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5.1 Sound Card Delivers 3 Streams of iTunes
An anonymous reader writes "How do you distribute simultaneous streams of DRM-protected iTunes from a single computer to multiple rooms of the house? Autonomic Controls demonstrated a unique solution at the recent Electronic House Expo (EHX). The company's Media Control Server EX software turns a PC with a 5.1 sound card into a three-zone music distribution server. (Add a second card for six outputs). At EHX, the solution was demonstrated with a multiroom audio system from NuVo, whose keypads could be used to browse and select songs, playlists, genres, artists, etc. The Autonomic software merges WMA and iTunes files into a single library for easy access." I have mixed feelings about this: on one hand, this is a really clever idea and a cool hack. On the other hand, the fact that DRM makes something like this necessary is truly infuriating.
What's wrong with a low end mini-itx box with passive cooling?
I enjoy the heck out of my Squeezebox Duet. A two-room system would be about $550, which is about half the Sonos price, so I guess it would be 2X a reasonable price for you. But it's still great.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
iTunes DRM doesn't stop you playing your music on multiple devices. With DRM-ed iTunes tracks the devices would have to be computers or iPods; with DRM-free music (which plenty of people, including iTunes, sell) they'd have to be computers or any old MP3 player. You could burn a CD using either and use the CD player you already have. Not that I like DRM, I don't, but in this example iTunes reasonably permissive DRM doesn't present a very big hurdle.
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It's all about combining your various music file collections into one virtual collection. This device is cool because it can merge all your disparate collections into one big playlist, regardless of format (and regardless of whether some of the content is DRM'd).
BTW, it is *not* helpful to keep blaming DRM for everything and anything. It only dilutes the argument against DRM when your claims are false, giving ammunition to its defenders.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
What's wrong with a Airport Express? A hundred bucks per output. And a $25 more for a copy of Airfoil to patch your subscription service into that.
I've been doing it for 4 years now (give or take) and love it. Had it come out a year earlier I could have saved a lot of dough on a high end CD player.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
i think the .1 part is the subwoofer, but that is not required to only have the low tones. You can send a full spectrum through that line.
[blockquote]Installing the analog wiring in all my rooms would cost me thousands of dollars.[/blockquote] These contractors you're hiring, they're getting paid by the hour, yeah?
What the hell are you talking about? I don't know where you shop, but last I checked you could get about 700,000 feet of suitable analog wiring (be it RCA, speaker wire or 3.5mm jacks) -- enough to wire my entire house, anyway -- for well under $100 at Walmart. And, you know, I'm talking wire of suitable quality as to not be any worse than the DSPs on this soundcard.
Got an attic? Basement?
Whale
That's unlikely, they have way more titles: Apple now has 2 million songs from EMI and independent labels available without DRM, out of its 6 million-song catalog. Amazon offers 4.5 million DRM-free songs.
Ah. Fairplay restrictions (quoted from Wikipedia):
.m4p files
FairPlay-encrypted audio tracks allow the following:
* The track may be copied to any number of iPod portable music players.[1]
* The track may be played on up to five (originally three) authorized computers simultaneously.[1]
* A particular playlist within iTunes containing a FairPlay-encrypted track can be copied to a CD only up to seven times (originally ten times) before the playlist must be changed.[2]
* The track may be copied to a standard Audio CD any number of times.[2]
o The resulting CD has no DRM and may be ripped, encoded and played back like any other CD. However, CDs created by users do not attain first sale rights and cannot be legally leased, lent, sold or distributed to others by the creator.
o The CD audio still bears the artifacts of compression, so converting it back into a lossy format such as MP3 may aggravate the sound artifacts of encoding (see transcoding). When re-ripping such a CD one could use a lossless audio codec such as AIFF, Apple Lossless, FLAC or WAV however such files take up significantly more space than the original
At this time, it appears that the restrictions mentioned above are hard-coded into QuickTime and the iTunes application, and not configurable in the protected files themselves.
An artifact of Fairplay is that it prevents iTunes customers from using the purchased music directly on any portable digital music player other than the Apple iPod, Motorola ROKR E1, Motorola SLVR, Motorola RAZR V3i,or iPhone.
oo
Unless your group of choice happens to not be on EMI? IIRC the ITMS DRM-free selection is a little limited.
For remote control, use one of the iPhone/Touch programs: Touchpad Pro or Telekinesis. I'm sure there are others.
mod me funny
Although they still charge $0.30 per track to upgrade existing DRM-encumbered tracks to non-DRM tracks, they no longer charge a higher price to buy non-DRM (iTunes Plus) tracks.
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$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;