinking of any audio-recording format or technology that doesn't become obsolete.
Off the top of my head, I've only been able to think of wax cylinders, vinyl, reel-to-reel, 8-track, cassette, CD, miniDisc, DVD-audio, then various digital formats stored on hard disks, flash memory, or whatever.
Every single thing I listed suffers from degradation over time. Most of ones toward the start of the list have already suffered from reduced availability of playback equipment.
So... it seems that anyone who builds a music library is doing so "in a format that could be obsolete in the future."
Is there some obsolescence-proof format I'm forgetting?
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
why, I tell ya CLICK the younger generation is CLICK a buncha pansies, why back CLICK in the day we used 8 tracks CLICK like men! CLICK and we LIKED IT! CLICK WHIRRRRRR TANGLE @#%%^ ...wait.... modern tech GOOD! Keep it up younguns, bless you! /me fires up new fangled "laser disk" stuff nephew sold him *cheap* hmm, looks good....
Your wife is clueless. This is not iTunes's fault.
Anyone who does not immediately burn Red Book CDs of all DRM-encumbered iTunes purchases is at risk of losing their investment. iTunes gives you the ability to back up your purchases and strip the DRM from them with two clicks of a mouse. If your wife gives money to Apple without understanding what she's buying or how to protect it, that can hardly be seen as anyone's fault but hers.
Sucker!
You see, this is why I back up my iTunes purchases to a Studer 2-track open reel deck and then store the tapes in a temperature and humidity controlled vault guarded by ninjas trained by Chuck Morris. It's the only way to be sure.
I'm not a good enough coder to write my own AAC codecs, should that format no longer be supported on comtemporary computers, but I can keep that Studer running until the heat death of the universe.
Plan B involves hexadecimal, a chisel, and a shitload of stone tablets. I've heard that this is really hard on the wrists, though.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Out of curiosity, would an AAC -> AIFF -> AAC conversion reduce quality? Or would the second AAC sound exactly like the first?
Okay, so iTunes DRM'd AAC isn't perfect. What's the alternative? The music labels won't let anyone sell non-DRM'd music. Since you can't legally buy non-DRM'd music, what would you have us do?
If DRM went away, online sales of digital music would go away, too. Period.
----------
Jeff Croft
http://jeffcroft.com
I stopped reading after '...only homos pay for'. Nice to see the twelve year olds are back representin' on slashdot.
So.. we have someone ranting that AAC and FairPlay might become obsolete at some unspecified time in the future. That makes perfect sense if we ignore the facts that:
Meanwhile, we have competing services that run on a subscription model, where everything I've paid for disappears:
Wow.. those Apple bastards. No wonder they only have.. uh, what was that market share again?
Actually, some lossless encoders tend to *enhance* artifacts that wern't previously there. So sometimes, they do sound worse.
If the putatively "lossless" encoder produces output that decodes to anything other than what the original input decodes to, then by definition it was not lossless.
(If the way I phrased that sounds odd, I wrote it to handle the MP3 -> FLAC "direct" encoding case. "Encodes to anything other than its input" isn't quite right in that case. I'm sure you can FLAC an MP3 file with the right command line argument but you won't get much out of it.)
Thus, if a lossless encoder adds artefacts, it is, ipso facto, not lossless.
Given the relative ease of testing a lossless encoder/decoder combo and the testing any one you've ever heard of has gone through, I find it far more likely that either A: An encoder you think is lossless is in fact lossy, B: You've got a serious flaw in your encoding software (rice up our Gentoo install too much, maybe?) or C: You're full of shit.
And why is the personal blog from someone (apparently minor) linked from the main page? He didn't say anything ground-breaking that hasn't been said here by /. commenters.
If this were on k5, I could at least -1 him directly and call it a day. Now all I can do is block Zonk.
Remember, it's AIFF -> AAC -> AIFF -> AAC. The first AIFF is the original, and the second AIFF has lost some of the information. Keep doing it and you probably end up with a concert A sine wave :) .
and only virgins or the ignorant use the word "homo"
"only homos pay for what they can easily get for free" You should really publish your findings to have them peer reviewed. I am certain the gay community and scientific community are worse off not knowing your incredible genius. There has to be something profoundly wrong with someone that has a beef with homosexuality and honesty. I hope you get thrown in jail and have a child that grows up to be gay.
They have to denigrate Apple because it's not Windows. It's not Linux It's not some imagined future system, which will be holographic sound and video that can be two-way on your tiny earpiece camera phone. My cuts on my iPod will last as long as I do, in all likelihood. When we have the 45Mbps Internet, I'm sure we'll be sucking up uncompressed holographic sound with n+1 channels and a signal to noise ratio of 3000 to 1. And those old stereo CD rips will sound like hell, too. No, wait a minute. My favorite numbers on my iPod are Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet tracks recorded very lo-fi in the '20s. Maybe it ain't the encoding, it's the groove. Oh, yeah, I also like this crummy mono recording in the late '40s of "Opera in Vout," by Slim and Slam, featuring the very mellow, very groovy, Groove Juice Special. You've got to listen to good music. Recording standards have been improving all the time. Which do you like? The encoding, or the musicians? I'll take the musicians.
Funny never had to replace a thing, total opposite even, the next generation complimented the last. My LP's became tapes, My LP's became CD's, my LP's & CD's became MP3's. Done on quality equipment you get quality results. Here in New Zealand we havent been deemed worthy of being blessed (cursed?) with ITunes yet - Ipods all over the streets just the same. My opinion obviously, but for me my cd's go to MP3, Me & Lame control the data rate - so they are top quality, and I can never lose them - I have the cd. You think in the next 25 years any new digital format isnt going to creatable from cd? Of course it will. If my calculation is right at 99c a song isnt an album about the same price as you US folk pay anyway give or take? With limited bitrate and restrictions? It might be more convenient to download for some, but I can rip an mp3 from an owned cd in about the same time. So I couldnt ever see myself downloading music, I almost always want an entire album, and if you are supporting the artist thats what they always intended you to hear too. I dunno maybe its the lack of exposure but my high quality mp3s from my 700 cds seem to be the best answer for me.
AAC is as vulnerable to obsolesence as any other technology. CD's are still around, and with the relative ease of maintaining software compatibility (rather than hardware which requires material support) I'd guess that AAC will be around for a while longer. The article provided no convincing evidence that AAC is more likely to die out before any other technology. Red Book audio has been around for 20+ years, why not AAC? With CD sales dropping and iTunes constantly gaining new customers, who's to say that CD or plain mp3 support won't disappear first?
Why bother paying $1 per song anyway when for $5/month you can listen to all you want? Apple is lucky that so many people don't know any better.
You answered your own question. :-)
Which will obsolete first, the technology or the music?
In 20 years, today's top music will sound so "Barry Manilow!"
Zonk has clearly got his head way up his butt. No wonder he's full of shit.
Try saving a JPEG at 85% quality. Then open the saved copy. Then save it again. Repeat about 10 times over and get back to me.
How can I mod down the article? as in FLAMEBAIT, TROLL?
And burning a sucky 128 mbps file, ripping it, and recompressing it makes a SUCKIER sounding file.
So no, this isn't viable workaround to rid the file of the DRM.
The SOLUTION is to refuse to buy DRM'd files in the first place. If everyone would friggin' wise up and do just that, Digitally Restricted Media (DRM) would be history. But they've convinced the world that a little DRM is OK and your comments show that you've bought right into that too. It's just a little DRM now. And then a little more and a little more and a little more until 20 years from now, you'll look back on your comment and wonder how on earth transporting media that you purchased to another format or another player was so easy and FREE those 20 years ago.
But 20 years from now you won't be buying music with any expectations at all of being able to move it from one device to another without paying more. You'll be licensing it and maybe it will be inexpensive to play that album in your car, but it'll cost you a few more cents. Play it at work... a few more cents.
But that'll all feel fine and dandy because you never noticed the rights you once had creeping away. And Apple's oh-so-friendly DRM is step one.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Then put the crystal clear polystyrene CD case and the crystal clear polycarbonate disk onto my tower of old dusty CDs?
Plastic sucks.
Digits rule.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
but is building your music library in a format that could be obsolete in the future really the best strategy?
Never stopped me before.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Anyway.
Let's start:
There are a dozen reasons people developed the MP3 format. For the same reason pkzip was created. Remember? I do - when a 1 gig hard drive was just incredibly large.
So what, zonk, were you born in 2006? Don't remember floppy disks?
How DARE people create casette tapes when cd's would outdate them. How dare people create CD's. Seriously.... why on gods green earth was this even posted?
why the hell would anyone want to actually buy any music anyway. Why should anyone finance the marketing machine that pushes so much pap, crap etc - stick it to the record companies. there's tons of music everywhere that you can play for free, made by musicians that are in it for love, not a quick buck. the only place you can hurt the stupid, greedy record companies, and that smug wanker at apple, is in their balance sheet - so don't support these leeches, head for your local bar, or all the free internet music sites - chances are, it wont be as crap as anything on itunes
You do realize, if your wife changes the playlist by just one song, she can then burn the songs again.
I can appreciate the passion of some of TFA's statements. Some of the assumptions in TFA are close to the mark, but I feel that I have to look at things differently.
We have to look at our music purchases in one very important way: do you enjoy it, and do you enjoy it where you want to enjoy it ? Yes, a format or DRM scheme may be gone before you know it. Eight tracks, compact cassettes, and 45/78 RPM vinyl are essentially for collectors at this point. Yes, they were good for the general masses for their time (in one way or another), but they're gone now. The general masses enjoyed them to no end, right up until the time that they were generally not available for new releases.
I agree that some DRM schemes (especially the awful draconian, PC-screwing ones) are bad stuff for the average consumer (the fans just want to listen!). However, if one is to have to put up with it, at least it is often (iTunes, Yahoo!, etc.) in a format with which the vast majority of the fans can deal, and it is something that can still be burned to an audio CD (with most schemes, anyway) to make it DRM independent.
I wish I had the answer to what would make audiophiles, average Janes, and the music business happy. In the meantime, however, I don't think that the customers of iTunes (or Yahoo!, or Virgin, etc.) are really suckers. In the end, they are listening to music that can be enjoyed and managed. The bottom line: current electronic distribution might not be ideal or even what we would all like to see, but it is at least better than the old audio cassettes of ubiquity, or even of low-grade eight-tracks. Plus: Fans can now pick the stuff they like and leave the rest behind.
A Passionate Independent Musician
Re: ... only homos pay for what they can easily get for free
It's usually the heteros that end up paying... the homos usually get it for free.
lol.... he's right! you itunes lusers are idiots!!!!!!!!! and gay!!!!! lol.
And burning a sucky 128 mbps file, ripping it, and recompressing it makes a SUCKIER sounding file.
You keep saying that. Either you have much better hearing than I do (which, considering what I do for a living, I doubt), or you're spewing FUD that you can't back up.
AAC at 128 kbps is at least equivalent in quality to MP3 at 192 kbps. Turning around and burning a 128-kbps AAC file to 192 kbps MP3 results in ABSOLUTELY NO audible degradation that I can hear... and you know what? I'll bet you can't hear it either.
What is a good example of a track that I can purchase from iTunes, burn and re-rip as MP3, and observe a noticeable degree of loss?
It might be a hacky way to do metadata but it works. Any music software worth using will import those files intelligently.
I haven't done it yet because I'm running Windows and it's been mumblety-long since I've played with Cygwin so I don't know if all the Linux-based tools can be built over there or not. But every time I find a tool that looks like it's got the capabilities I need, it's either for Linux or Mac, and my newer Mac is a decade-old 7100 that doesn't support OSX :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Somehow I don't think kids that grew up recording songs from sucky FM radio on even SUCKIER cassette tapes are really going to give a shit about what a handful of zealot audiophiles think. That would be the "over 30" crowd, for you kids who never heard anything but CDs.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
This article is just a little bit silly. Haven't been people been buying and replacing their media since... media existed? When I was just a young'un I bought cassette tapes. After a couple years I had many, many tapes. Compact Discs were unveiled and that format was the be-all and end-all of audio... and everyone was told that CD's would last forever, unlike magnetic tape... which is just hilarious. I used to buy VHS tapes. I had a large collection of those. Then DVD's arrived... and suddenly my entire movie collection was obsolete. In both cases there was good cause to switch to the new media format because the quality had improved. The newer media also took up less space physical space. The point being that it's an endless cycle; there's no "strategy" involved, really.
How exactly is this different than any other format? If I have a 128 mp3, converting it is likely a "losing" proposition. How is this different than vinyl or cassettes? They have a lifespan. I don't buy music on ITMS for this very reason. I purchase CDs burn them at lossless in iTunes, and get rid of the shell (yes, thief is getting old). I can do whatever I wish with the my file.
A sucker is born every minute, as we can tell by the leadership of this country.
With the iTunes Music Store:
you can burn all your itunes tracks to AIFF or MP3
Compare that to the article's author:
I rip it straight from CDs to crystal clear high bit rate DRM free mp3s
This is fair use in iTunes, but may not be with store-bought CDs.
The thing is since I backed up my iTunes purchase on CD (as Apple all but instructs you to do with their post-download warning dialog), I'm never going to end up listening to those songs at lower quality than I bought them. Why? Because if I ever move away from Apple iTunes/iPod it will be to some other system that is able to hold higher quality sound files than today's iPod. Which is to say, I'm not going to bother to sell my existing iPod unless I can buy a new player that supports lossless audio, and if my new player supports lossless audio, then I can just import my backup CDs losslessly. True, the quality won't be as good as buying CDs of the music in the first place, but it won't be worse than what I've always had before that. On top of that, the iTunes store is cheaper and more convenient than buying a real CD, so for purchases where I don't need absolutely every possible bit of sound quality, it's the best value and reasonably future proof given the CD loophole. And all this goes without even using illegal means of removing DRM like jhymn.
Anything that's not open source or easily re-engineered will die quickly.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
maybe Apple will be nice and create something that will convert the file type, but maintain the DRM. Besides, by the time this format is obsolete the songs we bought will probably suck.
Not by license agreements.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
If it so happens if Apple/iTunes kicks the bucket, they would just release a key to take the "Fairplay" off the AAC files as a final F/U to the RIAA.
Really, I'm not sure I understand what the problem is. Yes, of course formats become obsolete; that's what happens with technological advances. Does that mean I should just throw up my hands and never own any music ever, for fear that another format will come out that will supersede it? It seems like you would never have much of a music collection if you operated on that principle....or never get to listen to anything you liked.
Just burn your iTunes music to an AUDIO CD and you have removed the DRM. Big deal.
The real worry should be by anyone who has purchased an audio format that has sold less than one billion songs because it will be one or more of those formats that will not be available in the future.
jeezus, man, whatever happened to just putting on a godam record.
It is unfortunate that people are so self-righteous and hostile when attempting to explain why our rights are important - it just confirms people's preconceptions that the ideas are just conspiracy theories.
I definitely agree that CD's are better. When I buy music I am creating a collection that I plan on keeping for decades. CD's win on every mark for this. The fact that it is a wide-spread industry-standard means that I will never have to worry about finding a drive to read the data. Because it is an open standard I will never have to break the law to listen to it on the OS of my choice. Since it has not been encoded using lossy compression, I can encode it into whatever format is convenient for me without the artifacts that come from transcoding. Pressed CD's last a long time if you take care of them, which gives me a second level of backups in addition to my normal computer backups. Plus I like the jacket covers - I enjoy laying on my bed, reading and thinking about the lyrics, while listening to the music. For the advantages, the extra $3 that a CD costs is worth it to me.
Why should I settle for DRM? Sure the lossy-encoding is good enough for listening. But why buy music whose quality is inferior, but good enough. Sure iTMS has the most lenient DRM policy than any of the other DRM schemes. But why give up any rights at all, when not only is there a completely open standard available, but it is also widely used? Why settle for second best, just because it is "the future"? There is one significant advantage to buying music on iTunes - the price of a single. I can understand that, although I have never had a desire to buy singles myself.
It is frustrating to me that people are so eager to switch to a format that is inferior in both sound quality and consumer rights. Not because I am a control freak who wants to dictate peoples lives, but because once the majority decide that proprietary DRM'ed formats are good enough, companies will stop selling CD's. Then I won't have a choice. Eventually even the independent artists will switch to whatever the dominant format is, because that is what is easiest for most of their fans. I don't want to loose that choice.
I can't hear for you, so I can't comment. All I can tell you is what I hear and when I sit and listen to music (which literally means sitting... and listening... to music) on my home stereo system, it makes enough of a difference for it to matter to me. I don't have really high-end system either, though it's a good system. I did put a lot of time and listening into choosing the components (CD player, receiver, and speakers amount to about $2000).
And I'm not anti MP3. I have an ipod. I use it for music on-the-go (car, walking, etc). and I did rip most of my CD collection with either 196 or 256 kbps lame-encoded mp3. And I do listen to them on my home stereo (I stream them and the sound quality is absoutely OK if I just have background music on or if I have company over), but when I really want to listen to music at decent volume and actually pay attention to what I'm listening to, the difference is significant enough to me that I want to have access to the highest quality music available.
If I were (or if you are) listening with earbuds or computer speakers, or even any fairly mid-fi playback system, I agree that the difference would probably be indiscernable.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
So evidently /. is no longer "news for nerds. stuff that matters." but instead is "cranks with axes to grind. Rants that have no value."
A true lossless encoder would produce the same bits in output as it recieved in input. If your "lossless" format is introducing artifacts, better make sure it compiled properly.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Yeah, I know.
I'm a Book
On the Bookshelf
... except for the little "upgrade" from 1280kbps to 128kbps...
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
You can play it on other computers in your house via iTunes music sharing; up to three simultaneously, if I remember correctly?
I'm not positive, but I think you could probably get iTunes running under WINE to play stuff on your linux system.
Please help metamoderate.
Uncompressed CD audio is 11 times the size of purchased iTunes music (1411kbps vs 128kbps). Losslessly compressed CD audio is 5.5 to 6 times the size. Are you really going to buy a portable player to play 700kbps music at 128kbps quality?
Another sucker served.
Literally, I cringed at how many commentors thought they were soooooo clever for burning to a CD then re-ripping to MP3.
I remember (when I had just discovered MP3s in 9th grade) re-encoding them to a higher bitrate. I thought I was clever, I mean, higher bitrate right?
Fark I was stupid & so is every n00btard who says "burn it and re-encode it."
I think part of the problem is that people now have something 'invested' in iTunes or their iPod and because of that, they'll defend it. Even if you give them proof they may have made a bad choice.
Remember folks, denial is the first step.
Then comes anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
I'm not saying iTunes is bad, but the people who have invested money/time/credibility into Apple will have a lot of trouble stepping back and looking at their decision objectively.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Go apeshit much?
How do you moderate a submitted article as flamebait? Is there any reason why I should care about Thomas Hawk and what he posts on his blog?
I believe the GP understood your point entirely. It was that transcoding produces a loss of quality. He also made some good points about losing metadata. I'm not quite sure why your post was modded +5.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
Bitrate thats the only problem with itunes.
Funny as hell really you see adverts telling you not to download or pirated cd's video's ect.
the low quality of pirated music and video is often cited.
yet your legit download service serves up low bitrate and low resolution content - Lower than whats commonly available.
The restrictions on copy protected disks also ensures that your copy from disk is poor.
maybe this is just a continuation of the LP cassette situation home tapes never had the quality of an LP home taping never killed music because if you really liked an album you bought it, eventually.
you'd still tape it thou for party use.
If you want to become an itunes competitor you need to supply high quality nonDRM nonRIAA music give Independant artists a higher percentage of unit sales and low prices for consumers and multitrack discounts.
Promotional codes could allow your friends to buy the same music at a lower price and reward you with credit towards future purchases.
till then heres some free music for your ipod
http://www.the-hotels.org.uk/music.htm
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
I'm suprised that given the number of readers this person has, there is nothing in TFA directing/advising people about the much better non DRM services.
I have been downloading music from audiolunchbox.com and other similar services like magnatune. They are fantastic. Most of the bands I listen to have albums on there. Of course the big RIAA labels artists aren't, but once you get away from the big labels, you'll find a wealth of variety and talent. In fact many semifamous artists have their albums available on these sorts of sites.
The sooner people start using these services, the sooner that the RIAA will get the hint, quit acting like bullies, and start treating its consumers with respect. The only real way to change the RIAA's habits is to quit buying from them. I have, and my music collection has actually improved dramatically with new additions from independent artists I've found. Many of the artists are far better than the big superstar bands the RIAA tries to sell you.
A great way to discover a lot of new bands also is listening to indiefeed.org podcasts. Many (most?) of the artists featured there has music available on audiolunchbox.com.
Have you performed a blind listening test (preferably conducted by another person)?
This article makes an excellent point. Mp3s could easily go out of mainstream use, and all those people buying all those songs would be stuck. I mean, in the future, who wants to be stuck using an iPod from today for all of their music? In fact, his logic should be applied to everything:
From this point on you should never buy another computer, because, in the future they will have 30 terabytes of HD space, play DVDs at 30 times the resolution of HD, have floating screens, and fit into a tiny slot on the side of any desk's table top.
You should never buy a car, because, in the future the car will be considered archaic. Instead we will be piloting hover vehicles which get us everywhere a hundred times faster and a thousand times more safely.
You should never use the internet again, since in the future... You get the point. This article is a waste of time.
Yup, there will always be a case in the future where you will likely need to replace your content, or go through the hassle of converting it, just like with LP's, Cassettes, CD's, and yes, even iTunes tracks.
Yes, he converts his tracks from CDs into MP3's because he wants to. If i want, I can convert my songs back into CDs, or cassettes, or even LP's if I was really determined. So far no-one has really stopped you (some have tried, but Apple is pretty lenient about it) from being able to convert your media.
This just sounds like the 'CDs are the devil, everyone should still by LPs' argument in a new skin.
I think Apple's DRM is awful and represents a major step back for us all.
Got something better[1]? If so, don't just bitch...do it!
[1] Something that meets the needs of both the user/consumer and the creator/owner.
How about eMusic? They provide mp3s DRM-free, and their creator/owners are still cashing the royalty checks.
...for me at least, since so far I have refused to invest a significant amount of money in compressed audio files. Go for it, call me a snob. I just can't stand the thought of purchasing music that has been compressed, especially since I can hear most types of compression (DRM isn't a big deal to me, just burn it to a cd or use any number of programs to get around it if you really need to). I will, however, rip my cds for use in mp3 players and the like to save wear and tear on the cds. Plus I can use variable bit-rate encoding so the compression isn't as obvious. And since I normally buy used or discounted cds, the cost usually ends up being less than 99 cents per track. I just don't usually get cds right when they come out. Not that the folks that purchase iTunes or Rhapsody tracks are suckers... if they're happy with the product, then they win, and the music services win. iTunes just doesn't meet my needs/wants, so I choose to stick with good ol' fashioned cds.
It's called capitalism, folks.
... do realize, of course, that 128 kbps AAC is equivalent to 192 kbps MP3, right? AAC is a newer format with a better entropy encoder and psychoacoustic model. It takes fewer bits to achieve the same quality level.
I mean, you only have to burn the CD once, and then you can just duplicate as often as you want. What is the point of this restriction other then to annoy people? Whatever, the music industry sucks and I'll just continue to pirate stuff out of moral duity
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
If you're worried about the propietery format just strip the DRM. A Google search tells you how. Hint, you don't have to burn your purchases to cd and the re-rip to MP3. Or if you prefer, go from M4P to AIFF to FLAC or Apple Lossless. Again, no quality loss and no DRM.
Sometimes you have to look out for your own fair use rights.
So anyhow the iTunes songs are encoded in lower bit rate then what most of us would rip them at ... so converting to different formats, burning to cd and ripping them again won't matter for the most part. Also i have my bet on apple if their main format chages that they will have a tool ... built in iTunes to convert all of your audio to that format keeping the protection, so what ever.
- MOSKIE
There's no need to worry about this if you don't use itunes! Just get CD's. iTunes hype is that you can get "just one song". well, i've NEVER heard a song that i wanted just that song and not the whole album. No matter what happens to the CD format, there will always be some form of hardcopy, cd or better quality audio. And as far as getting our old music in later years? Well, all those people who have good cassettes shouldn't have a problem converting them into whatever format they want. Yeah, it's alittle harder that Cds, but the point is, when we're 80 years old, or when our grandkids find our old CD collection, they will have a way of playing it and putting it on whatever device they use, no matter what the current method or media of buying an album is. I'm not azgainst iTunes (i love the software actually), but i like to have an original hardcopy of any music i buy. Even if i only put it in py cd drive once to rip it, i still want it that way.
If Yahoo gets their DRM free music they recently requested, we'll know one of two things: The music industry either never cared about DRM or they're tired of Apple. I don't think the IF will ever become a WHEN.
Wait, thinking of DRM - Sony clearly wanted it on their CDs. Let's quit blaming Apple (although they are not flawless) and get to the music industry who demands protection of their intellectual properties.
I think it's stupid to pay $15 for most new CDs. I think it's stupid to pay for an entire CD when you want only one song. I think it's stupid to have to clear out a lot of physical space in order to hold your CD collection. I think it's stupid to force yourself to either a) go to a store to buy a CD or b) wait days in order to receive your purchase when the whole process can happen instantly. So I buy songs online. The DRM isn't really an issue to those of us that have actually used iTunes and know that it is very possible to get mp3's out of your m4p files.
Oh, and about the author's brilliant scheme of buying CDs and returning them the next day - if I wanted to get music while screwing the artist out of any money, I would just download the song for free.
couldn't buy a replacement stylus...
you did ask
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
.....But 20 years from now.... .... the content industry will have learned that DRM doesn't really get them much but costs a lot in terms of customer satisfaction. DRM will be non-existent by then. The content industry fought bitterly against new technology in the past, but eventually figured out how to adjust their business models and make huge profits from the very technology they opposed at first. What evidence do you have that this will not be this way again?
All theory is gray
Alac decoder source is here: http://craz.net/programs/itunes/
Previous Slashdot story on the alac decoder.
Something else to consider about the control of music is that music can inspire, cajole, teach, anger, inform, etc. There are people who don't want non-controlled music for more reasons than just money. Music is too dangerous to just let float around inspiring people. Read Plato's Republic and notice the talk of control of music, control of art, etc. for the purpose of supporting state goals.
Will the consumer once again have to someday replace their iTunes track just like they had to replace their LP, cassette, and CD
They name every past form of music that has more or less gone obsolete. Were my parents suckers for buying LP's? What about cassettes? Was I a sucker to buy a CD? No, I was just a sucker for buying music with DRM - which I can burn to a CD as many times as I like. I can only burn the same CD 6 times, which is a logical step to prevent piracy, you can't create a CD and make enough copies to sell a ton, but for personal use that's more than enough.
I can see the argument that iTunes uses a lossy format, but the quality of the songs I bought from iTunes is better than any cassettes I've ever owned, better than any LPs after being played a hundred times (I have listened to some songs that many times), and there's no concern of getting them scratched like with CD's.
That's not to say DRM isn't annoying. I'd like to leave windows behind and switch to Linux, but I'm bound to Windows (or OSX) by Apple's DRM. However going back to past musical formats, I'm still doing pretty well. LPs could only be played on turntables, cassettes in tape decks, CD's opened up the computer as a feasible way to play music, but it was still focused on CD players. My iTunes music, conversely, can be played from my computer, my iPod (which goes everywhere), it can be burned and played in a CD player, if you have a casette adapter for your iPod, it can play in a casette player. I'd go so far as to say iTunes is the most versatile form of music ever to take root in our culture.
The author of the article seems to think that the appropriate way to get music is to buy a CD from your local music store, rip it, and return it. I don't see that as any different from pirating on BitTorrent or other p2p clients, except you paid a little bit (to the music store rather than the artist) and you have more control over the format of the file than if you donwload it.
Me? I'm sticking with iTunes. It's a good service with lots of music at a fair price. Perhaps it's not as great as I could wish it to be, but in my opinion it's the best way to date to get music in a way that is fair to the people responsible for making it.
Since the only portable music player I can play files bought from iTMS is the iPod, I already consider the format useless and obsolete.
Vote for Pedro
Um, every format is going to be obsolete in the future.
I don't regret buying that Boston "Don't Look Back" cassette long long ago and playing it until it wore out!
Apple delivered. Everyone else failed.
Like it or not, those are the facts. There are two of them. Count them if you need to. There it is.
Apple brought the music industry to the digital market. Customers who were declared "uninterested" in anything other than downloading all their music for free have purchased one BILLION songs (and counting). iTunes is probably one of the most brilliant and successful examples of combining business and innovation ever. Left to the crouton people, the market for music would still be non-existent except for the odd music video promotion. On their own, the cubicles will ALWAYS FAIL TO INNOVATE. ALWAYS.
Apple is an example of one of the very VERY few companies that actually produce new products. Their list of successes is beyond belief and dwarfs their competition. The rest of business is so bereft of this ability it is truly astounding. Apple innovates. Everyone else follows.
Apple delivered. Everyone else failed.
Those are the facts.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Will the consumer once again have to someday replace their iTunes track just like they had to replace their LP, cassette, and CD only to get their music on their hot new non Apple mp3 phone of the future?
So far I haven't "had to" replace my LPs and CDs. Nobody "has to" do anything. It's all Madison Avenue hype. The sooner people realize what crappy sound they are putting up with with all these compressed formats and go back to the old tried and true formats, the better. Music matters, and the lossy formats are causing people to lose touch with the message musicians are trying to communicate in their performances. MP3s are the Soylent Green of the "music" industry.
You act as though there's some reason to not waste bits. There isn't. All of the Fairplay protected music on my computer comes to less than a gig in its current format. Let's say the lossless format I someday switch to is 5 times less efficient than this. Do you really think I'm going to upgrade from my 40-gig iPod to another player if wasting 4 gigs or not will be a relevant factor in my use of it? Most current manufactures only sell players in 10 gig increments, so I'm going to need to buy one with a least 10 gigs more space than my library currently has, just to avoid having to upgrade as soon as my library gets any larger. Why would I upgrade to a new player to begin with if it doesn't have enough space to spare for me to rerip all of existing CDs losslessly (9 gigs as currently compressed meaning 45 gigs lossless plus the space for the mp3s I got from my friends which I may or may not be able to get lossless from them as well)? So, if it's being a "sucker" to "waste" hard drive space that you weren't going to use anyway but still have to pay for, then I guess so, whatever.
If it can be played, it can be re-encoded into whatever format you like, on way or another...
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The sad part is that after the Nuclear World War of 2012, the old LPs and casettes will be the only thing that future peoples will be able to decode eventually because of analogs graceful degradation.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
You read my mind. I was honestly just thinking exactly that. I've lately been enjoying listening to LPs largely for the simplicity of it. Not only is it a simple process, but I also (mostly) understand what's going on with the whole set of devices I'm using.
Also, many audio equipment manufacturers used to consider their craft an art, in that their goal was to provide a beautiful sound, rather than a necessarily "perfectly accurate" sound. Using equipment designed with that intention adds to my enjoyment of listening as well.
Thomashawk, one billion suckers clicked.
nice way to generate traffic to a website.
is building your music library in a format that could be obsolete in the future really the best strategy?
Can you please point me in the direction of a format I can use that is never going to be obsolete? Pretty please? Right, I thought so.
So what exactly was your point?
FTFA:
What happens when the killer phone is finally here? You know the one, built in terabyte of storage, lightening fast file transfer speeds, full satellite radio, a breathalyzer, your car and house key, a tiny little thing the size of credit card with a 12 mega pixel camera on it (hey it's the future right, we can dream). What happens when this phone is out and you really want it and unfortunately Apple didn't make it? That's right, you're a sucker then aren't you. I thought so. You paid all that good money for your iTunes and now you can't put them on your new phone because your new phone threatens Apple's dominance. So who owns the music anyway? You or them? They do. You bought nothing. You bought the right to play their song on their product. It might work today. But I'm not about to bet that this will be the format du jour 10 years from now.
So, what happens when high definition audio formats finally take off? You know the one, 5.1 surround sound, 192khz sampling, 96-bit samples. I'm sure that the record companies will be ready to sell you all new versions of the music you already have. So what happens to all of your shiny CDs that you have? Oh wait, nothing... just like the DRMd AAC files that Apple is selling. They will still work with the iPods that have been sold today, and with the version of iTunes that is out now on machines that are sold now.
Listen, people bought LPs, 8-Tracks, and Cassettes -- the only one of those 3 that I could still play today is a cassette. And only in a few places (my car, for example, can't play them). So, basically, those formats are useless now. Life goes on. People will figure out how to upgrade their music collection or they'll replace it. Either way, nothing has really changed.
And, in the grand scheme of things, we are talking about a .99 cent purchase. Do we really put this much thought into .99 cents these days? I bought a cheeseburger at Wendy's today... 99 cents. It lasted about 5 minutes, and then it was gone. If I'm hungry again, I'll have to buy another. Am I a sucker too?
dennis
I think an important point for the burn / re-rip crowd and the AAC to FLAC or OGG crowd is that if you are a "true audiophile" you wouldn't even deal with digitized music in the first place. You would be more concerned with finding an audiophile-grade turntable to connect to your 20,000 dollar Mark Levinson amplifier. So lossy AAC files vs. hi-bitrate MP3's vs. lossless filetypes is a non-issue.
"Every time a bell rings, a Dell laptop bursts into flame."
which would you consider worse:
Buying a new player that can play your previously purchased songs even if they are at 128kbps quality at 700kbps and any new stuff. Or
Buying a new player and repurchasing the music you had previously downloaded.
I agree that you would be better off buying CDs and ripping them into a lossless format. But, if you're a person that just wants to buy a track or two at a time and aren't interested in buying the entire CD, what's the alternative? In an ideal world, the user would sign on to a record label's website, pick songs that they wanted, pay for them, and they would then be able to download those tracks in a lossless format or have a CD burned and mailed to the customer. But the record labels want to keep selling you the same music over and over again as technology changes, so they're not going to do that.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Oh god...technology advances?! I KNEW it was too good to be true! High tech witchcraft is what it all is! Scams! They sell you somethig and then a few years later, BAM, it's no good anymore! I recommend a huge class action lawsuit.
...or maybe we could just sit back and acknowledge the fact that technology evolves quickly.
In other news, investing in harddrive manufacturers is obviously a sucker's move. In 20 years nobody will be able to read them! Amazing insight. /sarcasm
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
but until Capt Walker shows up, they won't know what to do with them other than use them for scepter decorations.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Forget about the DRM for a moment, that may come or go or be circumvented. The plain unassailable fact is that for any given bitrate AAC is superior audio quality to mp3. And so it should be, it's part of the mp4 audio structure.
And while I'm here, somebody tell me one of the big losers to music piracy? That's right, Fraunhoffer, who for years kept a tight grip on the mp3 spec, and the license revenue stream. Sure, one day AAC will be superseded by an even better codec, and when that day comes you'd better be ready to trash all your other Brand X mp3 players.
For instance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk the floppy disk. Dozens of sizes, yet there always was a way to transfer stuff to a newer format. Off course one can always be careful not to damage the original hardware as well. Sing, hum and whistle are also a very universal format as well, yet not that transferable.
My point is: there will always be a transition option, period.
Hell I can even listen to a stream of music originally recorded to wax-cilinders http://128.111.87.4:8000/moran_opera_cylinders via iTunes. Nice, innit?
By the way Zonk, you're on my blacklist again.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
From TFA would it be possible to go down to Amoeba records, buy it for $14, take it home and rip it, then return it within 7 days to get 75% credit back?
Not in my country, friend. For over 2 years now our local version of Walmart, & several other smaller chains, has had a strict no returns policy for CD and DVD. Big signs in the stores advise shoppers to Choose wisely. Due to copyright reasons, we cannot accept returns of CD, DVD, or PC Games. Hey, it's no big deal, all DVD players sold here are Region 0.
A DRM format, based off MP4 audio, which is easily stripped from M4P to M4A if you're concerned about the issue, is a huge step back? From what? Napster? From pirating broken, incomplete, poorly-encoded MP3s? From piracy? From actually paying for what we consume?
Or is it a huge step back from buying CDs? From waiting six weeks for the local store to get in that obscure album you want, or from buying on Amazon and paying for shipping?
He's suggesting that we should all rip to MP3, but MP3 is patented and requires royalties. He's not even advocating open technologies like OGG (which I personally think are irrelevant).
He's saying that DRM is a step back because when you want it in the next 'latest greatest' format, you'll have to buy it again - just like LPs, 8-tracks, casettes, and CDs. So how is it a step back?
Perhaps I should buy CDs instead? I should spend $15-17 on a CD, instead of $9.99, so that I can get the liner notes (which I never read) and the physical media (which goes in a box within minutes, eventually getting lost)?
He seems to be saying that 'iTunes isn't stopping P2P because people can fill 80 gig disks and swap with friends'. What does this have to do with anything? Is iTunes supposed to stop piracy? Was this its stated goal? Did it miss its deadline? The iTMS is cutting into piracy, and that's enough for me. You're never going to make a pay system that completely replaces getting things for free. People have been taking things that aren't theirs since the dawn of time, and expecting iTunes to stop that seems more than a little ludicrous.
This reeks to me of sour grapes. It sounds like a man who is anti-Apple, or anti-iTunes or anti-iPod, or anti-something-else, and is getting fed up with everyone else loving something that he hates, so he resorts to ranting about it online in order to vent his frustrations with everyone else's favourite gadget. Give me a break.
Welcoem to capitalism, Thomas. Here's a tip: if you don't like the iTMS, don't buy from it. If you don't like iPods, don't buy one. Vote with your dollars. While you're standing on your soapbox preaching to the choir, the rest of us will be voting with our dollars too, downloading special tracks, podcasts, albums, and even liner notes, alongside TV shows like Law and Order, Lost, and Monk. I'll vote for my dollars and you vote for yours, and may the best solution win.
Oh yeah? Name some.
No really, name some. I downloaded Project64 a few months ago, and so far, the only good game I've found is Super Mario 64. Well, there was also Mario Kart 64, but that only lasted about an hour or two before I finished it.
I suppose this is a little offtopic, so, uh... DRM is evil!
You could probably script it on Windows too, iTunes has an ActiveX interface although I've not actually looked at it yet.
there is a difference between "lossless" and "lossy" compression.
The parent post is highly underrated.
If you hate DRM so much then take action and deny the DRM mongers any money. Give more ethical alternatives your money. It's that simple.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Whoa, whoa, whoa! Back up! $2000 in sound equipment? You're a major exception. Joe and Jane Schmoe have like iPods and maybe half-way decent speakers, then whatever came standard in their car. Which is like $1000 for 3 systems and their kid's CD player or nano. Really, they're not going to notice this difference, and they're like 95% of the iTMS buying population.
What a load of shite. Ok Thomas Hawk, you're FAR more clever than the rest of us. Piss off.
That is incorrect. iTunes will remember the metadata for CDs you burn. I'm not sure how it does that, either by writing something on the CD or by keeping it stored on your computer, but if you burn and re-rip the audio file, you will keep your metadata.
The other point about quality loss is more valid. However, 99% of the population simply does not care and can't hear the difference between the AAC file and the re-ripped MP3 file, as long as the MP3 file isn't ripped at a low bitrate.
The main counterpoint to converting-by-ripping is that it's really quite inconvenient to do it. You can use a re-writable CD so you don't waste tons of CDs, but still, it's not something that can be done automatically do your whole library.
Surely it is in the best interest of Apple to continue to maintain support for their format? If it becomes obsolete won't it provide an opportunity for users to move to alternative hardware?
This topic has got me a little worried. I've ripped most of my music at 320kbs AAC (.m4a) - I always assumed it was a better file format than mp3. Is this true? Will I have a whole bunch of un-playable files requiring a lengthy conversion process in five years time, or is AAC fairly future-proof?
Every time Apple is making a product that's bad, lame, stupid, etc ... I got used to it. Whatever anybody can say it will always be like that, as I said I don't care anymore.
... ...) and because everyone can work on it, everyone can use it. But music is not an open-source projects, it's the hard work of some one and you just don't have to right to claim it's free just because it is easy to get it for for free.
... As we said here: "your liberty ends where my liberty begins" -> your liberty with the songs stops where the artists liberty begins.
... CD) and they did not offered you more possibility to change format without loss of quality.
But seriously, this all debate is once more about having to pay for music, since the Napster, people feel that they don't have to pay for music anymore and it's a shame.
What do you people think, that those artist are there just to divert you and that you can use whatever they make as you wish ? Oh right it's the "open source" state of mind, it's digital so it enters the open source field and we don't have to pay for it
Just a reminder, the open source is based on the fact that people are sharing their knowledge to build software (or OS,
ITMS is has brought the music prices to the lowest level ever so far, it has helped us music fans to get rid of all the taxes that was put on the cd's and other support. In my country a CD was more than 20 to 25 $, that was not normal because it was overpriced. But with the ITMS, the price is fair and we should not forget that as we should not forget that the artist has the right to get paid for his work.
You claim for your liberty when you talk about the format, well it's a protection for the artist (please skip the the "no it's the bad big industry, not the artists" it's so 16 years old)
And just as a remark: "the format will be obsolete in 5 years", well maybe, maybe not, but maybe just as all format in music become obsolete at a time (LP,
"I'm not going to bother to sell my existing iPod unless I can buy a new player that supports lossless audio"
My 4th gen ipod supports both apple lossless and aiff files....i use mostly apple lossless for my ripped CDs, mp3 for my files procured from questionable sources, and aiff for my own work (which i need to hear at full CD quality....which is peanuts compared to 24/96) In my opinion, apple lossless is the best compromise for mobile music on an ipod. My vinyl collection is where the real listening takes place!
That's more served in less time than McDonalds. What does THAT tell you about society?
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
wax cylinder, vinyl, reel-to-reel, cassette, 8-track, laser disc, 16-bit 44.1 KHz sterio compact disc, MP3, OGG, AAC, DAT, whatever! They're all going the same way, into the past.
Start Running Better Polls
ahh, the "does it sound good?" vs "does it sound real?". the two aren't always the same. most ppl only ask "is it sound?" anyway...
Any format will be obsolete in 20 years. (remember 8-track?)
If I get all my music in MP3, maybe players in 20 years won't play them any more.
So what do you suggest I use?
What exactly is wrong with iTunes?
Kayamon
Let's see...
JPEG was invented in 1986 and is still being used.
GIF was invented in 1987 and is still being used.
MP3 was invented in 1992 and is still being used.
In the 1980s most people still had big collections of casette tapes.
Pretty much any common digital format can still be read by modern software. Personally, I think it's pretty clear that digital media formats will last for quite some time.
Call me crazy, but I would rather buy from iTunes and deal with the DRM issues than deal with the unknown filth that the RIAA companies are putting on audio CDs these days!
It's easier when the band is non-RIAA, like Sister Hazel. I'll buy their CDs right off their webpage to show direct support. But for RIAA bands, forget it. If I absolutely must have the material for my own, iTunes is as good a method as I'm finding to acquire it.
Those of you who worry about converting up to new formats later are worrying about horse technology with the automobile just around the corner. We're not far from the point at which we will just "tune in" electronically to whatever content we want, be it audio, video, or gaming. We're already a great deal of the way there. Think not? What medium is Howard Stern delivered on now? What is the most successful delivery method for Xbox 360 games per exposure? How do you save last night's new episode of Survivor automatically, even if it's pre-empted? None of these leave you with a physical disc to keep, but all of them give people as much access to the content as they have any real use for.
Yes, yes, the Taurean archivist in me likes the concept of maintaining my own personal library with no strings attached. I think a lot of us do. But it may be a concept whose time has come and gone, in favor of the universal multimedia library aethernet. Perhaps we'll all pay some small basic fee at some point for unlimited access, or our children will. Sort of like on Star Trek... "Computer! Play Vivaldi's Spring, and whip me up an Irish Coffee!" Wherever you happen to be, whatever receptive device you happen to have, all the content in recorded history is at your fingertips. Hitachi and Toshiba are polishing off their content-receiving mesh PAPER display as I type this... how long until we read books off that, or off an electronic padd? None of this is as far off as one might think.
Let's see... my favorite band comes up with an awesome album of typical length, say 15 songs. I want them all. I can either:
1) Buy the most ultimate limited edition of the album on CD for say $17. Comes with awesome artwork at full CD-quality (I always laugh when I read that claim for 128 mp3s!), on a completely DRM-free media with which I can do everything I want.
OR
2) Buy 15 songs at $1 each. They come in a vendor-locked digital COMPRESSED form and no tangible extras whatsoever. I can do with all everything that Apple will permit me. Or I can un-DRM them by RECOMPRESSING them.
So, is it really that hard of a choice? (Assuming of course that the artist is good enough not to have 13 of those songs be just filler to the 2 good ones.)
Besides, listeing to a compressed music format is like drinking juice made of powder, as compared to eating the fruit. It's still orange, but not quite. Recompressing is like adding more water to the powder...
i think converting your library from one format to another (eg. ogg) is pretty damn easy... high quality is the only real issue here. It might take some computer time, but i bet i could have a conversion of my entire media library going within 5 minutesof hitting google if i didn't mind taking the quality hit.
Geez! How is the parent a troll? A noiseless codec neither adds to nor subtracts from the signal. Doing so would make it a noisy codec by definition.
If anything needs a "troll" mod, it's the "One Billion Suckers Served" original post.
Both of which are no match for my ~1000 kbps flacs which I keep on that big cheap hard drive I have. Those are lossless and made of CDs of course.
Tunebite is an application for windows which makes a virtual digital sound card, then uses iTunes/WMP to play DRMed music at x2 or x4 the normal speed, then uses the digital sound card to record a perfect, lossless ogg/mp3/unencrypted wma. Works well, I've heard of some people use it on Napster (can napster WMAs play in WMP?)
--
The SOLUTION is to refuse to buy DRM'd files in the first place. If everyone would friggin' wise up and do just that, Digitally Restricted Media (DRM) would be history. But they've convinced the world that a little DRM is OK and your comments show that you've bought right into that too. It's just a little DRM now. And then a little more and a little more and a little more until 20 years from now, you'll look back on your comment and wonder how on earth transporting media that you purchased to another format or another player was so easy and FREE those 20 years ago.
Or maybe, just maybe, due to the evil small amount of DRM Apple have put it now, the iTMS will steamroller the music companies and musicians will start to get direct online contracts with places like cdbaby, cutting out a lot of middle men. The Record companies will die, and the desire for draconian DRM will die with them.
The reason Apple has not licensed Fairplay is to protect themselves in a cutthroat industry. The record companies and MS would like nothing better than to adopt and extend Apple's format so that it only works with their blessed players and software, and thus crush Apple in this market too by bundling the MS version with Windows (see Java for the perfect example of this). I am hopeful that at some point due to public pressure they will open it up, and if they don't they should be forced to by the US Government or EU when they become close to a monopoly in this space (they're on the way, but not there yet).
N/T
--We had, (and still do have), the opportunity to embrace a fair and elegant system of music distribution; to download MP3's directly from the bands and give them donations based on the honor-system. --Heck, iTunes has proven that people are more than willing to pay a buck-a-song. But only, apparently, if that buck is going to a large corporation and NOT the artist.
Yep. People have voted to be unscrupulous and in need of governments and corporations to control their behavior.
Hooray for the Pod-People! You all now give yourselves a nice pat on the back, you cute little consumers, you!
-FL
I, on the other hand, have been cursing the day I decided to rip all my CDs into Oggs. Nothing seems to play them out-of-box if at all (like my iPod).
I really should sit down one day and go through them again, rip them both into wav for optimal portability (who cares about metainfo anyway?) and write a script that converts them into the de facto standard of portable music, mp3.
The owls are not what they seem
Whatever happened to just playing your goddam mp3s?
I've been astonished since the store opened that people are willing to move away from a widely used format with no silly DRM variants and sound quality you all like just fine, you bunch of phony audiophiles.
If you care much about music I imagine you'd already been through two or three players before iTunes came around, and had several thousand mp3s encoded and or stolen - and far better use for your time (i.e. encoding and or stealing more music) than converting all this shit into the flavor of the week.
To say nothing of how foolish it is to keep all that music on a device you can't plug into anyone's computer and effortlessly play without first having an obnoxious conversation about it.
(yeah, mod me redundant)
... until you alter the playlist you are burning. If Apple died, if the DRM format died, then you can always re-rip - and by that time you'd probably rip lossless, so the old tired 'lose quality by reripping' arguments are moot.
Personally I've never bought an iTune and I don't own an iPod. I think Apple's DRM is awful and represents a major step back for us all. I think those that are investing in iTune digital libraries are suckers. You are basically betting that Apple's proprietary DRM laced format will be the standard for the rest of your life.
So you don't own an iPod and have never used iTMS. I guess that makes you the number one person to be commenting about it then. I also trust you don't download music from other music stores which provide songs in Microsoft's proprietary (albeit licensable) DRM encrusted WMA format.
Apple's DRM is pretty damn fair compared to other forms of DRM out there. At least you can burn a CD of your downloaded music. 7 times
Maybe people like convenience, and know that they won't be listening to bloody Coldplay or chav-rap in ten years time.
If you want to argue against iTunes then argue against 128kbps AAC, when Apple could be serving 160kbps - 192kbps AAC. AAC is a better format than MP3 at these bitrates of course - 128kbps AAC being roughly equivalent in quality to 160kbps MP3, but the same can be said of WMA, OGG, etc.
"1 billion suckers"? More like "1 billion people who were able to get music without going out to the store, conveniently, for a small fee, possibly including music many stores don't carry or you can't get anymore". Who is the sucker exactly?
If the DRM bothers you, there's always SharpMusique http://www.nanocrew.net/software/sharpmusique/.
I am getting really sick of these articles that are just some dude's crappy, biased blog. It seems that Slashdot has begun to cater more and more to these sorts of half-rate articles. A great example was that article a few days ago that was just some 15-year-old kid talking about how much Windows sucks in comparison to Linux. For heaven's sake Slashdot, give us some real news.
Whilst it's not wise to take anything for granted, it should be noted that the DRM that has not been cracked offers no new content over formats that have less protection (e.g. CDs, DVDs). With the weakest link in the chain broken, there's less incentive for people to try and crack the stronger links. Once (if?) the chain is whole again, I suspect we'll see an upsurge of people hunting for the next weak link.
Mod story down. Hell I have seen bad posts before, but talk about the extreme example of flamebait.
I could see the Apple blog. Slashdot assholes are still only holding the vast majority of discussions in english. Does slashdot think that everyone else should die because they can't speak engligh?
Sit... Speak.... Shake.... Good Dog!
Doing what I have been doing since my first attempt to copy a record to a cassette tape - this was in 1965/66? I'd pipe the audio output into the line-in jack of my Lafayette (now defunct electronics retailer) cassette recorder, and record away.
The output of any sound card played into another PC will work the same. No complex software encoding/decoding necessary - rip it right to MP3 or the audio format of your choice.
Sound quality is still dependent on the iTunes file, but it will still sound pretty good - even though it is no longer digital.
My 2 pennies..
"Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair" - George Washington
Since when did i *have* to replace my LP?s or my CD's? I must have missed that memo.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
When Vorbis first came out, a large portion of files available online were conversions from 160kbs or [usually] less MP3s, and thusly, everthing sounded like crap. Seriously, the last thing we need is the impending threat of obsoletion to goad everyone into converting their lossy-compression files into a different lossy-compression format with different properties, and brings out the worst in both formats. Don't do it!
--- What
Burn to CD using iTunes.
Rip CD using any program that can do it to any format you want.
You can now play the songs with any player that supports your format of choice.
What's the issue here?
"But I shouldn't have to!"
Of course you shouldn't HAVE to. I shouldn't HAVE to find a no CD crack for a game I PAID for because the Copy Protection blows.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Speaking out of my ass here but, as long as the input data is 'legal', flacc should be able to encode it to something that will decode to the same file (modulo some of the 'envelope' info which flacc may, or may not choose to save verbatim. -- however, there's no guarantee that the encoded file would be smaller than the original -- since flacc is specifically designed to compress audo data, it may not do so well with 'sounds' that aren't very listenable.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I figured i'd do the same, don't read his article (as he hasn't use itunes, or own a ipod) and draw the conclusion that he's a professional moaner.. First digital camera's, now itunes?, c'mon thomas you can't digg or slashdot apple out the equation..
"If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say that the universe aimed rather low
You mispelt '/cluelesslymissingthepoint'.
HTH.
Suckers not flaming one another enough? Need more page views to convince the mother ship you're doing your job of spreading fud, rumours and wild sensationalism? Post some troll bait to get the flames stoked.
Transcoding from AAC to a LOSSLESS codec means NO quality loss. That's why it's called LOSSLESS compression. Just because it's compressed does not mean there are dithering and artifacts! It wouldn't be a lossless codec otherwise.
AAC to AIFF or WAV = PCM (no quality loss)
AAC to Apple Lossless, FLAC, APE, etc = lossless (no quality loss)
AAC to MP3/OGG/whatever = lossy (quality loss)
(I suspect you knew that and just mistyped, but it needed to be said for the tards who think that they can burn an iTunes playlist to CD and re-rip to MP3 and think "voila!")
Not just suckers - poor quality music files as well. Barely adequate. Buy CDs. They aren't obselete, and you pay (with careful shopping) about $2 more than a set of songs matching a CD from iTunes. I can't count how many times the popular song by an artist turned out not to be my favorite on the CD as a whole. If you pick and choose you never make that discovery. And, the CD format has been reported dead for the last ten years, yet - still here... With a full quality lossless format you can convert to any convenient format. Before CDs really do disappear (20 years from now? More?), run those you have to the next lossless and open format (right now that would be wav) and bite the bullet for storage size.
the smell of FUD in the morning.
a man, a plan, a canal, panama
iTunes is pretty horrible if you ask me.. i especially hate it when i'm just trying to install Quicktime, and it comes with this crap.. I don't fucking want it you bastards.. yet another trend these people follow.. just like everyone that buys an iPod to begin with.. yea its nice to have a portable mp3 player.. but its TRENDY to spend $250+ on one every couple months because they come out with a new one.. they come out with these damn video playing ipods.. yet they still don't have a simple FM tuner.. people say that's obsolete too.. but i can almost bet, when you're iPod becomes obsolete, that there will STILL be millions of people listening to FM radio.. it won't be obsolete for a long freakin' time I can guarantee it.. I like have the ability to listen to mp3s, and tune in to the radio if i want.. and no I'm not buying a $5 portable radio.. whats the point?? carry around two devices?? apple's got you all by your trendy balls.. OooOOOO BiG BroTHer Man!!
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
"The other 99.999% of us are just fine with it."
Are you sure about that percentage? Are you saying that 99.999% of the record buying public is fine with iTMS? That doesn't seem likely. Or are you saying 99.999% of all iTMS are completely satisfied with it? That doesn't seem likely either.
I *think* what you're trying to say is that you personally are 99.999% happy with iTMS, which is terrific. I don't think I'm that happy with anything I own or deal with. I suspect you are no stranger to prescription pain killers.
All you high tech junkies seem to forget, there's still media out there, and the equipment to use it, that will never make it to the cutting edge. My current collection still includes SuperBeta & VHS, vinyl (33, 45 & 78), cassette and CD's. And depending on what it is, some of the older stuff sounds better analog than digital.( Plus the fact there's no pesky DRM issues with analog)
"AAC at 128 kbps is at least equivalent in quality to MP3 at 192 kbps"
That'a pretty broad generalization and I suppose you can find individual cases to support this. But the sonic flaws in even 192 kbps compression in pretty much obvious when you plug your iPod into your car stereo, or when you burn it to a CD and listen to it in the living room.
My experience has been that listening to my iPod on headphones doesn't really reveal the flaws that seem obvious when I burn to a CD and listen in my car. You can tell right away that it's not an original CD.
I suppose this is like the days of when there was vinyl LP's and cassettes. Cassettes tended to cost $1 more than the LP, despite the fact that the cassettes sounded a lot worse than the LP. But people bought them because most people listened to them on boom boxes (remember those?) or in their cars, which tended to have poor stereos in those days, so people bought them for convenience -- sound familiar? And we would argue with people that it's just as easy to buy the LP, buy a chromium cassette (remember those?) and then record it to use in your car. It was the same price, but it gave you significantly greater fidelity. But in the end, people still bought cassettes.
But how many people still have a vinyl collection versus keeping their old collections of cassettes? The analogy to CD's and low-bitrate music is very close in my opinion.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Frankly, the worry that a format can become obsolete is absurd, because any format can (and will) eventually be obsoleted. You could never buy any music if that's your primary concern.
The last sentence of the article: "And..... let the Appleheaded fan boys flame comments begin.....5, 4, 3, 2, 1... now."
That's the definition of flamebait, isn't it?
Why, I completely agree with him.
Buy your music at allofmp3.com, then you will pay per album what you pay per song now, and you can get it directly in any format you want, no crap attached. With some luck, you can get them to encode it directly from the CD rip, otherwise it comes from a 320 kbps MP3 or something like that.
I've tried to look up www.lp.org and tried to find the open source project regarding this LP thing. Are you sure you have the right acronym?
Why the hell does something like this get posted to slashdot????
A guy does not like a particular company's products/services, Uuuhhh!!!!! That's _real_ news.
I think it's kind of lame that submissions such as this get accepted, because from the looks of it, he only wants to popularize his blog.
Lame.
I thought that the sound suffered some loss when digitized to a CD. Did I miss any chapter of all this? Anyway, 128kbps MP3 is sufficient for my untrained ears. Specially when you are in a noisy subway wearing earbuds.
So say we all
In the future, the only music format safe from DRM will be LPs and cassetes. It might be a good idea to start collecting them...
*MOVE SIG*---*FOR GREAT JUSTICE*
"Oh, that's gonna replace CDs soon. Guess I'll have to buy the White album again."
- going up to your record player, carefully lifting the previous vinyl from the turntable making sure you don't scratch the record, slipping it back into the inner sleeve, slipping the sleve into the album cover, putting the album cover on the shelf, selecting the album you want to listen to, taking the inner sleeve out, carefully removing the vinyl from the sleeve so you don't scratch it, checking for dust on the vinyl and removing it if present, placing the vinyl on the turntable, pressing whatever buttons you need do, relaxing to enjoy the music for 25 minutes, getting up to turn the record over again, checking for dust again, putting the record back on the turntable again, pressing whatever buttons you need again, relaxing for 25 minutes with music.
- Relaxing for 50 minutes with music.
Beauty 'n' all is a fine thing but don't get confused about simplicity."The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
Why is it that any jerk with website who decides to blog is considered a journalist? This guy is worse than Dvorak. There is nothing to his argument except hypothetical rantings. No facts, no nothing. Hell, in real life, he works in a totally unrelated field. Where is his expertise? Yet, we are posting him without any vetting. He doesn't like DRM, BIG WHOOPIE DOO!!! Half the blokes here don't like DRM. I don't like DRM. But when I see a lot of people around pirating the hell out of music, software, video, OS, whatever, I understand why companies are using it. So Zonk, RTFA
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Yeh, all who bought music on iTunes are suckers! :D
I download the MP3!
I would never buy a music that is DRM-restricted.
Start offering music in Ogg Vorbis and FLAC format drop the price a little, give rebates for buy many songs, etc then I might consider it.
If another format ever comes along to usurp AAC, you can bet that Apple will make some kind of automatic re-encoder to "import" your old music. Even if it is slightly lossly, most people won't care at all. More likely however, is that whatever codec is used next will not be lossy so you will end up with a perfect copy of your AAC, same as if you were converting it to AIFF/WAV.
All you have to do with Itunes store music is to put it in a seperate folder, not the purchased folder, and then burn to CDROM as a music CD and then have Itunes rip that disk and it will take away all the copy restrictions from this newly ripped version.
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
that Thomas Hawk is an idiot.
But 20 years from now you won't be buying music with any expectations at all of being able to move it from one device to another without paying more. You'll be licensing it and maybe it will be inexpensive to play that album in your car, but it'll cost you a few more cents. Play it at work... a few more cents.
Nah. Artists will continue to release material on a physical media. I know many of you people seem to think that this is not the case, but it will be. Musicians (which I am - and not computer generated beats either, actual guitar) love actual media. Of all the people I know who are involved in music in some way (myself included), they buy online, but still walk into the store and enjoy buying the physical disc.
Music has always allowed a place for people to speak their minds, and continues to be so. I believe (similar to another post) that independant labels will grow and artists will release materials online, cutting out the record company entirely, using the web as a tool for distribution to mass audiences, until they have had enough success to release it in a physical format on their own. There will undoubtedly still be the Britneys of that era, there always has been, but I think their business model will look much different from that of a musician.
Records are horrible. If you rip them to cassette you lose quality. Oh, the horror!
-- Cheers!
iTunes, One Billion Suckers Served
Storing mass amounts of media in a proprietary format that cannot be exported completely lossless is a rather silly argument against storing it in that format when the media player is so popular. We currently have that data stored purely by proprietary organizations. From a purely functional standpoint, this negates this ridiculous article. Rather than explain why you think this "issue" could possibly be signifigant in the long term, you just drop random insults in an attempt to sound overbearingly superior. Your post misspelled /troll.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Actually, you have that backwards. Today they use acoustic tricks (like a subwoofer to make you think the bass doesn't sound flat) to make it sound better, while in earlier days pride was taken in sheer accuracy; making the frequency response as wide and flat as possible, with the lowest amount of distortion.
No recording of a musical performance sounds as good as the performance being recorded. The closer you get to the original performance, the more beautiful the sound.
I've heard LPs played on good equipment that you could swear was live, but I've never heard a CD that sounds real.
That said, I've been sampling all my vinyl and cassette to CD, then ripping to MP3 on the PC.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Will the consumer once again have to someday replace their iTunes track just like they had to replace their LP, cassette, and CD only to get their music on their hot new non Apple mp3 phone of the future?
I had to replace my CDs? I play them just fine after I ripped them. I'm sure the next big format after mp3 goes the way of the dodo will rip my CDs just fine too.
The format is obsolete if you obsess about having the latest tech and doing it in such a way that you can flaunt it.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Didn't Jobs say the average users buys 70 songs? $70 dollars is not much of a library. Losing all your Apple DRM'd music would probably represent a spoilage rate on a par with older technolgies where records broke, tapes were eaten or lost, etc. It also blows apart the myth of an iTunes lock-in. In other words if some company built a better iPod without Apple DRM support migration of the majority of iTunes Music Store buyers is feasible. Personally I don't care one way or the other. I preview with the music store, buy CDs, and rip with iTunes as MP3, and load the MP3s to my iPod. I'll be compatible with any car stereo, home stereo, CD/DVD player, or portable player I buy in the forseeable future (and most likely far beyond).
You can easily prevent "pointing a camcorder at a TV/CRT screen to make copies": if the sync rates of the two media (the display's refresh rate and the camcorder's frame rate) are very close, the image you record onto the camcorder will slowly fade in and out with the difference rate in the two media. Of course half the time you'd still see something on the camcorder recording, but it certainly isn't going to be anything you'd want to spend time watching. And it will only be visible about half the total time. How's that for DRM?
~
[1] This was true when I bought mine. It might be bigger now.
[2] Slight simplification, since it doesn't (didn't?) load partial-tracks into cache.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If the question is one of quality, shouldnt we also consider the recording itself. If you want a copy which will never age, you should be buying the rights to 3 minutes of the artists time, so that every time a new microphone emerges, you can demand a more up to date copy.
or you could just enjoy the music
--AlexC
Just because I dont agree with climate change doesnt make me a troll
this guy is a dick. i've bought some of the dual-disc cd's that won't play in my car, on my computer, or in my stereo. they will play on my dvd player.
you want to talk about pain in the ass drm; how about a cd that won't play?
no, apple itunes has replaced cd's for me. i listen to satellite radio in the car, and my ipod at work or on the motorcycle.
99.9% of the under 30 crowd doesn't care what the audiophiles think either. Listening to music isn't a religious experience conducted in a sonic temple of gold low-oxygen oriented-the-right-way-to-not-impede-electron-flow cables.
Sorry... that post should have ended:
for normal people.
Oh, and about the author's brilliant scheme of buying CDs and returning them the next day - if I wanted to get music while screwing the artist out of any money, I would just download the song for free.
And good luck finding a store that will accept returns of opened CDs.
Have you ever wondered How to Take Over
And that is "fortunately"? I would hate to hear any possible downsides to buying into Apple DRM.
No, freedom of choice, not vendor lockin is clearly the way forward.
Oh my god! You are one mind numbingly toasted jerk! It's people like you who have toatally f'ed up the industry and created markets of nothing but opinion. I can't even conceive of the thoughtlessness that people like you bring to the table. You are the very reason for the phrase "There's a sucker born every minute."
Of course, the actual numbers have changed before and may change again due to the lovely-ness that is DRM.
Music companies want to raise prices, apple doesn't -- perhaps a compromise in the number of times you can burn songs or the number of computers you can play them on? Not so far fetched.
Rohin Kasudia said... Technically, the effect of Apple increasing their ipod and itunes products is because people like the service and are willing to pay for it. Look at it from a practical aspect, people want to listen to music, they dont want to worry about transfering the music to a new device in the future 5 to 10 years from now. Thus,when the time comes for a need, then software will come about to accomodate. More so, if they really needed to get around the encording problems, why not just burn a cd with itunes, and then rip it with a rip program to mp3 format. That is easier than going out of your way on third party networks, like bittorrent, trying to find your music, trying to make sure you get all the tracks, and then making sure its good quality. For the average customer, they could care less how much technology you use. They dont have the time, its about efficiency and thats what apple has got. Its streamlined, thus if one, like you, find a better way for you as opposed to other people. It does not necessarily mean that is good for everyone else. - Rohin Kasudia-
Let's see here... your computer won't stop playing the iTunes-purchased files, and you could probably format-shift them without too much difficulty.
It seems like every time Apple announces any sort of accomplishment, shortly afterward Slashdot has a hysterical story about why that accomplishment is bad for consumers.
In 1995 you could buy a music album on CD or on Compact Cassette. If you bought it on cassette you could listen more readily with a car or portable music player, but the cassette would wear out fairly quickly and the music that's on there is not going to make it to another format.
In 2005 you could buy a music album on CD or in iTunes. Again the reason you choose the non-CD format is for portability, but now the portable format is more durable (MPEG-4 AAC backed up to DVD), sounds better, and can be burned to standard audio CD as well. Once it is a CD you can turn it into anything else you want, of course.
There is a legitimate issue in the music industry with people being asked to buy every Led Zeppelin album again and again. However, this issue is not specific to iTunes. In fact, the case could easily be made that iTunes and MP3 are a step forward from past formats because MPEG-4 AAC and MP3 can be turned into CD's and back again.
Concerts.
Spine World
The only reason I would download a song from iTunes music store is a chance at that sweet grand prize. I never could understand why they would use a totally weird formal designed for iPods. Why not stick with good ol mp3s?
Of course standards and fidelity change over time. There's already Music DVDs and SACDs on the market, which would seem to indicate a move away from stereo in favor of surround with discrete channels. I have yet to buy any of the new equipment. I've yet to see anyone using MP3Pro, or MP3Surround. In fact, the only major change I've seen in digital audio in the last 6 years or so (when I first got started with MP3's) is a shift from 128kbps encoding to 192kbps or high bitrate VBRs being more common on the P2P networks. I've also seen some Flac stuff floating around, but I've yet to encounter any Oggs. Perhaps that illustrates my lack of sophistication. Perhaps it's just that MP3 is common and easy to understand and in almost all cases provides an acceptably good sounding track that anyone with a computer is able to make use of.
I've downloaded a total of 7 songs from iTunes, using free download promo coupons. When my MP3 drive went kaput a couple weeks ago, I checked to see if I could re-download the stuff I'd gotten from iTunes. The standard canned answer was "no," but when I explained to them (again) what had happened, they were kind enough to re-queue my purchased music so that I could get it again. eMusic, on the other hand, doesn't even carry any of the 200-ish songs that I'd gotten from them, so those are lost to memory now. The moral of this story is that Apple provides good customer support, even for someone like me who only spent $7 in coupon bucks with them. The fact that their music is AAC with DRM is a problem easily solved with a right-click using their own software (convert to MP3). There's a reason they hit a billion downloads, and I don't think it's just marketing. Their product is convenient, fairly priced and backed up by decent support.
I think the real issue is how much music out there has an expiration date that is inferior to that of their encoding.
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
One is not fortunate enough to experience that effect that with CDs.
.:bleaked
Come now, sillies! Just burn your iTunes tracks, delete them, and import them back into iTunes as mp3s. Its worth the CD-R to guaruntee you'll have playable music well into the future. This is Slashdot! You're supposed to be geeks; hackers! This should be a mute point. ;)
I, for one, am glad that audio equipment manufacturers finally realized that their product is based on solid engineering and not some ephemeral "art". If I want "sweetened" or "beautiful" sound, I'll EQ it myself, TYVM.
As for understanding what's going on with the various pieces of equipment, well, that's your own fault for buying equipment that you don't understand and then refusing to gain an understanding of that equipment. There are 5 basic types of equipment:
1) Input devices
Turntables, cassette decks, DAT decks, ADATs, CD players, DVD players, etc. are all just media readers. Microphones also fit into this category.
2) Mixers
This category includes everything from the highest of high-end studio mixing consoles, down to the ordinary, everyday volume knob. Most people are most familiar with home A/V receivers these days, and they fit here too.
3) Processors
This is where you find equalizers, effects processors, etc. This is where the "sweetening" should happen. Without exceptions. A mixer takes an accurate signal and pipes it through a processor to get a "warm" or "sweet" or "tinny" or "echoey" or "harsh" or any other kind of sound. Before it gets to this device/stage, the sound should be accurate.
4) Recorders
These are things like tape decks, DATs, ADATs, CD and DVD burners, hard drives, etc. They receive a signal and store it for later playback.
5) Output devices
This is everything from the amplifier to the speakers. It receives a signal and converts it to pressure waves compatible with human ears.
Your statement leads me to believe that you're an "audiophile" in the worst sense of the word, or at least someone who aspires to be. LP's aren't simple to use (you have to line up the needle with the groove manually!). They have a very inaccurate sound due to a pathetic dynamic range, and to compensate for that, most recording engineers would apply an EQ profile during mastering that would compensate for the ass-tastic capabilities of the medium. If you want the same sound using more modern media, you'll just have to add the EQ yourself.
Don't worry about it - standard aac ripping (even with iTunes) is an unprotected MPEG-4 rip. What you get from the music store is an m4p(I believe that's the extension used) - which indicates that it has the DRM encapsulation. MPEG-4 isn't going anywhere, your current collection should be as safe as the next music format.
(And for many reasons, which I will expand upon if anyone shows interest, I would offer an argument that it is safer than ogg and absolutely safer than wma. MP3 would be safer, but would not sound quite as good.)
Seems like you could just mount the laser on a pintle, then it would shake when...
oh, wait... Digital, d'oh.
I don't think that's a major exception. $1000 receivers are the norm for mid-range home theaters and $300-$400 per speaker isn't outrageous for something that actually sounds good. It's not like we're talking $10K electronics here. I think most all of my friends have home theater systems whose stereo sound component probably costs in the $1.5 to $2.5K range. We're not rich, just people who really love this stuff.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
"The SOLUTION is to refuse to buy DRM'd files in the first place. If everyone would friggin' wise up and do just that, Digitally Restricted Media (DRM) would be history. But they've convinced the world that a little DRM is OK and your comments show that you've bought right into that too. It's just a little DRM now. And then a little more and a little more and a little more until 20 years from now, you'll look back on your comment and wonder how on earth transporting media that you purchased to another format or another player was so easy and FREE those 20 years ago."
Ok. Show me the online music store where I can download legal songs -- legal in the sense that the RIAA isn't throwing a hissy fit over it -- at a decent (>=128kbps) bitrate, for $0.99 or less per song. It also needs to have a good selection, so nothing like some tiny independant label that sells only their own library. If a friend tells me I need to hear a song, I want to have a reasonably good chance of finding it. Point me to that store, and I will begin using it immediately, recommend it to everyone I know, and no more iTMS for me.
Oh, I'm sorry, it doesn't exist? Well then that's just tough noogies for you, ain't it? Apple's DRM is the least restrictive I have seen in any music service. It Just Works, and continues to do so until you try to do something that is blatantly wrong; like buying an album in iTMS, buying a cheap 100-CD spindle at your tech store of choice, burning 100 copies of that album, and giving them away or selling them. Nope, you can only do that 7 times.
I don't know if you've ever had any training in rhetoric, but I think everyone can safely assume that you haven't. Rhetoric 101 makes it pretty clear that a slippery slope argument is a BAD argument. Your argument is a typical slippery slope argument. Come up with a better way to argue why you're right, the rest of the world is wrong, and should change, and I might listen.
Oh, and about the author's brilliant scheme of buying CDs and returning them the next day ...wouldn't work. I can't think of any store that will accept a new CD for anywhere close to full price after it's been opened. The best you can do is sell it as "used", and you'll be lucky to get a fourth of what you originally paid.
You don't even have to go down to the analog hole level to get your music out of iTunes format.
Not only that, but Apple recommends making Audio CD backups of your music.
AND they ran an ad campaign that told you all you needed to know about removing the DRM from your iTunes music.
Man, I wish we could mod articles.
The DRM is exactly what the Music Industry specified.
They really specified these obvious holes?
iTMS sends you the song unencrypted (hole one).
iTunes encrypts it and stores it on disk.
iTunes lets you burn the music to CD at full AAC quality (hole two).
iTunes happily rips a CD in AAC or MP3 format.
I thought "indie" was short for "independent", not "industry".
Live and learn.
---
If you want an explanation for why they're not taking advantage of a few people who don't demand DRM: using the same policy across all tracks is one of the levers they use against the folks in the industry that want to tighten the scres.
To say that a format may be obsolete in the future means nothing because this is true of all formats. However the audio format that Apple uses in the iTunes Music Store is a) less likely to be obsolete than competing formats, b) can easily be converted to plain audio CD just by burning the playlist to a CD in iTunes. That is so far from a Microsoft-style vendor lock-in that it's crazy to knock it. Not just crazy, it's suspicious crazy. Like spreading FUD crazy.
If you compare iTunes MPEG-4 to the previous portable formats (MP3, Compact Cassette, 8-Track) then iTunes comes out looking better in every way. Hence the success. On the other hand, Microsoft has not shipped anything to do with music that is better than plain-Jane MP3. Where's the beef?
If buying songs off iTunes is a bad idea, buying ANY kind of media is a bad idea, doesn't matter what format. How am I supposed to watch all the VHS movies I have? What happens when CD's go out of style? This is just stupid, you can't knock iTunes' MP3s without making the same arguement about all media.
You know it's possible to make exact digital copies of those backups, right? As far as copies for personal use, you get a lot more than you did in the days of vinyl or cassette. With those you couldn't even make a single accurate copy.
The only reason why any particular DRM instance will not get cracked is there is no economic incentive to do so. It is not a question of being good enough technologically--it is a question whether it is worth it for the people involved to circumvent the DRM. If the DRM is relatively non-intrusive, if the DRMed files are available for a reasonable price/quality ratio, and/or if there are easier DRM schemes out there (as someone else noted), then perhaps no one will bother cracking it because it's not worth the effort to do so. It's economics, not technological considerations, that will make a DRM scheme "uncrackable". Technologically, all DRM schemes can be feasibly cracked if someone is willing to put in the effort, but it may not be worth a reverse engineer's time and money to make it happen.
The more intrusive you make the DRM scheme (which lowers its value from the point of view of the consumer who needs to put up with it), the more expensively you price the DRM files (which are already less valuable to the consumer because of the restrictions that are being imposed), all of these give incentive for people to crack DRM. I'm sure there is a magic point of pricing and restrictions that the majority of people will be willing to accept. Only trouble is, the music industry seems to have a hard time believing this simple fact of economics, because it means that one of their most cherished beliefs: that they have absolute control of their music, is no longer true.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Bullshit! I'll bet you could suck a golf ball through a garden hose.
If you want to be a jerk, and fill the pockets of some Russian crooks, rather than the people who actually entertain you, go right ahead and use AllOfMP3.
And if you consider yourself a "fan" of an artist, it's a real slap in their face to screw them over this way.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
if I wanted to get music while screwing the artist out of any money...then buy it from iTunes
http://www.downhillbattle.org/itunes/
Erm, i don't mean to sound pedantic, though that's the main reason most people seem to post to /., but 85% of what? You do know that the JPEG compression scale should not be expressed as a percentage, it gives some people that horrible misconception that an image saved in JPEG format at a quality setting of 100, with chroma subsampling set to 2x2,1x1,1x1, contains 100% of the detail from the original image.
"The SOLUTION is to refuse to buy DRM'd files in the first place. If everyone would friggin' wise up and do just that, Digitally Restricted Media (DRM) would be history."
Yeah, right. With 98% of consumers, there isn't even a thought about DRM. If some kid wants the new Britney Spears single, and it's only available in a DRM crippled format, they will utilize that crippled DRM format.
The ignorance and complicity of the mass market is precisely why DRM will succeed. Most people don't give a crap what format their music is in, or if they have to install a spyware enabled plugin to listen to it.
Ok i am not a fan of any format that is controled by one specific group like apple's itune. buying something that is not supported by other companies is frankly waste of money to begin with. coming back to the original article couldnt be more stupid. The assumption is based on one killer phone in the future that will be basically a portable entertainment station and curiously this person is thinking that no other company will make another version of this phone. can anyone be more stupid than that. Now which idiot is going to make a ultra super phone which will not support "one billion suckers".And if an idiot,lets say sony for the sake of argument, comes up with this phone,Panasonic will have them in dinner with a phone that will support itune and mp3. its just plain stupid to think of "what if" since we already know that there are products in the market that play both formats and more.
Dupe, flamebait. Why do you publish this crap.
Do you honestly believe something will go obsolete while people are willing to pay for it? LMFAO.
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
Mastering a record really makes it sound better. A good mastering engineer really is worth it. I get a lot of demos sent to me, and almost always you can tell who recorded them at home and who worked with an engineer. Part of it is having someone with good ears listen to something besides yourself.
"The quality of the average mp3 was actually much higher several years ago when only people that really knew what they were doing were making them. "
;p
it pisses the hell outta me! i was around pre-napster and got my stuff through ftp's, usenet, whatever... as soon as napster came out and got popular, it ruined everything. to the unwashed masses, a 96kbit-encoded mp3 was fine. to the rest of us, it was like being stabbed in the ear drum with hot needles. it's gotten even worse now. have you noticed now that some of these newer so-called release groups release really shitty albums on these torrent sites?? wtf is up with that? this shit is frustrating.... anyone wanna trade leech ftp accounts?
Your saying that it is ok for apple to sell people crap because you don't care about it being crap. It's as if you own apple stock. Anyone would agree that if someone sold you something inferior while pretending that it isn't you deserve to get your money back or get what you paid for. In the end don't let apple make you into a pushover. PLEASE DON'T BE A PUSHOVER!
I know what you mean. One day you're thinking "Oh, I'll just download one little song from iTunes." Before you know it, Steve Jobs breaks into your house, kills your puppy and rapes your wife. DRM is EVIL, I tells ya.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Jeebus H. Cribbs! Just d/l and use Godfather for formatting your MP3 files!
Goddamned kids! Get off my lawn!
I'd recommend that you take a look at SharePod.
When's it coming out? I want it now! Where do I pay? How about more ringtones? And a subwoofer with surround sound!
---Secular kittenism may be right for you.
. . . how about an iMac and 5 iPods with docks and AC adaptors.
the good news: 9 of his friends are getting free iPods
the bad news: they all need to spend $60 dollars on accessories that should be included!
http://zenwaves.textamerica.com/
Sure, I'll explain as you're having trouble.
The article was about the problem of data that is linked to a particular manufacturer's support/DRM etc. This is a form of vendor lock-in, and the guy was pointing out that most people's music collections have a very long life - i.e. their lifetime, often as not.
You respond with an inappropriate analogy about hard drives. It was stupid and missed the point because nobody's data is locked to the hard drive. It just stores bits. You can copy that data to another hard drive as much as you like, or a USB drive, various flash memory technology, optical media, or whatever is invented in the future. There is competition in the storage market - your claim is basically that one day all manufacturers might stop manufacturing standard storage devices. Compared to the likelihood of Apple's DRM not being available on all commonly used OSs (and right now it isn't, and Apple threatens to sue anyone who tries to change this), the contingency seems remote.
You said "In 20 years nobody will be able to read them!", but it's the data that is important, and you will be able to read that data (because if it's important, you will have transferred it to the storage medium du jour). Of course, even though you have the data, that might not be any use to you if it's DRM locked, and e.g. you just decided to switch to Linux or some other OS not supported by Apple's DRM solution. That's the problem; not that technology evolves.
Sorry, I dropped an 's'. You dropped grammar though.
Why would you burn and rip a CD 10 times? Why not just do it once in a lossless format?
It would have been more accurate for you to challenge him to save a JPEG at 85% quality, then open the saved copy and save it as a PNG.
Oh, wait... you weren't trying to be helpful or factual. You were just trying to bash iTunes. Sorry. I missed you intention there at first.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
It is simple, in the way washing the dishes is simple. Yes there's maintenance & care involved, but there's also a sense that music is valuable & worth taking care of. How many of us have 40 gigs of music, and don't even know half of what's in there? I do. Digital music has become almost valueless in a sense, with the ease of perfect duplication & lack of physical media.
As for your other points, no matter what format you use, you still have to select what you listen to. And come on, how hard is it to pick up an LP and put it on the turntable? Takes about 5 seconds longer than finding an album in itunes. Plus you get to see & hold the cover art, & you might actually get involved in reading something--liner notes!
In general I feel more involved in the music, rather than just having it be a background activity. Maybe I'm just retro-chic, but at least I'm chic somehow, for once...
Jesus Christ, man. I never said I was an audiophile. I said I've been enjoying LPs lately. Sure, I could delve into the inner workings of CDs, and in fact I have a pretty good intellectual understanding of how PCM audio works (though the SACD tech still baffles me). But I have a fairly complete intuitive understanding of how a vibrating needle converts to voltage, is amplified, and becomes sound waves at my speakers. I don't have to read engineering dissertations to understand it.
And as for your assertion that before processors the sound should be "accurate," don't forget that any recording engineer is using preamps, compressors, and often even EQ just in tracking the original sound. What does "accurate" mean in that context? The engineer is trying to get the solo clarinet, for instance, to sound present, full, and warm. There's yards of processing equipment invoked to do that, and often this comes well before the signal ever gets to its recording medium. Any good engineer knows how to use this stuff beautifully and transparently, but it's definitely a couple of steps from "accurate."
By the way, I'm a musician & recording artist. Recently I was working in a really nice studio, which has a beautiful, fully analog setup (2" tape, 16 or 24 track, 30ips), as well as a very high-end ProTools setup (24bit/192kHz, 64 channels, nice A-D/D-A converters), plus really really nice preamps, compressors, everything. We were doing everything analog. We decided we wanted to loop a section, so we bounced the track from 2" tape to ProTools, did the loop, and synced it to tape. We then did a blind A-B comparison of the original analog & the version that had been through ProTools (of course with the levels matched etc.). Listening to the all-analog version, there was a spacious sound, as if the singer were outside singing to the hills. As soon as the engineer switched to the ProTools version, it sounded like the singer had been placed in a box. I never would have noticed it alone, but with the A-B comparison it was obvious that some of the beauty had, in fact, been lost in the digital conversion, even with some of the highest grade digital equipment available.
I recognize that this is only marginally relevant to the discussion of LP vs. CD/MP3, since the resolution of an LP is far less than 2" tape, and the resolution of CD (and moreso MP3) is less than a high-end digital studio rig. But I did find it fascinating. Enough to get me to start listening to LPs again;)
Also incidentally, my stereo's preamp/power amp (an old NAD 7020, fairly well regarded during the heyday of analog gear) has two phono preamp inputs, one "pure" ("LAB IN", intended for precision & measuring), and one with a little (very little, by looking at the schematics) sweetening circuitry. I'd always used the LAB input until recently, when I decided to try the other one. I found the modified sound to be pleasanter to listen to, and I appreciated the subtle tweak offered by the engineers who designed it. That's what I was referring to when I said that engineers used to focus on beauty slightly more that accuracy. It was a subtle adjustment, easily bypassed, and I thought they made a good choice. A far cry from adding mega-bass to mask crappy equipment.
Thanks.
Yes! :-p
vi ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music\ Library.xml
...
Now why not lookup and compare your detailed meta-data that Apple has left out there easy for you to read and make a utility to compare that with your Linux box archive of tunes with an eventual weed out routine?
Easy?
No.
But Forbes Magazine has a whole article regarding this kind of dilemma, our bits being so transient and so bulky.
Keeping Our Bits About Us - Forbes.com
You just used your high-powered digital camera to take wonderful pictures of your kids romping at the petting zoo. But unless you're both careful and lucky,
www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/0227/060.html
That should tell you volumes that your current challenge is a mere tip of the iceberg for sure!
http://www.aisnota.com/slashdot/ Welcome to Logic and the Future
You said "In 20 years nobody will be able to read them!", but it's the data that is important, and you will be able to read that data (because if it's important, you will have transferred it to the storage medium du jour).
As with recordings, there will be a loss of data in the transition. You just notice more in recordings. At this point, I can recognize someone who doesn't make backups.
I still see this whole article as BS and you defending your ego. The original recordings are held in non-proprietary forms by proprietary entities. THE MUSIC (as data) IS SAFE REGARDLESS OF THE FORMAT PPL PURCHASE OR STORE IT IN. You'll be able to purchase it again, faithfully from your neighborhood RIAA. By accepting DRM you accept you aren't getting a lossless exportable format. If you don't like it, clouding the issue with practical eventualities that affect ANY FORMAT, isn't helping. The author didn't "Point Out" anything. He's an anti-DRM cheerleader who's pissed a massive company is making money in a way he disapproves of. For understanding such a technical issue, you KNOW he's a cheerleader when he acts like iTunes are FOREVER iTunes. Gimme a break. In other news I can play CDs in my DVD burner or as images off my HD.
Here is the crux of your defensiveness and my sarcasm. The article is saying SURPRISE, when it should be a non-surprise and treated as such. Maybe you can't read your current music format in 10 years as easily as now...I dont expect the same of 3.5s, or even IDE drives. You can still export DRM music from a number of vectors while a failed harddrive has a similar characteristic. You end up with data loss in both cases. That's called a correct analogy, not an incorrect comparison. Yes there is a vast difference between storage media and storage formats...perhaps you just misunderstood or didn't realize there was another way to interpret my OP.
Looking at it again, where is this article anything more than an indirect attack on DRM from a technical standpoint when there's NOTHING TECHNICALLY DEFICIENT in DRM protected music?
You are basically betting that Apple's proprietary DRM laced format will be the standard for the rest of your life.
I'm not trying to teach you anything, other than you have some sort of personal disorder that causes you to attack a comment on an article you didn't write about a topic you don't have anything to add to. The majority of responses are "I just rip them", because the complaints are completely baseless there isn't much to add.
P.S.
My fans don't mind my grammar, they mind it when I post sober.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
I had a friend who did this programmatically a hundred times using libJPEG, and after the first compression, the image wasn't degraded at all. Perhaps if you tried different quality rates it would make a difference.
Qxe4
No format has a guaranteed lifespan. You're not suggesting that innovation and development should cease, are you?
Any discussion on the long-term viability of a media format will be full of speculation, but he're my take on it.
There will likely come a day when I can cram 10 times the data into a music player of the same size as what I have today, and at no additional cost. At that point, I could convert all my iTMS purchases to a lossless, DRM-free encoding without sacrificing any audio quality. My investment will be preserved indefinitely, as it can be re-encoded to whatever lossless format my next player might support.
There are both official (burn CD) and unofficial (Audio Hijack, etc.) ways to create your lossless recording, and Apple goes so far as to encourage the former for the very sake of long-term backup. I would certainly have been more reluctant to buy tracks from iTMS were this not the case, but I really can't see this becoming a problem for me a decade from now.
For example:
Huh? When I copy data from disk to disk, there will be bitrot? How often does that happen?
The data from my desktop and laptop are automatically backed up to a NAS device every night. My laptop system disk has been backed up with Ghost to the NAS. My desktop system disk is backed up every night with Ghost, also to the NAS. My parents' PCs operate on a mutual backup scheme for the data, and I have Ghost images of the system drives.
Your move.
I can't work out if that's something you're saying, or something you think I said. If the latter, then I didn't. If the former, then I don't get it, because I don't use Apple DRM.
I call shenanigans. I did have something to add, which was that your comment didn't make sense, and that you'd missed the point of Thomas' article. I didn't realise I needed permission to post on slashdot.
You make out that the article author is saying "Surprise!" and that it isn't a surprise at all. Well, I can pretty much guarantee you that the vast majority of people who buy music from iTMS don't realise the full ramifications of DRM that the author was pointing out. Slashdot posters are not a representative sample of the population. (And even burning the music to CD and ripping it again just seems dumb - why not buy the CD and make life easier, without the drop in quality?)
Most people who use computers don't understand most of this stuff. With your snide but incorrect comments about backups above, you'd think you realise this. The standard response to losing all the music you've ever bought from iTMS is "you should have backed it up". While I back up my data, most people don't. Thomas is talking about the average user of iTMS, not technically minded people.
Suddenly everything becomes clear.
What I find irritating about these rants against Apple and iTunes are several things that people consistently overlook.
First, nobody put a gun to your head and told you to sell your vinyl collection, your CD player, or your Macintosh G4 with iTunes. iTunes isn't suddenly going to implode one day on your machine, taking all of your precious copies of Britney Spears latest crap down in flames with it.
Second, nobody complained that the Sony PCM-F1 signaled the instantaneous death of all analog formats. Know why? Because technology cycles take a very long time to reach maturity. Case in point: Nyquist theorem laid out the specs for digital recording in the early 20th century. Philips and Sony developed optical disk technology in 1978. CD's were first marketed in 1982. This year now makes it TWENTY years since the first million-selling compact disk ("Brothers in Arms" by Dire Straits). Did people suddenly lose all their music libraries? No. In fact, people are still buying CD's, despite what RIAA wants you to believe.
The point here is that there's always a phase out period. The only ones who seem to repeatedly forget this historical fact are the morons who have that compulsion to go out and buy the latest and greatest technology... blaming the manufacturers, and not their own perverse obsession with bragging rights to ownership of new gadgetry, for this conundrum of changing formats, etc. And it makes you wonder... What compelled you to buy the previous technology if not your willingness to succumb to the marketing efforts of the new technology's manufacturing predecessor?
Third... and perhaps most importantly: I have several recorded tracks I made. I guarantee you there isn't a single person in the universe complaining that I've abandoned CD's entirely and will only release my music on 24-bit PCM DVD Audio and Dolby Digital 5.1 surround from here on out. Know why? Because they don't know I exist.
The major recording companies control their catalog's available formats... Nobody will complain about my music not being on CD, but they'd complain if it were Britney Spears, Foo Fighters, or many other groups they've heard of. That you've heard of any group is a function of their marketing presence, whether it was done by the record label, or, as in the case of Ani DiFranco, by the artist. Either way, the sheer fact that you've heard of them and want to buy their stuff is a consequence of the same industry model that controls distribution options.
I'm not saying, "Be happy with what they give you." Incidentally, I'm saying the opposite... I'm saying they don't owe you a damned thing. They're not in this business to be altruistic. They're in it to make money. I know you know that... it's obvious. I just think sometimes people need to be reminded of it. Either you can buy what they're offering, or not. It's the "or not" that they respond to. No amount of fist-waving is going to get them to do things differently if you STILL BUY THEIR PRODUCT.
I'm not advocating piracy, either. All piracy does is give them cause to send lawyers, instead of get innovative... with, ironically, the exception of Apple. They weren't the only company to experiment with internet music distribution models... but they were perhaps the first to look at internet distribution in a radically different manner. Rather than seeing piracy as an illegal, unviable enemy, they chose to view it as a competitor.
By doing so, Apple realized they'd have to develop premiums... things outside of just the music alone that would give people a reason to pay versus not pay. So, they developed a user-friendly interface with search and sample capabilities, higher fidelity formats (whoever complains about a service not offering lower-fidelity MP3's has my sincerest, most heartfelt outburst of hysterical laughter), and set out to negotiate with labels large and small to acquire one of the largest libraries available... and, well, their volume output exceeds the combined distribution of all the ma
You are basically betting that Apple's proprietary DRM laced format will be the standard for the rest of your life
Again, why do you continue to think ppl are attacking you? THAT'S FROM THE ARTICLE YOU FAILED TO READ or more likely, comprehend.
Huh? When I copy data from disk to disk, there will be bitrot?
Again, you can claim anything you like about making backups. You long ago betrayed a lack of credibility. Arguing for arguing's sake is not contributing. Thx for playing.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Very eloquently put, you guys are all so smart...
YOW! Now THATS what i'm talking about...thats exactly what I mweant when I said, Jeezus whatever happened to just putting on a record...you guys are so smart. Im not into all the tech stuff, all I know is that I have an 80 gig hard drive stuffed with all these weired mp3,s wmv. ss bla h blah jesus i dont know what. yea I have the 150$ Creative sound card, the klipsh speakers on my computer and all that, and it is nice to be able to just "click" Led Zeppelin, sort by name and double click on "Rock and Roll" and hear john Bonham whacking those high hats...but honestly, It is just not the same. I also have a gigantic box of about 300 LP's (vinal) disks in the closet that I havent listened to for yeras. (not 1 scratch in the whole collection) im very proud of that fact, NOT 1!. I long...LONG... for the good ol days of looking at the record collection on the shelf, finding the name of the album...yes ALBUM not "file" of what I want hmmmm.....L L L oh there it is, Led Zeppelin, pulling that big satisfying album off the shelf, running my hand over the cover art, opening it up and seing the big glorious lyrics to Stairway to Heaven on the inside with the hermit standing there, slowly sliding my audiofile plastic sleeve anti static cover (jesus I cant even remember the name of that company anymore, any 1? the company that used to make all those extra goodies for albums?) help me out...what was that name..?) that I paid extra for, carefully slipping out that beautiful vinal disk with all those grooves, zapping it with my antistatic peizo electric gun, laying it on my precious $500 Thorens turntable, clamping the disk down to my 9 pound platter, running the velvet record cleaner over the record, making sure its nice and clean...putting that 149$ needle onto that groove, cranking up my SAE pre-amplifyer, and hearing my handmade Vandersteen, floor standing speakers, POP when the needle settles into the groove, hearing those little sshhee sheee sheeee souds as the music suddenly burst into life. John Bonham whackin those high hats...dushhh dush dush dushhh dushhh dush dush dush dushhh dushhhh ba ba ba ba ba...then JP on guitar rippin out that rifff....and knowing that in 20 minutes you had to flip to side B, which was a whole different tone and vibe and listening experience then side A.... aaaaa listening to music was a ritual, there was a processs...the albums where quircky and fragile and beautiful and CHEAP $5.99 at the local TSS store...and the music, the songs, the tracks had a flow, a sequence, it was a journey...side 2, Misty Mountain Hop...not sorting titles by name, or double clicking Led Zeppelin to get a list in alphabetical order of A to Z...sigh...im so depressed...I wis I had my old stereo so I could put on a record of Tales from Topographic Oceans...oh wait, its in the windows player under 'Y' for Yes...let me turn my computer on...its not the same... oh, and for those of you that dont know any better, vinal records SOUND BETTER than digital files, if you think i'm wrong, then you just dont know what your talking about... now excuse me, but I have to go defrag my F drive... sigh....