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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.'"
rumor has it, iTunes will support DVD ripping (for 20th century FOX movies) as part of the FOX movie rental deal. It might be announced at MacWorld later this month.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The article goes on to explain that this has to do with price control. As by far the leading distributor of online music, Apple can maintain a $.99 price point for all songs. The record labels want variable pricing (more than $.99 for some songs, presumably, and hopefully something like $.01 for things like Britney Spears's new crap but that's too optimistic) and by striking contracts with Amazon and other distributors they might be able to put some pressure on Apple in this regard.
I like basketball!!1!
The change of heart only happening after Christmas may have been because the holiday sales of CDs this year sucked, down 20%.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
If someone would be willing to use an "unauthorized" patch, then why don't they just use Handbrake now? It's no more illegal, and just as easy!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Yep. Memory Stick is why I wouldn't buy Sony electronics before the rootkit/DRM/etc.; the rootkit/DRM/etc. is why I'll continue to boycott them even for products that don't have Memory Stick readers.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Everybody talks as if Apple dies or thrives on Itunes sales.
WRONG!
Most analysts agree and Apple has all but confirmed they make almost NO money on the itunes store. Rather it's just a vehicle to sell more hardware (ipods, iphones, isomethings). Geeks like devices that have lots of options, and we like to crap on the ipod due lack of this or that feature. Normal non-geeks have been buying the ipod and associated devices due to other reasons other than for the the online itunes store. The idea if itunes goes away the ipod will vanish into oblivion is crazy. If Amazon gets bigger than itunes and Apple can still make a player that sells better than the others it's a win-win situation for them.
Amazon uses VBR with the average song being between 196 and 256kbps. At that quality an MP3 is indistinguishable from a CD even on high-end speakers. The only advantage of AAC is that it can achieve those rates with smaller file sizes. Since the vast majority of files sold by Apple are ony 128kbps with DRM, there's no contest here.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
More likely, Fox will include "iTunes" versions of movies on their DVDs which can be imported. They'll probably use the same encryption that downloaded movies use to prevent them from being used in a non-authorized manner.
I'm curious. What makes LAME "crappy"? I don't know about low-bitrates like 128kbit and lower but I've done alt-preset-extreme VBRs with it for years and those mp3s sound as good as anything else I've heard. Even with decent amps and speakers, they sound about as good as the CDs I made them from. I'll grant the filesize is a tad large but all the music I've been collecting for 18 odd years still fits under 20GB.