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Sony BMG Dropping DRM
Lally Singh writes "BusinessWeek is reporting that Sony BMG is planning on dropping DRM from their music. Salon's Machinest had an interesting take on this; 'Actually, what's happened is quite ironic. It was the industry's own DRM mandates that tied many music-lovers in to Apple's music storefront (we all had iPods, and the only way to buy digital music for the iPod was from Apple). Now Apple's become too powerful for the labels. They need an alternative distribution channel — they want to get music to our iPods, but they don't want to go through Apple to do it. The only way to do that is to offer retailers like Amazon the chance to sell songs as plain, unrestricted MP3s, which are iPoddable.'"
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
I still have never seen a definitive answer to the AAC vs. MP3 debate other than that, for me, my 5 "Digital Audio Players" all play mp3's and none play AAC. AAC may be a better format, but is it in Apple's implementation in iTunes? I know you can pay more for higher bitrate songs now, but when iTunes first opened I went out and bought 20 songs. Just out of curiosity I bought a few I already owned on CD. I then burned them to a CD and ripped them back as WAVs. Then, I ripped the songs off of my CDs and encoded them to MP3 at 128kb with a good Fraunhofer MP3 encoder (not LAME or MusicMatch or some of the other crappy encoders most people used at that time, there is a big difference), and then converted them back to WAVs. And, to be honest, I couldn't really hear any difference. So, I played both WAVs (from AAC and MP3) through a spectrum analyzer, and the visual difference was obvious. The Apple AAC sourced WAVs were extremely clipped on the high end compared to the ones from the MP3s that I had encoded. Therefore, I have never bothered to try iTunes again. Things may be better now, but with all of the DRM free MP3 stores popping up, I will be going to them first.
Nevermore.
I just checked the FAQ and it says you only get one download. That's too bad. It would be nice if Amazon could keep track of which track you have a license for and allow you to download those songs anytime you like.
Erm, managing a gamestop is like being a stripper: if your daughter has to resort to that, you done fucked up as a father.
In other words, "I'm a smug asshole and you're all inferior to me."
Not all, just the Windows users.
A blog about stuff.