MSN Music Purchases Not Compatible with Zune

lewiz writes "The BBC is reporting that music purchased at MSN Music will not play on the new Zune music player." From the article: "The problem has arisen because tracks from the MSN Music site are compatible with the specifications of the Plays For Sure initiative. This was intended to re-assure consumers as it guaranteed that music bought from services backing it would work with players that supported it. MSN Music, Napster, AOL Music Now and Urge all backed Plays For Sure as did many players from hardware makers such as Archos, Creative, Dell and Iriver. In a statement a Microsoft spokesperson said: 'Since Zune is a separate offering that is not part of the Plays For Sure ecosystem, Zune content is not supported on Plays For Sure devices.'"

Comments

Re:talk about missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, who exactly is the target audience? People too stupid to know better?

FOX 'news' viewers ?

Re:I can only say...

[JimDaGeek]

...And then re-encode a cheesy 128 kbit AAC to some non-DRMed format. You end up with a crappy 96 kbit audio file at best... No thanks.

The whole "Apple's DRM is not bad" crap is just that, crap. Buying a music track as such low quality and then having to re-encode at a low bit rate to remove the crappy DRM is just not acceptable to me.

<soapbox type="technical">
I am lucky that I own an MS windows desktop, a very nice Ubuntu Linux desktop, a late 2006 Core 2 Duo iMac and a Core duo Intel Macbook. I am able to play the DRMed crap my wife bought on MS Windows and both Macs. However, I now block the iTunes store so my wife cannot buy any DRMed crap. Why? Because we ran into problems trying to play the tv episodes that we PAID for from Apple. My wife spent probably $30 on music and $40 on tv episodes. They were all encrusted with DRM and gave us problems with where we could play them and "authorization". I thought I was "authorized" to watch the crap when I PAID for it. From now on I just download the tv episodes we miss with the Usenet account I pay for. You can't beat Usenet. No RIAA/MPAA crap to worry about like you have with torrents.
</soapbox>

I'll stay with my iPod

[curious.corn]

Dear Bill,

you've tried hard, cool. Some even believed we would throw out iPods en masse, after all brown is so hip (billions of flies can't be wrong). But in all honesty, no... I'll stay with my shiny iPod... no matter how hard you try, you've never had a chance with me.

Yours,
e