Apple To Play Fairer With FairPlay?

NewbieMonster writes "According to tech.co.uk, Apple is about to license its Fairplay DRM to Made for iPod accessory manufacturers. It's reported that Apple will also allow streaming of protected AAC content via USB. Could this signal a move to allowing other music players to access and play ITMS content?" From the article: "The expected announcements could signal a move on Apple's part to take some of the sting out of its Fairplay DRM which has come in for a great deal of criticism over recent months. It may also be a way of keeping Made For iPod makers onside, as the draw of the Microsoft Zune becomes stronger." Anyone noticed the draw of the Microsoft Zune becoming stronger?

Comments

again....

[User 956]

According to tech.co.uk, Apple is about to license its Fairplay DRM to Made for iPod accessory manufacturers. It's reported that Apple will also allow streaming of protected AAC content via USB. Could this signal a move to allowing other music players to access and play ITMS content?

Again, reinforcing the point that DRM isn't about preventing piracy, it's about maintaining control over other things. Like competitors in the marketplace.

am I missing something

[larry bagina]

Outside of slashdot (an alternate reality where grandmothers use lunix and ogg vorbis is popular), who is criticizing fairplay? Is there anybody that doesn't think Zune is a turd?

Please, enlighten me.

Re:am I missing something

[mgv]

Outside of slashdot (an alternate reality where grandmothers use lunix and ogg vorbis is popular), who is criticizing fairplay? Is there anybody that doesn't think Zune is a turd?

Not too many people.

In truth its not very restrictive, as far as the current policies go. And apple has defended the users against abuses from the RIAA (esp with increases in pricing).

In particular, the fact that you can authorise 5 machines and an unlimited number of ipods is good.

More importantly, you can reset the list of 5 machines once per year even if you have lost all your old machines. Which means that having your music work on a new machine isn't likely to be a problem, even if your old machines get stolen or reformatted before you could deauthorise them out of your list of 5 computers.

Not to mention that you can burn the music and rip it again anyway. Sure it loses quality, but if you are buying for quality alone, you wouldn't be using either iTunes or an iPod for that matter.

I'm not surprised that iTunes isn't yet hacked. Mostly because there aren't many reasons yet why a legit user would get pissed off.

The biggest thing they should offer (in my opinion) is the ability to redownload your music that you have purchased. In this situation you would be getting defacto off-site storage of your music, which would be a huge plus for the service that you wouldn't get with mp3's. Unless you consider bittorrent as your off site backup.

Anyway, DRM has worked against the RIAA. They thought it would give them control over the users. Instead it has given apple control of the RIAA.

Michael

Re:No

[harlows_monkeys]

You may already know about this, but here is how to un-DRM your songs: simply burn them to an audio CD, then re-import them from the CD's. Sure, you theoretically lose sound quality this way, but I cannot tell the difference, and I'll bet if I blindfolded you, you couldn't either.

I'm surprised no one has made an AAC encoder specifically designed for this situation. Consider how lossy audio compression works. The 30000 ft overview would be that you simplify the input by throwing away some of it (hopefully, some of it that is inaudible), resulting in something that can be losslessly compressed.

When you take a lossy compressed song and expand that (e.g., burn to an audio CD), and want to compress that again, you don't need to throw any of it away to get something that will compress well, if you are trying to compress using the same compression system that was originally used. (If you were expanding an AAC file, and then wanted to compress with, say MP3, that would have to have some degradation, because AAC and MP3 would have different ideas of what needs to be thrown away). What this means is that it should be possible to design an AAC encoder that can take advantage of the knowledge that the input is the result of expanding a 128 kbit/second stereo AAC file, and compress back to something that matches that original AAC file.

Re:No

[QuantumG]

please excuse me if I cause anyone offense in saying this, but maybe if Mac users didn't refer to crackers as "scum" and other names, they wouldn't ostracize the platform. I do appreciate that crackers are finally being recognized by others as the freedom fighters I've always considered them to be. It's about time.