Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
"These rented songs can't be burned to CD and go silent if you stop paying the fees"
Oh reeeeely? We'll see.
I am not left-handed, either!
I tried out the beta of windows media player 11... It's pretty nice looking, and the new organization for the music library is a lot better, but all in all it feels like a skin for windows media player 10 sometimes (not that there's anything wrong with that...) It does look much sleeker than version 10, but I'm hoping they'll make changes to skin mode as well, which currently looks the same as it did in version 10.
How is this a "new twist"? Listen Rhapsody has been using this model for years.
The Online Slang Dictionary
As in, I stopped paying my bill, and now all my music is "purged" from my computer.
Music should be simple to enjoy. Music doesn't need safeguarding the way the industry jealously guards their Jewel Crowns.
I do "support" outside my everyday professional experience for family and friends, and describing "how to" is a minefield and Media Player 11/Urge don't help.
I've not verified what the article says, but the warning is WMP11 is more than an update, it's an upgrade, i.e., the only way to recover from it to previous versions is with System Restore. WTF?
I guess that helps me decide, I'm not going to load it, I'm going to steer anyone who's interested away from it, and anyone who has questions about it, I'll turn away.
I won't single out Microsoft for the miserable state of music and the ability to enjoy today. Everyone seems to be trying their best to squeeze money from entertainment. I'm not opposed to paying for entertainment, but I come from an older generation where:
I remember early on with CDs the promise of things to come. Heck, my first CD player actually had a DIN connector on the back of it which was referenced in the manual only as "for future use". I dreamed of liner notes running to the TV, lyrics, lots of cool stuff. It never happened.
And when did album info become available? When the public contributed it via the early public CDDB database. That was a great thing, but was (and still is) fraught with errors and the fickleness of description by the first contributor in.
This was the first of many betrayals by the music industry, and I've not seen any push back that looks promising.
WMP11 is just one more non-contributor to the music-enjoying demographic. They're all selling themselves as providing an entertainment "experience". They're all full of shit.
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.
I have the URGE to avoid this.
someonoe
Not only do I declare you a grammar Nazi, I also declare you a spelling Frenchman.
Microsoft imposing its own proprietary standards using dominant position in OS market... Such a cliche
1) Do you really want to fulfill Godwin's law so quickly? (one message?)
"Godwin's law" (which the term itself I hate) is so stupid that it's a shame that it's even still mentioned anywhere.
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving any subject matter approaches one.
It's just plain foolishness that people invoke "Godwin's law" to defend themselves.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Looks like the teasing from the CEO of CRM got microsoft in a squeeze. Subscription this, subscription that. People aren't going to be too warm and fuzzy to the idea of having to pay continuous fees just to listen to music. I mean, a lot of music you just listen to off and on, and paying over and over again just seems absurd.
Electricity, water, resources that have fixed, continuous costs, that makes sense in the consumer's eye....but software? Music? Digital stuff with practically zero reproduction cost? This is what drives people to piracy...they can't visualize the need for software et al to have continuous fees...it feels like extortion.
Despite how justified/neat business model it may be, that's what the average person deep down thinks. RIAA et al do not understand this. MSFT seems to have followed the same path.
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
http://www.oldversion.com/ I'm pretty sure you can snag Winamp 2.x there.
What Urge is missing - and what I was looking forward to - was a low low intro price for the first year. I got the first year of Yahoo - including to go - for $60.
Also, Urge is more expenensive than Yahoo as you can get the non-to-go version for only $5 at Yahoo rather than $10 at Urge.
All the other complaints in the article - old news. Either the PlayforSure thing is for you or it isn't.
I believe you would be looking for the Hymn project.
And just for shits and giggles, you could use FreeMe or DRM2WMV for Windows Media 10 DRM'd files.
Trust me, cracking 11 is just a matter of time.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
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.
I am SO TIRED of all this DRM crap. Everything - and I mean EVERYTHING - has some sort of incompatible, misconfigured, hard-to-use "Rights Management" software/encryption/whatever. DVDs have CSS, Displays have HDCP, Music has Fairplay/WMP, and the list continues. Is any of this really designed to "protect the product"? No! It is designed to protect the profit margin of the record/film company.
None of the aformentioned technologies were designed with the end-user in mind. Did anybody at Microsoft/URGE even sit down and think about whether or not their customers really wanted to be tied yet another proprietary format that works only with a certain manufacturer's proprietary player? Lets face it, the iPod/iTunes interface only works because the iPod's particular proprietary format has become not-so-proprietary because more than half of the Audio Players out there are iPods, and can use Fairplay'd songs.
Here is what I want. An easy-to-use, universal encryption scheme everyone can agree on. Make it burnable. Make it sharable. Make it brain-dead simple. Make all of the record companes pledge their unwavering support. Heck, Make it 4096-bit RSA if you really want to. Then make it easy to use, and have all new audio players - Apple, Dell, Creative, MS, etc - support it. Then drop the price to 49 cents a song and $5.99 a record, and watch your profits SOAR. Why would they soar? Because at those prices, with those features, and those major names backing it, nobody would really feel like hunting on a Gnutella network for a decent-quality version of their favorite John Tesh song. People would willingly buy the audio player they liked, because they could use their songs on all of them. Illegal song sharing would largely dry up. Record companies would be happy. OEMs would be happy. I would be happy.
Just my (slightly more than) 2 cents.
This is the RIAA.
You are in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Come out with your hands up, bend over, this won't hurt a bit.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
I think it's a perversion, and copyright laws especially for music should be repealed.
Well, when you get it done let me know.
Musicians should go back to making money the old fashioned way, performing.
Actually, many of them made music from selling sheet music. Besides, at the time if you wanted to hear a song you had to go hear them play it, today with recording media that's no longer the case. So what you're saying, essentially, is that if a musician wants to make money he needs to perform it while you have the "right" to record, copy and redistribute at will? if that's the case they won't make much from concerts either as their live recordings will be spread world wide before he can even get to his second gig! that's not a good business model for the musician and what would you do then? you'd make professional music profitless and you'd have a fine selection of garage bands but quality music would diminish if not die out.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
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
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.
Or just use vsound. It's very easy to use and great quality without the trouble of hooking up two computers.
DRM is a bastardization of copyright law. And I quote:
Interesting. When I hear "Urge", I think of someone badly needing to use the toilet.
You claimed control "is the whole point of copyright in the first place." I claim it is not. I think we both agree it has been perverted from its original purpose (notably by the term extension from 14 years to up to 120+ years), but the original purpose was to encourage, through financial incentive of limited term monopoly, the creation and duplication of creative works so they would enter the public domain and raise the overall cultural IQ, hence the name "copyright." If its purpose was to control who can and cannot view/listen/whatever to a creative work, it would have been called "controlright" or some other silly name.
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)