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Apple To Grant All Labels DRM-Free Distribution
SexCaptain writes "MacRumors.com reveals a letter circulated by Apple to all producers of content for the iTunes Store, announcing that from May onward they can sell their music at higher quality and free of DRM. Hopefully this opens the doors for labels like Netwerk. This is a big step in the right direction, although it's unclear exactly what Apple means by 'higher quality,' and there is no mention of price changes. (Apple charges $0.30 more per song for DRM-free content from EMI and encodes it at 256K.) Quoting from the letter: 'Many of you have reached out to iTunes to find out how you can make your songs available higher quality and DRM-free," Apple wrote in the communication. "Starting next month, iTunes will begin offering higher-quality, DRM-free music and DRM-free music videos to all customers."
This could get really interesting. Of course emusic uses the more ubiquitous mp3, bt I bet eveyr 'mp3' player will now come playing unprotected aac as standard now Apple is making things interesting.
They used to like 128kbps AAC uploaded to them, but now they want lossless - so it's been on the cards for a while (not the DRM free, but higher quality). Anyway, means they can encode to anything they want for all the new stuff without having to transcode. Hasn't helped with their congested servers though.
Apropo of nothing I suppose, but thought it might be interesting.
It seems pretty clear to me-- they're offering the same pricing scheme that they've announced with EMI. They will continue to sell 128 kbps DRM-wrapped AACs for $0.99, but will additionally offer 256kbps DRM-free AACs for $1.29. Anyone familiar with Apple's tactics will tell you that they'll want to keep it simple. They'll offer the same pricing for the same product across the board.
I'd guess that this is all transitional anyway. Apple will continue to try to pressure labels to drop prices and remove DRM on everything. In the mean time, this is a step in the right direction.
Hopefully Apple will eventually allow labels to set their own prices. There are tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of old songs languishing at barely measurable sales numbers-I think that a hell of a lot of those could sell pretty well at $.25 or $.50. We could see back-catalog price wars! It would also allow smaller labels labels and independent musicians to compete by leveraging their lower overheads--one can sell for less when a album was self-produced in a week with no advance and no A&R guys to feed.
"Many of you have reached out to iTunes to find out how you can make your songs available higher quality and DRM-free. Starting next month, iTunes will begin offering higher-quality, DRM-free music and DRM-free music videos to all customers."
Translation from Jobs-esque:
"People asked for DRM-free content, and EMI said fine, but we'll charge more. So we said, ok, we'll up the bitrate and justify the higher price with that."
It's encoded at a higher bitrate AND DRM-free.
But but but, DRM is an "Enabling Tool"...
That's really just mincing words. I do agree with you though, if it's DRM-free then it's a better product, but the simple fact is it's not better quality unless it is, and in this case it looks like it is, not because it's DRM-free, but because it has more samples per second or less compression. Some of us want that.
However, $13 per album is on the order of a CD. So, for the same money I can get a bad copy with no DRM, or a good copy with DRM, the only hassle is the 3 minutes that it takes to rip, and the need to physically purchase the product. Though iTunes is still a reasonably good deal, it is no longer the great deal it once was.
I will admit for single track purchases the money for the DRM free is compelling. I can see them moving toward a 100% DRM free collection, with a $1.29 price tag. This in a time when the value of CDs are plummeting. WHat did Steve Jobs say? iTunes has to compete with free? How exactly does this scheme do this?
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
How am I supposed to manage my digital rights now?
But can I import them into iMovie or Final Cut (Express or Pro)?
I'm not a music collector. I can fit all my CDs into one carrying case with their jewel cases. But if I can get per-track purchases able to be mixed into my own video projects without hassle or fee (for my personal use) I may buy a few tracks.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
It would also allow smaller labels labels and independent musicians to compete by leveraging their lower overheads--one can sell for less when a album was self-produced in a week with no advance and no A&R guys to feed.
This is exactly why I'd expect the RIAA to pull out of iTunes if they allow this. No matter what, they don't want an efficient market - not when they're selling artificial scarcity.
It's interesting to see Apple as the potentate with the ability to change the music industry with small changes in policy. I think they're doing a good job as benovolent dictator, but there's some deeper meaning, I'm sure, to the fact that iTunes is only 5 years old and we're talking about things this way. The power of the Internet to change markets, demonstrated, perhaps.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
(not trying to be smarmy or anything, but seriously - Jobs, Apple et al have been talking about making music DRM-free... hasn't said jack about software or hardware. I'll take any step in the right direction --no matter how small or niche-y it may be-- over none at all, y'know?)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
"EU asked for DRM-free content, and EMI wanted higher prices. So we said fine, we give you higher prices (we'll justify with bumping up the bitrate), you give us DRM-free tracks & we got a deal."
Your translation is well-done, and likely accurate. Here's my take on it:
"Awesome - who cares if a track costs $1 or $1.3 if it's DRM-free?"
I plan on upgrading all of my iTunes guilty pleasures ASAP. If this is the battle that's going to turn the tide on DRM, I'm all in.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
what Apple wants is their AAC to become the defacto standard over mp3.
AAC isn't Apple's codec. It's the MPEG group's replacement for MP3.
When Jobs came out with his "Thoughts on Music", I made all kinds of cynical comments saying that he was being disingenious for this or that reason. After all, Job's in incredibly successful and people all over the world laud him and his company's products, so he NEEDS to be brought down a notch.
Well now he's making me look like an ass.
Will Apple allow users who have purchased DRM encoded tracks the chance to re-buy them without DRM at a reduced price, or will they have to fork out a 2nd time the full amount for the same tracks without DRM? (much like having to re-buy your favourite films every few years because someone comes out with a newer higher quality format)
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
To sum up the list of objections to this move by Apple:
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The article mentions "DRM-free music videos". That's nice but what about the TV shows and movies also offered on iTunes? Will we burning DVDs from those anytime soon?
I'm, for example, now under the dilemma whether to pony up the upgrade price on Photoshop CS3, given they added almost nothing of value to me as a web dev except a new intimidating interface and few obscure photo editing tools.
Why the heck is that a dilemma? Do you owe something to Adobe?
If you want to spend money on stuff that has no value to you, send it to me and I'll find some crap out in the shed to mail you.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Complete this sentence: DRM is about enabling tools to... recognize a joke.
I don't normally respond to trolls, but it brings up an interesting topic for conversation, so why not?
Why is DRM okay in some contexts, but not others? Is it evil to apply DRM to music but not software? What about movies?
I think that music is something that we are naturally possessed with - it probably coincides with the emergence of humanity. We hum, we whistle, we walk around with our Walkmen and our iPods. We even amended our copyright law to give music a special exemption for format-shifting and copying for personal use. I think this is why DRM on music offends us so much... DRM prevents us from doing something that we as a society have already decided we should be able to do!
Movies and software, on the other hand, aren't in the same ball park. Movies have only recently become part of our culture, and it was only 30 years ago that you could realistically bring them into your home. It's only been about 5 years since it became feasible to walk around with them, and that's still awkward. Maybe we'll feel more strongly about movies as technology makes format shifting more important. It already irritates me that I have to jump through hoops to back up stuff.
Software - I think it will be a long time before society gets worked up over software... after all, the best software is invisible. Besides, the whole concept of format-shifting is hard to apply to software. I mean, the kind of software application that you expect to work on you Desktop computer is pretty unsuitable for your cell phone.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
For the regular price ($8.88 CDN per album) you get 192kbps non-DRM'd MP3's. For $2.00 CDN extra, you get the same album in FLAC format. Their entire catalog is in non-DRM format and they have been doing it this way for a lot longer than Apple. As an added benefit, they a support all platforms equally, so you can use Windows, OS X or even Linux to browse and buy music.
STFU about slashdot bias.
I'll give them $2.00 a song if they will give up on this compressed stuff and sell me lossless. I'd like to have the same music that comes on the real CD. That way I can compare a checksum with a "global public" value, and make sure they haven't watermarked the song. They could even go to $3.00 a song for people who are aficionados and release the 24 bit stuff.
So we have...
$0.99 = DRM'ed AAC at 128kbps
$1.30 = Non-DRM'ed AAC at 256kbps
$2.00 = Non-DRM'ed, lossless.
$3.00 = Non-DRM'ed, 96KHz-24bit per Channel.
Still dreaming.
You make some reasonable points, but I couldn't disagree with you more about software & movies. The point you used to illustrate software was particularly misguided:
I mean, the kind of software application that you expect to work on you Desktop computer is pretty unsuitable for your cell phone.
You do realise the iPhone is going to run OS X don't you? Do you realise that you would be able to run OS X in a vmware window if Apple didn't actively prevent you from doing so?
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Out of curiosity, who gets the $0.30 for the songs, Apple, the producer, the musician? A quick search didn't turn up anything.
"those who wants to earn money from these potential customers have to adept an acceptable technology"
How? Let's see here, there is free and unencumbered allowing free redistribution and there is everything else. If it can be redistributed, it will be for free. Thus ends any possible revenue.
How long until people post their iTunes DRM-free purchases for P2P sharing? Tomorrow. Maybe the next day at the most. Why would anyone purchase from iTunes when you can get the same, identical product for free elsewhere?
That's the point of this. There cannot possibly be any revenue from music any longer. Yes, they are competing with free but they are also competing with their customers sharing their purchases. Maybe everything gets bought once. Maybe. And then it joins the world-wide music catalog of P2P.
As soon as the last person gets over the idea that stealing music is wrong and illegal, there will be no more revenue from recorded music. And we are doing an excellent job of training youth today, so that day is coming Real Soon Now.
Do people who have bought DRM-crippled low-quality versions get some sort of discount/upgrade option to the higher-quality DRM-free music.
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
How long until people post their iTunes DRM-free purchases for P2P sharing? Tomorrow. Maybe the next day at the most. Why would anyone purchase from iTunes when you can get the same, identical product for free elsewhere?
How would iTunes having DRM free music do anything at all to stop this? Guess what, search for just about any song on a torrent tracker, or other P2P client, and I'm sure you'll find it. As long as CD's are sold, it will happen. iTunes getting rid of DRM will do nothing at all for this, except giving people who don't mind purchasing music, but don't want to put up with DRM another option. That's a Good Thing.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
My Nokia phone plays AAC pretty well, so I don't quite get your point. AAC is as much a standard as MP3 is one.
Besides, once there's no DRM, you can transcode it to whatever format you want, even right in iTunes.
Apple doesn't care about making aac standard, they chose it purely because it's cheaper to license than mp3. I just wish they would move to FLAC. The lack of a licensing cost would more than makeup in the increase of needed bandwidth.
Mmm, no. Not just top 40. Apple carries all manner of classic rock, hard rock, symphonic, blues, and more. beat them up for DRM (OS or other) all you like, but let's not just lie about things, ok?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Because it is cheaper to distribute. If I were in a business and I figured out a way to cut my costs in half, you'd probably call me an asshole if I didn't cut my prices at least somewhat. In fact, if I was in a business where there was completion, it wouldn't matter since if I failed ot, someone else would and I'd lose money. Cost going down and price going up is not progress.
Oh, and when you can buy a song for what it's actually worth.
/Still buys CDs anyway, so don't actually wake me up even then
Well, that was nice and specific.
The record labels love you for wasting money needlessly on their behalf.
It is hard to determine if Apple is challenging the record labels to allow all music to be DRM free, or if this is just PR. The deception is that if Apple really cared about the consumers then they would open iTunes/iStore to work with other players. This is possible, no matter how much the Apple brain trust tries to convince us otherwise. It is assumed that iTunes only work with Apple's iPod series of DAPs. Offering DRM-free content is good for those that own iPod, but mean nothing for those that don't or have not intention on purchasing one.
In my oh-so-humble opinion, it's because most people see music as something going on in the background, rather than something that should be given undivided attention, the way film and software (your examples, not mine), usually are.
So, all the record labels need to do is find artists that are worth just listening to, and they can load it with as much DRM as they want.
A CD is $10 at Wal-Mart. I can buy the hit single for $1.20 without DRM and encoded at a decent rate. Yes, that is progress.
I have bands I like I cannot buy at any rate at Wal-Mart. Going forward, I can buy a whole album from them for $10 without DRM and encoded at possibly an even better rate. That too is progress.
In all the ways I as a music consumer act, progress has been made.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You are either a uninformed troll or an MS shill but again for the record: AAC is a part of the MPEG standard that is used by many other players like Sony's PS3, MS Zune, SanDisk Sansa e200R, numerous cell phones, etc. The licensing scheme of AAC is even more generous than MP3 as there is no license on distributed content. Also for the record, WMA has never been the industry standard. It was a standard foisted up us by MS which actually suffers from the same defects that you claim about AAC. If you change AAC in your ranting with WMA and Apple with MS, your statements would actually be true.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Huh? AAC is Advanced Audio Coding. It is based on the work of many companies including Nokia, Sony, Dolby, and others. Apple did not create it nor does Apple receive any money from organizations that choose to implement AAC. It was the most advanced audio encoding format available at the time of the iTunes launch and thus a good choice.
.m4a which also has nothing to do with Apple other than that they are utilizing a standard.
/MLS
What they DO own, is the m4p protected-AAC container format which has nothing at all to do with AAC; it merely houses the AAC audio data in a way that they can implement DRM. They could implement m4p with embedded OGG, MP3, whatever and you would have no idea other than the audio quality difference. What they are effectively doing away with is just that, the protected container format, meaning that the files will be released (probably) as
True, AAC is not a truly 'free' format, but neither is MP3.
I'm very skeptical that it will be OSX in anything but name, or possibly kernel. But almost any application that is suitable for a phone would not be very usable on a desktop and vice versa. Video games have a much higher threshold on a desktop. Excel would be a travesty on a phone. Even the VNC version that I have on my desktop would positively suck on a phone. Even phone-centered apps like Address Book or iCal are not suited to the tiny screen on the iPhone.
Even if the iPhone worked perfectly with all OSX applications, it would be but one example in an ocean of counter-examples. I have never seen a Palm or WindowsMobile application that is as functional as it's desktop equivalent.
I'm not saying that DRM doesn't restrict software - clearly it does (as in your vmware example). I'm just saying that we, as a society, seem to hold software to a different standard than music, and I was simply pontificating on why I thought that was the case.
I think that video is somewhere in between the two - perhaps when it takes less than 2 hours to encode a H264 movie people will start to care more. Right now, ripping a CD takes about 2 minutes and it's pretty bulletproof.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"We've upped our bitrates and prices--now up yours!"
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
AAC is somewhat less "proprietary and locked" than MP3. While its true that AAC (and MP3 ) are patented,the patent is held by the MPEG standards organization and only requires payment and a license for the sale of encoders. The MP3 license requires use fees, that is, payments for the distribution of encoded content. The patent isn't held be Apple or any other corporate entity, but by the MPEG folks.
FOSS implementations are available in source code format.
The list of vendors that contributed to and promote AAC is much longer than just Apple - they include Sony, Nokia, ATT, and the Fraunhofer Society, largely responsible for the invention of the MP3 standard.
Almost every modern music player from the PS3 to Neuros to Archos to iRiver to Kenwood car audio players can play AAC, and encoders are available as a stock part of Nero software, as well as FOSS encoders available for the download. It's hard to understand what you mean by "only existing in Apple's reality sphere"
So while it may be technically proprietary because an IP patent was issued, its hardly as if Apple invented some in-house format that they won't share with anyone. Apple didn't invent it, doesn't own it, and receives no financial benefit from its use.
By "locked", maybe you mean the DRM applied to most iTunes content -- that has nothing to do with AAC and Apple has shown some tenacity in convincing a major label to risk going without. They may have done so for profit-oriented reasons, but I don't find that reasoning particularly "evil".
You sound like an anti-Apple troll.
And as for all the rest, it probably wouldn't hurt you to venture outside of top-40 music and try something different.
I agree with your point, but not your rationale.
I'm *gasp* 35, and for as long as I can remember music has been freely copyable. Radios with built-in cassette players could often record "free" [1] music directly from the radio, without any external microphone. One radio station even spent Sunday nights playing entire sides of LPs.
The CD era made it even easier to make high quality tapes. It was easy to record, and in some cases the quality was better than a mastered cassette. Some of the "portable systems" [2] could actually calculate optimal song orders to put as many tracks on a tape as possible.
My point is that at least two generations have grown up with the ideas of "free music" and "freely copying music". Right or wrong, it's a part of the American culture. The sudden appearance of DRM when freely copied/format shifted music has been permitted for decades is a culture shock, and is only turning people away from the big labels.
1: Sure, someone was paying for it, but to the end user the only costs were electricity and cassettes.
2: aka boom boxes. I'm a child of the 80's.
I am sure that if Disney said that that Apple could distribute its content without DRM, apple would do it.
Music is so completely different from film (and I don't just mean one is A/V while the other is just A), that I have to wonder if you meant to say something completely different. I'm just as confused as if someone had to said there's no difference between B&W and color film.
No, it isn't redundant. The higher quality refers to the audio stream, the DRM-free refers to the wrapper. Most people got that.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
This is great. Higher quality AND no DRM, whereas normally you'd think you would have to pay more for non-DRM. I take this as a serious attempt to get rid of DRM and make customers happy.
I can be made happier by getting rid of syncing. I HATE to sync! Hate, hate, hate!
I figure the idea of being able to use only a limited number of computers, and having to sync, is based on Apple's initial wish to make studios happy about their support for drm.
And there is one good thing about syncing I suppose, I used an Internet cafe computer once that had a hundred songs from in an iTunes library left on it. Huh!
The iPod's "sync only specific files" interface sucks and is outdated when you can have so many on your iPod too. And if I drag movies to my ipod in the iTunes app it just silently fails instead of say, starting a size conversion thread or telling me why. Dumb.
And I use my iPod like a hard disk a lot. It would be much better if I can drag music or video onto my iPod to a folder I can play/view from when detached from the computer. How about an expert mode that lets you view all the data in the ipod? And a database at Apple, or some other site like iMDB could be used to update the metadata db in the iPod. Right now everything is nailed down and nearly unhackable (how about a perl app for that Apple?).
If I could I'd like to ask for the iPod to be able to play video in it while connected, convert movies automatically (Red Kawa's iPod converter is so-so but best I've found on windows, though the Mac based handbrake is cool). I'd like to be able to view website archives and pdfs too, and while I'm at it, I'd like to be able to store absolutely huge astro or landscape photos and be able to zoom in on them with the ipod too. Oh and make it possible to use the ipod tactile interface for pageup/pagedown and maybe up/down/left/right too. A tap code would be acceptable to get into that mode.
In conclusion now that Apple is working hard to eliminate drm, I'd like them to make the iPod's software more user-friendly too, and they can start by taking the training wheels off. I'm not going to complain about how the video ipod dies after a couple hours of watching video (okay I just did complain but..) however it feels like Apple just used the function built into MacOS to let you plug in another mac as an external hard disk. That's totally 20th century.
Same about the "corrupted" state my ipod is perpetually in and the "do not unplug" logo. Very fragile I think. They should make use of the iPod screen when plugged in too, and most importantly, dare I repeat myself, GET RID OF THE SYNC! PLEASE! I don't want a sync.
I want to put music, movies, and ebooks (text or html files) in my iPod, I want to be able to put real sized photos in and read real sized text files with a real sized font size, and I want a real backup of my entire iPod on my hard disk. I don't want to have to delete things from my hard disk to delete them from my iPod or some such insanity. Now that Apple's sold enough of these things they can certainly afford to take the time to stop the insanity and STOP THE SYNC! Thank you.
Radios with built-in cassette players could often record "free" [1] music directly from the radio, without any external microphone.
Has it not ocurred to you that you can still do this?
The CD era made it even easier to make high quality tapes.
And I'll bet you didn't mind the loss of quality in exchange for the ability to format-shift, did you? Funny how people don't feel the same way anymore.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
It's honestly not that much less convenient to rip a CD and store it.
True, I'll definitely grant that with a modern computer and CD drive, ripping an album is really not that much harder or time consuming than downloading it. (However, as others have pointed out, downloading scales better than ripping in terms of working without user intervention -- you can "fire and forget" a few thousand MP3s but you'll have to babysit a terminal all week to rip an equivalent number of CDs, and human time is expensive compared to pure machine time.)
The downside of CDs is that they generally require you to go into a store, which requires substantial human (again, as opposed to machine) time. If you're not impatient, you can just buy them via mail-order, though, and not deal with most of the acquisition downsides.
Personally I buy almost all of my music in the form of Red Book audio CDs, used, from sites like Half.com; to me they're the best of everything -- no waiting in line or dealing with the general obnoxiousness of big-box stores, DRM-free format, a read-only backup, and sometimes some interesting goodies or extras -- generally for less than $5 per disc. However, given how impatient people have become, I think online music is here to stay, if only for the immediate gratification it offers.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
One compelling argument for making music downloads DRM-free is that most music sold in stores is recorded on DRM-free CDs anyway. On the movie/TV side of the aisle, it's all copy-protected DVDs, so the same argument doesn't apply.
It might be possible to convince the MPAA to sell non-protected content, but the vast majority of what they currently sell is protected, so they'd be understandably sceptical of giving that up.
Don't get me wrong, I don't care much for the packaging either, but calling it progress to pay extra for the lack of something is quite bizarre.
Really?
There seem to be many people willing to pay extra for the lack of something.
Like those willing to pay for satellite radio, because it lacks stupid DJ's and excessive ads.
Or those willing to pay more for their steak, because it lacks the fat and toughness of a cheaper steak.
Or those willing to pay more for their new car, because it lacks the mechanical problems of a cheaper used car.
Point being, there are countless times when paying more for "less" makes sense. But then again, in those cases, "less" is very subjective, depending on who is actually doling out the cash.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
Not to be a conspiracy theorist or anything, but I wonder about this. That is Jobs' pitch to the record companies: "We're not your competition, we just want to sell iPods." But is it really true? Jobs thinks long-term. Maybe he's just lying low, trying not to spook his prey until it's too late. With iTunes becoming huge, what young musician wouldn't be tempted to sign up with iTunes as a label? Particularly if, instead of the artists getting a small slice of the record companies' cut of an iTunes sale, they got most or all of it? Wouldn't that increase the artists' income from digital sales by something like 400%?
The major labels would excrete bricks if this happened, but if iTunes gets much larger, it may be inevitable. At that point Jobs will have the major record companies over a barrel, and could make them obsolete while getting cheers from everyone else by vastly increasing what musicians make for digital sales and giving the fans what they want.
Imagine the PR coup that would be. I see it as a "One more thing..." item at a future MacWorld Expo keynote.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
they want me to buy it all over AGAIN??? I've already replaced my LPs with CDs... I'm not gonna spend major bucks to get official MP3s to use instead of my CDs... I'll carry on ripping to format shift and play on the mp3 player in my car...
I have a huge home made NAS with all my rips archived in flac and ogg and I've backed all that up onto DVD... I only transcode to mp3 when I want to make a mix disc for the car... the player in the car doesn't handle ogg, my ipod does though... only cos I wiped the OS from it and replaced it with Linux.
Now if they were offering downloads in flac format though... I'd maybe purchase new stuff that way...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Will that mean i can use my a billing address in India and buy music?
Does DRM-free mean iam free to buy music from US iTunes store even if am residing in Australia or worse Iceland?
Until that happens, all this DRM-free crap is just marketing.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
I don't want 256K recordings. I would probably pay the extra for a 128K mp3 file over a 256K AAC file. Talk about halving the size of your iPod in one foul swoop.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
If it has :
WebView
NSTextField
NSControl
that implies an awful lot of cocoa being ported. Once that's done a lot of the frameworks (address book etc) could come along too - *if* there's enough space for them. Frankly, they couldn't have Safari on there if all the supporting cocoa frameworks didn't come too.
The guts of most applications will work fine. The GUI, as you say, can't be shared between the two, but to hook up a new vastly simpler GUI and recompile for another chip would be pretty trivial. I can't see why something like a spreadsheet wouldn't work quite well - just have minimal toolbars etc and show only the cells - pop up number pad for entry. You couldn't use the GUI from MS Excel or Word, but that's no loss.
Probably memory constraints are more of a problem. Perhaps many apps would have to be tuned for that. I'm sure they won't release an SDK for a while as development might still be a bit hairy, but when they get up to 32MB phones, possibly with hard disk, and 1GHZ processors, why not? Perhaps they can launch a small tablet that uses the same OS X nano too, and amortise development costs further.
At that point it'll become very important how close the APIs are for the phone and desktop and they'd be crazy not to have thought this through and gone for convergence.
Close.
Advanced Audio Coding is MPEG-2 part 7, with enhancements in MPEG-4 part 3. It's not a replacement for MP3 (MPEG-2 part 3), it's an alternative, which has existed for just as long as MP3 has.
See ISO/IEC 13818-7 and ISO/IEC 14496-3.
they want me to buy it all over AGAIN???
Um, no, what makes you say that? Don't forget Apple's "Rip, Mix, Burn" campaign... why on earth do you think they'd do anything to make the music you've already ripped stop playing. For that matter HOW on earth do you think they'd do that?
If you don't care for the service, they're happy to sell you more iPods to play ripped music on... whether you're running Linux on them or not.
It's not Apple's AAC. You know what AAC's usual name is?
MP4.
An iPod is an MP4 player. Anything that plays AAC is an MP4 player. My Linux box plays MP4 files, and plays stuff from my iTunes library just fine.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
The deception is that if Apple really cared about the consumers then they would open iTunes/iStore to work with other players.
They have. DRM-free music from iTunes will play on any player that supports MPEG-4 audio. That's all Apple's "AAC" is, it's an open standard and one that's used by a number of serious musicians like Elena Kuschnerova for their online distribution. Apple didn't invent it, they selected it because it's superior to MP3, and any company making a music player ought to have done the same.
Recently I went to Frys to try and find a player that supported MPEG-4 audio (under any name, MP4, MPEG-4 Audio, or AAC) and found precisely one non-Apple player that supported it. More importantly, I only found one other player that supported ANYTHING but MP3 and Windows Media.
So it's not Apple that's keeping you from listening to your iTMS music without converting it. I don't know whether Microsoft's been cutting restrictive licensing deals with the people who make the players, or whether they're just stupid, but it seems to me that it's hard to take a company complaining about not being able to license Apple's format seriously when it's not actually something they have to license from Apple in the first place!
Thanks should probably go to the EU, where Apple was about to face anti-trust proceedings related to the DRM+iTunes+iPod combo.
That would be the interesting thing to see, personally I think this is a trial balloon, I would lay odds that they are watching the peer networks and bittorrent networks to see how many of the DRM files escape onto the peer networks to build out a better business case for DRM and possibly get new laws. Ok, conspiracy central kind of idea, but it makes sense.
See, here's your problem right here. You're under the mistaken idea that price and cost are more than vaguelly related. You might want to try framing price in terms of perceived value instead. To some people being able to buy one song at a time from their couch has higher perceived value than buying a CD at Target. Thus a higher price is supported.
This framing has the added benefit of allowing for different perceptions and opinions without value judgments. So you might have a different perception of value, and that's fine. You can go to Target and pay less for the CD, and everyone's happy. Yay for the free market.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Remember that iTunes and Quicktime on Windows are supposedly built on the Carbon framework even though they run on Windows. I don't doubt that there will be OSX technology in the iPhone, I'm just very skeptical that it will be OSX in any real sense. But I don't know, Apple has surprised me before.
Either way, my point was that to the average person, software does not need to be portable like music does. They expect to buy a music CD and be able to play it on any CD player. They expect that CD to import into iTunes and play on their iPod. They don't see why they should buy the same music over and over again. They do not seem to have this problem with software. People regularly buy a separate copy of the same software for each computer (home and work, for instance). They don't expect Windows software to work on their cell phone. It's just not an expectation that people have.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yes, you can buy albums for $9.99 - but the question would be, what is the UPGRADE price for a whole album? After all, you already paid the $9.99, so in theory there should be no upgrade charge... in reality there will be some small charge I think.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
eMusic for me is actually much more expensive than iTunes. Some months I just forget to buy anything. Some months I only buy a few things, because I only find a handful of things I like. The iTunes model of not having to remember to buy a certain number of tracks every month, even when you can't find anything you like quite enough to buy, is less expensive. I have been a subscriber to eMusic more because I wanted to support DRM free music than because the pricing model really made sense for the way I buy music - as soon as Apple goes DRM free I'll probably drop out of eMusic since I've always been more interested in purchasing things as I need them rather than an endless monthly drain on my financial resources.
Also with the world opening up more and more to DRM free stuff, we should be able to buy more music from bands directly, like the Barenaked Ladies (who sell recordings of almost all concerts they do, many in FLAC or MP3). That's really the best idea because then I know the maximum amount of money goes to the artists.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nevertheless, the fact that they codified the Serial Copy Management System in 1992 so that you could only make first-generation copies is indicative of the acceptability and widespread practice of format-shifting. I maintain that most people consider it their fair right to move their music to other formats if they want.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I don't think that our rationales collide - I think that they are complementary :) I'm about the same age, and I spent a good portion of my youth making really high-quality tapes from my CDs. I'd spend extra on the good Type II or IV tapes and play with the recording levels... no wonder I turned into a geek engineer! I even figured out that a hi-fi VCR would give you almost CD-quality sound, and so I started "mastering" my mixes on VHS and then making cassette copies of them. I also had a local station that played the whole record late Sunday night.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The big difference between MP3 and tape is the convenience. You can stick a CD into iTunes and have all of your music in 2 minutes on a big hard drive. You don't have to lug tapes around anymore, or spend an hour copying the album to tape. Instead of hovering by the radio waiting for a song that you like to come on, you can just fire up Kazaa and download the track. If MP3s had resolution no better than tape, they'd still be popular.
Video might be next - I can't be the only one who grew up in a household where my father taped movies off of HBO instead of buying them at the store...
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
People do still feel the same.
Going from CD to a lossy format does have a significant loss of quality.
The side effects might be different, (once you learn to recognise them) they're quite apparent, especially at low bitrates often offered for download.
I did dislike the loss of quality but the convenience of tapes at the time seemed worth it.
Nowadays with cheap portable storage available it's actually quite amazing to me how much loss of quality the general public seems to easily accept when it's technically not at all necessary any more.
MP3's are just a mobile form of my music, they're not going to form the basis of my library.
Hell, better yet, I'd pay even more for lossless DRM-free audio that's sampled at a higher resolution than CD. Maybe a buck a song or something.
The market is there, I'm thinking, but nobody is selling the equivalent of CD audio, much less something better. CDs even come with a physical backup!
[javac] 100 errors
Will there be a way of 'upgrading' current crippled music to DRM-free, or will we have to pay and download the whole thing again if we want to be crazy and transfer it to several of our own computers?
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I think the answer might lie not in more fields, but in repeatable fields. I'm drawing on my experience as a library cataloger here. The record format that we use most commonly in my field is called MARC (for MAchine Readable Cataloging... or "Cataloguing" if you are in an English-speaking country other than the US), and, instead of having a field for every possible role a person or corporate body (not as in a corporation in the business sense of the word, but in the literal sense, so "The Beatles", "The Berlin Philharmonic" or "Blue Note Records" would all be considered corporate bodies), there are fields for names which can be repeated for every name you want to add to a record and a subfield can be applied to each entry, identifying the role the person or corporate body plays in the production of the work.
... etc.
Very interesting. Although in retrospect your explanation makes sense, I didn't quite understand what you meant about MARC until I did a little reading. Anyone else who is interested might want to have a look at this LoC publication. I agree that the way they do things is pretty nice (although, being an old format, they're really niggardly about bits in the headers). I think if you were good about establishing conventions, it would even be possible to hammer such a system into a schema that only provided for arbitrary Key=Value pairs (no explicit 'subfields').
Artist0 = "Beethoven, Ludwig van"
Artist0-type = Composer
Artist1 = "Klemperer, Otto"
Artist1-type = Conductor
The real problem, given that AAC files do have the capability of arbitrary Key=Value pairs, is really the interface; what iTunes really needs is a metadata browser that's more like Aperture's (which is excellent); allowing you to define 'views' for commonly used metadata but also view and edit the pairs associated with a file directly if you wish.
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Cassettes are dead, man, and the updated technology no longer includes this capability.
You're being obtuse. I didn't say anything about satellite or digital radio. The parent refered to recording songs off of FM radio, which you can still do today. And why do you automatically assume cassette tapes? Why not directly to your computer?
Still, a tape was more than good enough in a portable or in the car. MP3s are lossy, and most people seem happy with them, so I don't know what you mean when you say that "people don't feel the same way anymore."
You're ignoring the context. The parent was talking about DRM being a "culture shock" because it apparently prevents the kind of format-shifting described above. In fact, it permits exactly the same loss-inducing kind.
My point is that where once it was "acceptable" to record a CD onto a tape, incurring a loss of quality (perceptible or not), in the DRM-era it is "unacceptable" to incur any loss or face any obstacle when format-shifting. Saying "burn/rerip" can get you shot in some circles, even though it actually works.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
...but, it has two, count them, two!, A's in the name! One of them must stand for Apple!
The grandparent was talking about CD-to-tape as a counter-example to DRM. Not CD-to-lossy digital. If you had read the thread, you might have caught that.
I did dislike the loss of quality but the convenience of tapes at the time seemed worth it.
My point: This is the kind of thing people don't say about DRM. Incurring a loss in exchange for added convenience isn't widely accepted anymore. I personally find this kind of silly, and especially silly when it's highlighted in a comment like that above.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
Well, I'm not PURPOSELY being obtuse :)
:) The vast majority of people will burn and re-rip if they must. I know quite a few people that just dragged their Microsoft-encoded WMA music over to iTunes, only vaguely aware that it had to "convert" it. The sheer number of 128 kb/s MP3s on P2P should be indicative that quality is not paramount for most people. If they actually get DRM to work, people will in fact go back to the analog hole.
I meant that no one markets a product like the old boom boxes, where recording from the radio was as easy as holding down two buttons when you wanted to record. The radio shark is cool, but is not built-in to any "boom box" type device that I am aware of. Still, I would have killed for it and Snaptune when I was a kid.
People are now used to random access - the old "wait for the tape to record the radio in real-time" thing was a drag even in the old days, and it sure can't compete with Kazaa today. I actually do the modern equivalent - I listen to Pandora all day and when I hear a great song I fish it out of the cache.
As for the quality issue, the only circles that you will get shot for using burn/rerip in are Slashdot and HydrogenAudio
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
So let's say I already own an album I bought on iTunes, the DRM version. The question at hand for the last several messages is, how much will it cost me to upgrade the album I already bought, and get the DRM free higher bitrate version?
For a single song, that cost to me to upgrade the song, will be $0.30. That's because the DRM-free version costs $0.30 more. So now take the album, which I have already bought for $9.99 - how much will Apple charge to upgrade those songs to be DRM free and of higher quality? Will it be $0, since a DRM free album on iTunes costs $9.99 as well, which is what I already paid (since I own the album). Or will it be $0.30 a song to upgrade just the songs I like, even though I already paid for the whole album on iTunes before?
I already own the album that I bought on iTunes. How much will it cost me to upgrade to the DRM free version, nbot purchase again, but upgrade to the DRM free version?
That's the question, ofr which you have no answer. I'll let you re-post your same answer again, waste as much of your own time as you like.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Jesus, all the replies took this seriously. Next time I'll make the heading, "Sarcastic," ok?
Twice you came back with the simple answer of what an album COST, not the upgrade COST or any acknowledgment you even understood we were talking about upgrades.
If you had showed any intelligence in terms of reading comprehension across multiple messages, I would not have belittled it. If you had in fact shown any ability to help rather than repeat yourself like, well, an idiot - I would not have belittled you. As it was you were of no use and couldn't seem to read the simplest of messages.
I have also researched the question and come back with no answer. But I know how to compose a response in such a way that it indicates I understand the question being asked, even if I don't know more details. If you don't want people to call you an idiot improve your responses to queries.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Offering DRM-free audio to other labels isn't that surprising. What gets me is the DRM-free music videos. Jobs has taken care not to imply that video (movies) should be DRM-free. I'd like to see other types of video show up, short movies, clips, etc.
Move along, no sig to see here.
Analog audio copying was rampant, and the music industry was terrified of digital copying. They tried to stave it off by restricting the hardware, and they succeeded until general-purpose computers became powerful enough to handle audio. Now it's too late, and people won't put up with government restrictions on the use of their computers. At least, that's my Humble Opinion
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Close.
Except that MP3 was originally MPEG-1 part 3. And from page 1 of ISO/IEC 13818-7 (warning:PDF file) (page 7 of the PDF):
Thus, what the GP said, ("AAC [wikipedia.org] isn't Apple's codec. It's the MPEG group's replacement for MP3."), is pretty much correct.
Ehrmm.. I did catch that. I have read the thread.
My point was that both CD to tape and cd to lossy digital lose a considerable amount of audio quality so there's no real difference there.
There's already a considerable loss even without considering DRM.
Therefore incurring a loss in exchange for added convenience still IS very widely accepted.
Anyone downloading 128kbps or 192kbps lossy audio is getting a lower quality copy just like copying to tape.
Different artefacts than tape but lower quality and easily distinguishable from the original nonetheless.
I personally find that silly because technically it isn't necessary anymore to accept that loss.
This is the important point - dr. badass is trying to make a point about how losing quality is no longer acceptable yet everyone was fine with it for years, and while true, there's no point to be made beyond a statement of fact. It's no longer acceptable because it's no longer necessary, and with the coming of the internet and places like HydrogenAudio showing up in google searches more and more "regular" people are becoming aware of audio fidelity issues.
The only reason people accepted low fidelity recordings, as in cd, vinyl, or radio to cassette, or even cassette to cassette, is out of ignorance that there was anything better. Listening on the built-in speakers on your boombox or the cheap headphones that came with your walkman or the stock car radio or whatever, the difference wasn't even noticeable unless it was a really bad copy. True high fidelity affordable to regular people is a new concept.
Now, many are willing to part with hundreds of dollars for mp3 players, all of which are capable of excellent sound quality. Then they read reviews on amazon saying the included earbuds are crap and that they should buy something better, and they do. Then maybe they start to notice that the 128kbps or less mp3s they downloaded from Napster back in the day don't sound as good as the ones they ripped off of a cd themselves recently.
The point is many "regular" consumers these days are much more educated on technical matters than even ten years ago, and this is not a bad thing - it's called progress. It brings the price down for high-quality products so those of us who really appreciate the latest and greatest technologies can actually afford it too.
With this knowledge comes the realization that the old, easy ways of getting music, like copying to a cassette or burning and re-ripping your itunes, equal inferior sound quality that is finally noticeable with the most common music-listening device of the day, which is now ipods and mp3 players, with excellent headphones costing less than $100 or even $50. This drives people to want to be able to listen to what they want without having to sacrifice quality to get around DRM or whatever the problem is, because a drop in sound quality is noticeable and distracting.
That said, the vast majority of people are still fine with lossy copy methods, and most would probably be perfectly happy with cassettes if they weren't deemed un-cool these days. With the ripping, burning, and re-ripping of cds that happens in some groups, the quality can get as bad or worse than cassettes. Heck, a lot of people probably don't own any music themselves except maybe a couple of top 40 cds they got as a gift or something, and listen to everything on their radio with built-in low-fidelity speakers.
There is some amount of HDTV content available from unencrypted broadcasts, but that's not directly relevant to my original point, I think.
While you can record over-the-air HDTV signals legally and fairly easily (at least for now), you can't buy that content in a store without having copy protection applied to it.
The record labels love you for wasting money needlessly on their behalf.
:)
I never said I bought cds from them.
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I stand corrected.
However, MP3 also refers to MPEG-2 part 3 layer 3, which is an enhancement to MPEG-1 part 3 layer 3 supporting more than two channels. So I was right in that AAC existed in the same specification as MPEG-2 audio layer 3, but not the original MPEG-1 audio layer 3.
My bet: Similar to the AppleTV, the iPhone will have most of Mac OS X. No Finder, of course, and possibly no Carbon, but most of the basic stuff that makes up OS X.
Good points, but I think it's way simpler than that. Music is something you use again and again. Most people listen to the music they listened to when they were 20 for their whole life. You're going through a lot of different hardware during that time, and you want to take your music with you. In my case, I went from vinyl to cassettes to CD to MP3 to AAC. I re-bought some stuff, but generally, I would have preferred to just keep the music I already own, and move it to new formats.
Movies are different. You watch them once, then you don't watch them for 5 or 10 years. Or ever again. Hence, re-buying them isn't that much of an issue. Hence, DRM is somewhat acceptable.