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Mandriva Linux to Offer Online Music Service
dysfirkin writes "Mandriva 2006 is to be the first Linux distro to offer built in online music service. The service will compete with the likes of emusic.com for the music business of Linux users. I have not used Mindawn before, but the service is offered in Ogg Vorbis and FLAC."
cool
and annoying auto playing video with sound!
Doesn't mention how much this will cost. I'm guessing from the text of the article that this is a pay-per-song service rather than a subscription model, but it doesn't explicitly say.
Interesting that it will support Linux, Windows and OS X - is this the only music service that can claim this kind of compatibility?
MacBook Pro. Worst name since the Bicycle
Given that they likely won't use DRM with their downloads (after all, a Linux distro doing DRM would be quickly abandoned by many of its users and be excommunicated by RMS)... that would seem to mean that the major labels would not allow their songs to be put on it, counting out the majority of popular music today.
Shame.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Another $1/song service with absolutely no selection... It would be cool that they used ogg if I were ever disposed to use it.
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson
Maybe Apple will finally decide to port iTunes to Linux if they see that there's a market.
There are already similar, browser based services that allow you to download content in Ogg or MP3. The biggest reason they're not massively popular is the same reason this won't be - no 'big name' labels.
What nifty freebies will Mindawn be giving away to the lucky recipient of their billionth download?
Once again, DRM free - but no bands you've ever heard of.
I already buy CDs from my local bands (that nobody else has heard of). I just don't understand how this marketing works. In fact, I think it wont.
Crappy interface too.
TFA tries to put this up as a competing service to iTunes/Napster, but there's a pretty large gaping hole there.....content. While it looks like an interesting service, especially for people who like unsigned/indy type releases, that's not really competing with the other services. Their customers are buying mainly releases from "mainstream" sources (the big record companies). Saying that this is serious competition to iTunes is more a delusion of grandeur than a realistic statement.
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
I'm all for supporting open source and free software, but without MP3 support nobody is going to use this.
As far as being multi-platform, how hard would it be to make a service like this web-based?
Edith Piaf, Charles Aznavour, and many others. But uneducated people like you obviously listen white power garbage only.
I have basically stopped buying music for some time. It seems that noone wants to sell a reasonable selection of mp3/ogg music.
CD's are not practical. DRM music has no value to me.
emusic is pay-monthly. I just want to buy a few songs now and then.
The only places to find mp3/ogg's to buy with a reasonably selection are Russian sites. But I don't quite trust my credit card floating around there.
http://www.mindawn.com/news/34?PHPSESSID=109de8547 5f3274709a8bd0cb78e05d0
I'll be able to play whatever I buy in my iaudio x5 http://eng.iaudio.com/ in ogg / flag - cool
"Given that they likely won't use DRM with their downloads (after all, a Linux distro doing DRM would be quickly abandoned by many of its users and be excommunicated by RMS)... that would seem to mean that the major labels would not allow their songs to be put on it, counting out the majority of popular music today." So then they'd have to rely on selling music from among the rest of million os musicians on the planet? That's a positive in my book. Using the FLAC format means they could sell classical music, something we classical lovers hadn't considered before, since any other format previously available sucked for such hi-end purposes. Mandriva, that's a brilliant move.
>I have basically stopped buying music for some time. It seems that noone wants to sell a reasonable selection of mp3/ogg music.
You are so correct.
>CD's are not practical. DRM music has no value to me.
I still buy CD's, but the local stores are carrying less and less selection. And you are not alone in people seeing DRM music as having no value.
>The only places to find mp3/ogg's to buy with a reasonably selection are Russian sites. But I don't quite trust my credit card floating around there.
Yep- they are doing it the "right" way, too bad it is illegal because they are essentially taking money for stolen music. If there were a legal site doing what allofmp3 was doing, my wallet would start draining...
Try allofmp3.com. Music costs just $.02 per megabyte. They have all big name labels, even metallica and the beatles, and the offer the songs in ogg,mp3,etc formats.
Some of you miss the point completely. Mandriva isn't after iTunes neck. It's trying to carve a niche market: That of Linux users. They add the other clients just to better their chances of profit. And the music offering not being the popular bands is no problem at all: Linux users aren't looking for gangsta rap, they have a brain, and use it.
It's also non-DRM music from independent artists.
Fortunately, on allofmp3.com you can pay with PayPal; hence you're only giving them $10 at a time, they never see your card details. Plus, that $10 usually ends up giving you more than $10 worth of music.
Isn't Mindawn already "built in" to every OS with a browser? How are they going to "integrate" it into Mandriva? Put a bookmark to mindawn.com on the desktop?
Of all the things I'd like to see in Mandriva, this isn't it. I'd like to see them automate and decentralize the system for obtaining new and update packages. Nothing irritates or wastes my time more than having to manually resolve the urpmi BS every other week. I'm also not interested in hearing any jawflapping from linux fans about how it's just a couple of lines. They are the most annoying thing about the OS and, as an average joe home user, the very first reason I would look to some other OS. ...the lines, not the users.
Maybe you want to visit www.finetunes.de. It's german-based but it provides an english frontend. Payment is handled through Firstgate.
-DBS
Sigs suck!
Althought I couldn't get the source to compile (then again I didn't try very hard) the prebuilt binary works fine for me on Gentoo with only one minor bit of trickery. The binary is dynamically linked against libFLAC.so.6 I had to create a link to libFLAC.so.7 to fool it but other that that I had no problems getting online and downloading a demo file.
A service nobody will use. I give it a year tops.
Besides, Linux is the "indy platform" of the computer desktop world.
Linux is "counterculture" not "indy". Indy is pro-business, it just wants those business to be smaller, more creative, and more responsive to the audience. A more decentralised capitalistic system.
Hey, thats a plus..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That would be because they're the incumbent monopoly in the desktop operating system market. Much as we (Mandriva) would like to be, we're not.
Mandrake starting a music service is harmful because all the artists who want to distribute without DRM have to sign up for yet another service if they want Mandrake's customers to easily see their music. If Mandrake really cared about promoting online music distribution in a way that is acceptable to their customers they would partner with one of the existing services. They could exchange free promotion of the service for a commitment by the service provider not to change the terms of the service. Unfortunately, that sort of press release would produce less investor interest than this one.
Having said that, I find the hypocrisy of certain slashdot reader to be quite entertaining.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
And if you must have major label stuff, Real Rhapsody has a beta version FireFox plugin that allows you to use the entire jukebox service. Given, you can't download and keep it, but at least you can listen to the service, and Real is doing something for us Linux users.
If there's no God, Why do people keep asking Him to bless and damn everything?
Not at all, the music is aquired legally in the country the site is hosted in. Therefore in the US it is legal to purchase their music once aquired. If I had to break the encryption on a movie to play it on other players and allow second hand sale in Russia, did you think the disc would magically become illegal when I entered the US? Of course not, the laws of the country I was in at the time prevail. I can even sell my now unencrypted disc in the US since second hand sales are legal here, just not breaking the encryption (which I did in Russia).
Go to Amsterdam and smoke some hash, you won't be arrested when you step back on american soil for doing so.
The facts are simple: Allofmp3.com does not produce any music themselves, they sell what others produce. They have no contract from the producers and rights holders. This alone makes any "license" authorizing their activities very dubious. Regular license holders have some kind of contract, typically brokered by the local equivalent of the RIAA.
Has any of you guys ever looked at the legal situation in Russia? Russias legal system is a joke, and the laws dealing with modern technology (anything invented after 1900) are ridiculous.
I live in Europe, and there are still countries in the former eastern block where you can buy a stolen car quite openly, and the police does not care. Does that make a car theft "legal"?
Think again, comrade!
Many banks allow you to generate one time use CC numbers. I know MBNA does. I wouldn't trust 'em with my real card either.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
...about the merits of Ogg Vorbis, but I feel that the time to do so has finally come. Many of the unwashed audio heathens have partaken of the lesser formats like MP3, WMA, AAC, WAV and the like. And they have all formed their own, oft incorrect, opinions on these formats. First I will start by dispelling some common myths:
1. MP3 is a LOSSY format. It doesn't matter WHAT bitrate you encode at or what your variable bitrate range is. It is LOSSY meaning that it LOOSES. MP3 is akin to the old wire recorders of the 60s that were the scourge of audiophiles like myself.
2. WMA is owned by Microsoft which immediately puts the taint of Bill Gates and his first wife Steve Ballmer on it. They tried and tried at Microsoft to outdo MP3 (which was already paltry to begin with) but they couldn't. They once again contacted their all to frequent business partner, Satan, to sell off a few more Microserf souls in exchage for WMA. This is why WMA sounds WORSE than MP3. It was made in HELL!!!!
3. AAC. What a joke! They CLAIM that it is an encrypted Dolby something or other with MPEG4 style encoding. But in reality, it's a nanoscale 8-track tape. Everytime you download more stuff from the iTunes store, you are just downloading 8-tracks for god sake. And rehashed ones at that!. If you listen VERY carefully, you can hear Conway Twitty bleed through (what a debasement!!) your supposedly shiny new Depeche Mode release.
4. WAV is NOT what CDs are based on. It never was and never will be! Get that through your head you dipshits. Back before Windows even had any concept of a CD burner (about 1996) there were tons of Macs burning CDs and they used AIFF as their format to burn to CD. But you know what... that's not even what CDs are based on. RedBook specs dictate that the audio must be 16-bit stereo 44.1 kHz PCM audio. PCM being PULSE CODE MODULATED. That's a PURE digital format that can be represented in AIFF or WAV. If you want purity, you'd be better of with straight PCM files from... good old Unix boxes. (Which incidentatlly is what is used to mass produce CDs in big media houses)
The one true LOSSY format is, was and ever shall be Ogg Vorbis. The one true LOSSLESS format is, was and ever shall be FLAC. As my listening party proved to my friends and family so long ago, the only way to enjoy music is without DRM and with high quality audio sources. No one has yet beaten Ogg Vorbis or FLAC. Ever. Period. End of argument. If anyone is interested in data tapes of my Ogg Vorbis listening party sources or updated source material, you may post in my most recent journal. Thank you and good night.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
If Spiggy Topes and the Turds were on Mindawn, I might be interested. But alas they aren't. I guess that as a "popular singing group" they could be too expensive for your average Linux user. Like Spinal Tap, really. I'm afraid that Mindawn doesn't conform to my free noise principles if they are not prepared to support the Turds or the Taps, and so I won't be using the service on moral grounds. However, I might make an exception if Mindawn invited RMS to make a two-hour speech at their billionth-download party which can surely be only a short time away.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
This is a revolting development - they're obviously subversives trying to torpedo Slashot.
A (maybe) non-DRM music system;
A non-Apple music system;
A non-MS music system;
A music system that supports Ogg and FLAC.
Nothing left to talk about. *sniff* Cue crickets.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I'm guessing from the text of the article that this is a pay-per-song service rather than a subscription model, but it doesn't explicitly say.
Rocket scientist, eh? Golly gee, I suppose you're right; it might be hard to RENT oggs and flacs.
is this the only music service that can claim this kind of compatibility?
Hell no.
They've been in the game longer then just about anyone. Changed hands about half a dozen times and still offer fair (I pay $19.95 for 90 tracks a month, DRM free and mine to keep, play, etc forever). While I appreciate sites like Bleep they are somewhat limited in their scope (which can be a good thing) and E/M's cataloge is big enough that I end up finding a lot of music I wouldn't have found otherwise. For the big bands allofmp3.com is still a pretty good bet (not so much my thing, but good to fall back on) and they have a nice new iTunes-like (Windows) application that makes finding and buying music dangerously easy. Of course if your a 'believer' you can't fail to mention Magnatune for being probably the most moralistically upstanding label/service going. But their catalog hurts, probably proportionally.
I'll still fall back on iTune's if I have to, but the trouble of the DRM and their pricing make them my last choice. I'd love to see Last.fm do something other then partner with amazon.com. I'm too impatient to order music I just fell in love with when 90% of the time I don't have to.
Quack, quack.
Downloading music (from anywhere, foreign or domestic) isn't importation, so 602 does not apply. Even if 602 did apply, you would not have an exemption under 602(a)(2) because of 602(b).
Importation is the act of taking copies or phonorecords across a border. Look at the definitions of "copy" and "phonorecord" in section 101. Copies are "material objects [...] in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device." Copies are real, physical things. Copies are not broadcasts or transmissions. When you have a song on a CD, the CD is the copy. When you have a song on a hard drive, or in RAM, the hard drive (or the RAM) is the copy.
When you download from allofmp3.com, or anywhere else, you're not transporting an actual copy, in tact. This is obvious because the copy is a physical thing: the copy of the song is the disk on which allofmp3 stores it. They didn't send you their disk. So, what happened? You made a copy of the song, and the new copy is the song fixed in your disk.
So you didn't import the song. You reproduced it. Reproducing a copyrighted song without permission of the copyright holder, or an applicable exemption, infringes the copyright holder's reproduction rights. Just because allofmp3 has the right to make those songs available to you under Russian law, does not mean you are authorized under US law to make your own copies, which is what you're doing when you download music from them.
For instance, let's say that merely "making available" does not infringe copyright. So, I put up a directory on a public webserver filled with music I bought from emusic.com or somewhere else. I may have a perfect legal right to place those songs online, merely doing so isn't distributing them for instance, but you still don't have a legal right to download them. It is no different with allofmp3.
Now, in Canada, in constrast, it is probably legal to use allofmp3.com. The private copying provisions of the Copyright Act do not not require that private copies be made from legitimate or authorized sources, merely that they are made for personal use and that they are made onto a recording medium that isn't prescribed.
Life after capitalism? The participatory economics project
I was looking at them just the other day. Too bad it's MP3 only (and some FLAC). I've decided long ago that even though I'm not actively deleting the MP3s I do have, I'm not adding any new music in a patented format and I'm sure as hell not gonna pay for the "priviledge". It just wouldn't be right.
Spine World
I agree with everybody who says that the selection is lousy. I'm a true indie-music geek (and proudly so) but none of my favorite unknown/lesser-known bands were in there. NONE!! I searched for more than a dozen bands ranging from tiny Los Angeles groups to National headliners (like Pinback and Belle and Sebastian). Not a single one came up! So obviously this is of no interest except that...
..except that it is an interesting business model for the online music industry:
-It's the first time I see a service offering lossless downloads. This is valuable for those of us with real stereo equipment in their living rooms (I find mp3s sound a little "empty")
-pay-per-minute of music downloaded pricing. That's interesting because it annoys me when I have to pay the same price for a 30 second song as a 10 minute song when I am trying to get a full album. FYI:
0.99 per 10 minutes of lossy compression (Ogg Vorbis format) (each 10 minutes in length is another $0.99)
$1.24 per 10 minutes of lossless compression (FLAC format)
$6.99 per album for lossy compression (Ogg Vorbis format)
$8.99 per album for lossless compression (FLAC format)
So note that this is NOT a 99c/track type service as has been mentioned above.
Oliver / http://www.treasuretunes.com/
Got a question that the allofmp3 site doesn't answer, since a lot of users are probably in this thread... are the tracks they sell tagged? They list insertion of id3 tags as a feature of their Windows front end so it makes one wonder. If I have to tag everything manually it would certainly be a reason NOT to use them.
Democrat delenda est
or does Mangina lunix make anyone else feel uncomfortable?
I'm far from major-label only - I've been a subscriber to emusic for, um, 6 years next month minus the one year they had kicked me off for d/ling too much before switching to the limited subscription model.
... 1000 albums for a music service? Emusic has a relatively weak selection, and it has 102939 albums.
But Mindawn seems to have a bit over 1000 albums in ogg, including duplicates, total. (Note that they list ogg and flac albums seperately). That's just
">Good luck. How many labels are going to allow their music to be sold in a DRM-unencumbered format?
t ml
Probably none"
Actually, it's closer to 18560 labels acording to what's available on emusic.com.
http://www.emusic.com/browse/0/l/-dlm/l/0-0/0/0.h
Since Mandriva is French and thus almost European, maybe they will have a decent selection of music? I mean, I'm fairly standard and mainly listen to rock with the odd goth / goth-metal band thrown in, and I have a seriously hard time finding music I like on itunes. It's all r&b, rap, hip-hop and other stuff which barely qualify as music in my ears...
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
It had bloody well better. Whenever I buy something, I do so because the product or service is worth more (at least to me) than the money I paid for it. If the product or service was worth less to me than the price asked for it, why, then I won't buy it.
In buying something, I am effectively declaring that I would rather have this product or service than the money, or any of the vast range of other things I could have had for that money.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Dude, you have something really messed up on your system if you are having choppy MP3 playback under Linux on that system. I just finished installing (last night) a "new" machine for my wife, to replace her Win98 POS box. It is running a stock install of Mandrake 10.1, using a 366 MHz Celeron, 384 megs of SDRAM, 6.4 gig IDE drive. Basically a bunch of "scrap" I had in my shop. Other than KDE feeling a tad "laggy" (I might tune it down on effects if she complains), it plays MP3s perfectly off the network server. I can't even say I tuned the drive using hdparm yet...
You didn't give many details about your system, but I doubt the problem is your Linux install, or the hardware (unless something really funky is going on). I have managed in the past to get MP3 playback running on a AMD 586/133 (you know the one - the funky "overclocked" 486 Pentium-beater chip that AMD made in the late-1990s - excellent CPU) w/16 meg RAM under DOS (it could barely do this - but it did work). If that can be done, then your system should have no problems.
If you are stream the MP3 from a CD-ROM, check the hdparm settings for the drive (make sure DMA, etc is on - plenty of docs out there on this - BTW, this is a good thing to check for the hard drive device as well). Also, make sure the driver is 100% correct for the soundcard chipset in the system - sometimes the auto-installer on distros pick the wrong driver (or a generic Soundblaster driver) for the chipset, even when the driver for the chipset is available. Make sure your swap partition is big enough. You sound like you should have enough RAM for such a use, but if you are running KDE as your WM, that might be a little low. Something else to try is installing a command line MP3 playback util and try seeing how well that plays things under X vs dropping out of X and to the command line. Also, make sure there isn't any IRQ conflicts between the soundcard/system and the rest of the box.
I am sure there are several other things that I am missing here, but the ones I listed are the first ones I would look into. The system you describe should be more than capable of doing what you need to do...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon