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Windows Media Player 11 and Urge
j0e_average writes "The Washington Post is running a review of Microsoft's next version of Media Player, and its integration with MTV's new music service Urge. According to reviewer, Rob Pegoraro, 'Not only does this new, Windows XP-only software promote Urge to the exclusion of other retailers, you can't shop at this store-- or even just play your Urge downloads -- in any earlier version of Windows Media Player.' The Microsoft/Urge subscription model contains a new twist as well: 'Urge also lets you rent songs: $9.95 a month (or $99 a year) lets you download all the tracks you want to a computer, while $14.95 ($149 a year) lets you transfer those downloads to most newer Windows Media-compatible players. These rented songs can't be burned to CD and go silent if you stop paying the fees.'"
How is this a "new twist"? Listen Rhapsody has been using this model for years.
The Online Slang Dictionary
Even with MTV and Microsoft pushing it together, I think that the fact that you can't burn the music is going to turn away most of their potential customers. People are stupid, but given the choice between owning DRMed music that you can burn or renting it and watching it all vanish when you stop paying...well, I'd hope that people aren't that stupid.
Goo goo g'joob.
Didn't PlayFair do that over a year ago?
But this DRM shit is why I refuse to use itunes- allofmp3.com for me.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I was happy as a Clam when they folded.. and i'll happily NOT install this version on anything I have. For just 1 million dollars you might actually be able to OWN a song and put it anywhere you want it.. But it'd have to be DRM'D so you could never give it to anyone else. Bah music companies sicken me.
Inane Comments are Generously Disregarded
I don't think it's that no one CAN... I think it's that no one cares enough to even bother.
Considering the fact that high-quality, free music can be obtained without any sort of DRM cracking, there's really no incentive to crack the iTunes DRM system.
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Consider this: A lot of people are paying similar amounts of money for XM or Sirius satellite radio, and they mostly listen to music. Satellite radio has hundreds of channels that play all kinds of music, but it's still decided by other people what songs you're going to listen to. You can't just turn over to "Classic Rock Channel #12" and get Stairway to Heaven instantly. But when you cease to pay your Sirius bills, you don't keep getting service. So it doesn't seem horribly unfair to me that Microsoft/Urge might cease to let you have access to their music library when you stop paying the bills.
Obviously, satellite radio has other things to offer as well, such as Howard Stern and Jim Breuer and other talk or comedy shows, live sports games, the ability to receive it into your car, etc. But a lot of people are mostly into it for the music.
Also, there are advantages to using Apple's music store, or other online music stores. Obviously on the plus side is the fact that you get to keep the music you buy. The obvious downside is that you have to buy individual songs, and you don't really get to hear whatever is on the site.
So the way I see it, this Microsoft/Urge thing is cool. They're doing something different from Apple, which is great. If Microsoft came along and said, "We'll take a loss by selling songs for $0.50 each and paying the record companies the difference in cost. Then when iTunes fails, we'll raise our rates." See, THAT sounds like the Microsoft we all know and love. But instead they're going with a different business model and trying to compete fairly. So why give them a hard time? Either stick with iTunes or try Microsoft's model and see if you like it.
People contribute just by living their lives. Are you saying that just because my son is too young to contribute to culture, that he's not allowed to sing Happy Birthday to his friends? It's his culture, he inherited it. It's our culture, each and every one of us, regardless of age or contribution, owns it. We should all have an equal right to participate.
Civilization and culture flourished for thousands of years, and we've only had copyright for about a hundred. I think it's a perversion, and copyright laws especially for music should be repealed. Musicians should go back to making money the old fashioned way, performing. The rest of copyright law should be seriously re-examined too.
That's my opinion.
"Replay Music" developed by Applian Technologies
It can record any song being played on your computer and automatically enters all the tag info while compressing it to MP3 on the fly (or to uncompressed files if your pc is too slow) It'll record anything that windows media player plays because it just replaces the driver for your soundcard that splits the signal in two. One goes to your hard drive as a new mp3 and one streamed out your soundcard.
Simple.
DRM is Dead Restrictive Moneygrubbing
It will never work so long as it can be played.
And if it can't be played no one will buy it.
Logical death.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
Or there's Virtual Audio Cable which creates a fake sound card that lets you redirect it's output to another applications input.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
I work for Microsoft (but not on Windows Media Player), so I got an early trial of the product, and have been using it for about a month now.
I didn't really get it when it was first pitched, but the hybrid subscription/paid model works great. In the years I was using iTunes, I never really did much purchasing of tracks, since it seemed ephemeral, and not really any cheaper than buying on physical media.
With URGE, I pay my flat fee, and can try ANYTHING - it isn't $9.99 ever time I want to give an album a spin to see whether or not I like it beyond 30 second previews. I can play it on any of three different PCs, and can even transfer songs to my Treo to listen to on the plane, or stream them live to my Xbox 360 for an entertainment experience. And if I like something, I can just buy it just like iTunes and burn it to CD or whatever.
As for pricing, $15/month for as much new stuff as I want to listen to? I've already got 20 new albums in rotation, stuff I likely wouldn't have bought before but found via the recommendation system, and really enjoy (I'm embarassingly obsessed with the Arctic Monkeys now). Ast $15/month, the amount I would have paid buying that music would have covered the fee for years.
A couple of cool little features:
A good selection of music videos, linked to the songs.
After setting up a new machine on your account, you can tell it to sync up to EVERYTHING you have on your other machines.
Even though there are the three recommended machines, any PlaysForSure device seems to work fine, like my Treo 700w phone, and an ancient Creative MuVo I had laying around.
Anyway, I've been really happy with it, and after years of trying to get a good home-wide music experience out of iTunes, it's already working a lot better for me, in large part to support by a much wider selection of accesory vendors.
My video compression blog
Civilization and culture flourished for thousands of years, and we've only had copyright for about a hundred.
If by insanely long copyright terms", much less than a hundred. If you mean copyright in general, you're completely wrong. Copyright (& patents) are written into our (I am assuming you're from the US; if not, I apologize and adjust the pronouns accordingly) Constitution. You know, the one that is about 219 years old. And you think our founding fathers got the idea, you should look back further. Say, at the 1710 Statute of Ann. Earlier than that, there were other forms of copyright in place. This means that you are at least off by about 200%.
And then we get to the point about there being far less need for copyright much previous. How are you going to copy a book for instance before the printing press?
DRM pisses me off, too. The best thing you can do about it is to just ignore products that use it. It'll make your life far happier.
Instead of watching another mindless hour of junk on TV, go to your library and take out a few books on subjects that interest you. If you would have been watching CSI, get a book on criminal forensics. If you would have been watching football, get a league almanac from the 1970s or 1980s, and see how much you remember about the teams from then.
Some other people I know started playing instruments to meet their desire for music. They get together informally, and create their own unencumbered tunes. You can take the $100/month or so you'd spend on cable, DVDs, CDs, at the cinema, etc., and spend it on a guitar and some lessons. With some practice, you'll be able to create music far more enjoyable to yourself than the latest shit from the pretty-faced "artist" of the week.
You not only hurt the bottom line of these companies by avoiding their products, but you also can do something that benefits yourself far more. You'll probably find it far more enjoyable, too!
Just make sure that you mute the record output (monitoring) level - otherwise you'll end up with a wonderful feedback loop!
It's actually more difficult than you might expect to be able to record your computers output - it actually would be an easier solution to use a second PC. Just make sure that you've got your equalizer set to something reasonably flat, otherwise you'll have too much bass and treble.
Pretty funny how we've now come full circle - doesn't this remind you of the tape trading days? Next thing you know we'll be playing back + recording sounds at twice the speed (so that you could tape an album in half the time...) - ahh, those were the days. Made it easier to slow down a fast guitar solo :)
As for pricing, $15/month for as much new stuff as I want to listen to? I've already got 20 new albums in rotation, stuff I likely wouldn't have bought before but found via the recommendation system, and really enjoy ... Ast $15/month, the amount I would have paid buying that music would have covered the fee for years.
Wow, for fifteen bucks a month plus the cost of all the newest M$ toys and software, I can stream my music to my TV where my $40/month cable subscription already pipes 30 channels of endless hours of music I already don't listen to? Fantastic! Besides that music source I don't listen to, there's plenty of online music streams these days. You know, like the internet archive and their 34,000 live concerts? Don't forget the creative commons people, who also want to promote worth while music. Why would I want to rent a source of music from the usual RIAA pigs again?
What was it that WiMP has that Amarok was lacking? Wait a minute, WiMP does not do lyrics, cover art or even wikipedia lookups?
Sarcasm off. The RIAA and Microsoft are both based on a scarcity that does not exist. The music publishers are damaged and people have routed around them. Microsoft too has been routed around. There are plenty of alternatives to both. Restricting your users while other do not is fatal. Your supposed world of plenty looks awfully limited.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
$200 a month on CDs? My wife loves CDs, but she's always used record clubs. Generally she'll spend a buck or two on one and get the others for free. We've been using this method for well over a decade now. I just got Tori Amos Beekeeper for free. Paying for any compressed music is something I'll never do willingly. $15 a month to rent music is absolutely lame in my book and I hope it's practice that quickly becomes obsolete and dies a painful death.
It's kind of sad that peeps would willingly allow other companies to own their assets.
I personally uses iTunes, but not to buy music, but to listen too and find new artists. No other app has yet to come close to being as intuitive as its interface for browsing music, with as many unintrusive features, not even WM11.
<]=)
"Not only does this new, Windows XP-only software promote Urge to the exclusion of other retailers,..."
WMP11 supports many retailers besides URGE, as can be seen here.
Here's a link to the PCMag review of WMP11 that contains the above page.
The retailers shown in the above links are:
MSN Music Store
audible.com
Napster
MovieLink
WallMart
XM Satellite Radio
f.y.e.
Live365.com
PureTracks
PassAlong
URGE
That's fewer than the number of retailers that WMP10 supports (WMP supports the above (minus URGE) plus CinemaNow, CourtTV, emusic, ESDC, MLB, msn/soundsgood.com, MusicGiants, MusicMatch, musicNow, MyStation, SongTouch, soundBuzz, GetMusic), but WMP11 is still in beta, and may very well support all of those when the RTM version is released.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
... and which will not be an option since Microsoft implements a Secure Media Path, and the driver for the soundcard must be signed by Microsoft to play content. Needless to say. Microsoft will not be signed any drivers that allow "content" to be saved anywhere.
allofmp3 appears to be leaving the building, heading toward that "jukebox in the sky". The only thing left is that the fat lady hasn't starting singing yet.
Translation: You can still connect to the servers using alltunes, but cannot order music at this time.
The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race. - Don Marquis (1878-1937)