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Dell Colludes With RIAA, Disables Stereo Mix
RCTrucker7 writes with a link to a Maximum PC story, which begins: "Details of Dell's surreptitious collusion with RIAA (Record Industry Association of America) have emerged. Apparently, the computer manufacturer disabled the Stereo Mix/Mono Mix/Wave Out sound recording function on certain notebooks to assuage RIAA. The hardware functionality is being disabled without any prior notice and one blogger has even alleged that he was asked by Dell's customer support staff to [shell] out $99 if he desired the stereo mix option. Gateway and Pac Bell are the other two manufacturers to have bowed to RIAA at the expense of their customers' satisfaction and disabled stereo mix without warning." (There are some workarounds posted in the comments of the linked article.)
Nope. If you trace back the trail of links, the link for appeasing the riaa goes to a forum post that only mentions the details of the registry workaround. This was already determined to be hearsay on days ago when the story broke. Congratulations to the /. editors for their diligence.
...and you've eaten your pen. simply stunning.
in the US yes, but in Europe they are still a major player.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
correct - any musician wanting decent sound quality will use an spdif (or similar) interface and do the analog/digital conversion outside the computer.
these days, if you need only 2 channel stereo you can use a usb-audio input device and there are ones that have spdif toslink (opto) inputs. then you front-end that with an a/d converter, maybe a small mixer and you're all set. can be done for $100 or so and you'll get bit-perfect recording. usb-audio (asynch) drivers are driverless! so there's nothing 'they' can disable on you.
same with usb-audio style spdif out devices. those run in synch mode and they are also driverless (mac, win, linux, bsd, you name it). you can find usb audio dongles that support 2496 samplerates and even DD5.1/DTS via raw mode.
no one that would be 'serious' would use the analog i/o ports on a notebook for recording.
BUT that does not let dell off the hook for hobling their own goddamn hardware. no excuse for that kind of behavior. shame on dell. I will remember this stunt for the next time an IT manager type asks me which brand of hardware we should go with.
vote with your dollars. avoid dell and when asked, TELL them why.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
AKAIK the DVD plays in an "overlay" layer... it's not rendered to the player's window like normal windows graphics but it's rather placed on top of it (in a similar fashion to directX, I assume). That would explain why screen captures (which must work at windows UI graphic level) don't capture DVD or divX frames.
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
You have to turn your hardware acceleration off.
Right-click
Properties
Settings Tab
Advanced
Troubleshoot Tab
Drag slider to the left
Take you pictures and just slide it back to the right.
1 4/\/\ 1337
Welcome to the dreadful hack that is the Windows graphics overlay system. It allocates a very specific color that will be treated as a video area by the video card, so that it won't overlap windows that should be on top. It's clever, but XVideo in the open source world is much better. As usual.
Sam ty sig.
Indeed. Techdirt had an article about this two days ago.
I seriously doubt Photoshop would stop you, but that's just me. It seems a little pointless to have photo-editing software try to do that.
That said, for years scanners, copiers, and I believe laser prints have been designed to try to detect people copying currency and refuse to print. It may happen in ink jets and other printers too. I believe it is only the high end models though.
There is also the "invisible" yellow dot tracking that so many printers do today (you can Google it, or I know it's been discussed here years ago).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I seriously doubt Photoshop would stop you, but that's just me. It seems a little pointless to have photo-editing software try to do that.
Are you sure about that?
There is also the "invisible" yellow dot tracking that so many printers do today (you can Google it, or I know it's been discussed here years ago).
I'm well aware of it. I guess the anonymous "printing press" was just too much for the Government to contemplate leaving around.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
As it turns out, the editors are basing this on complete hearsay. Nobody knows if the RIAA were even involved in this.
Sorry to reply to myself, but I forgot to add that Dell is not the only one that distributes drivers that disable stereo mix. Lenovo has these problems too:
http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/message?board.id=Special_Interest_General&thread.id=316&view=by_date_ascending&page=1
It's quite a popular thread, and Lenovo reps have posted too.
Dismissed at the pleading stage for failure to state a claim for which relief can be granted. There is no legal theory on this planet that would make a third party (even a disreputable one like the RIAA) responsible for the Dell's choice to include or exclude some features from a driver. Perhaps you could proceed in a fraud case against Dell IF somewhere they claimed stereo-mix as a feature or, and this is a huge stretch, general merchantability.
More broadly, I suggest you stop thinking of the legal system is a cure-all for every practice you don't like. The law is not meant to be an all-encompassing tool for redressing every wrong but rather a minimal standard of civilized decency. While I'm no fan of the RIAA, and many of their tactics are indeed illegal (I'll let NYCL flesh those out), this particular odious act is still well within the law.
Yep. Video overlay. This occurs for pretty much any video in any video player that uses overlays. No conspiracy there.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
An easier way to do is to take advantage of the fact that Windows XP can only use the hardware to render one video stream at a time*. So:
1. Start up some video player and have it play any old video file.
2. Pause this video player (optional).
3. Start up another video player and have it play the file you want to take screenshots of. Windows will render this video using software.
4. Capture your screenshots.
*Some fancy video cards may have drivers to work around this limitation. It also probably won't work in Vista.
From the techdirt link posted above:
However, there seems to be no evidence whatsoever that the RIAA had any part in this. On the whole, it sounds like someone just made a bad decision in terms of how to configure certain sound cards. If someone can provide any evidence that the RIAA actually had a role in this, we'll post an update, but there's no reason to jump to conclusions without any evidence. That's what the RIAA does.
Yep, plenty of facts! Can't get more conclusive than that! RIAA is caught red-handed.
I guess FUD works both ways.
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
What's also funny is that typically the Stereo Mix functionality is implemented post-DAC. So when you're recording from stereo mix, the signal goes:
Output->DAC->ADC->Stereo Mix
So modulo electrical noise on the microphone and headphone jack, you get essentially the same result you'd get as if you went:
Output->DAC->Headphone Jack-> $6.00 Cable->Line In Jack->ADC->Line In
... that I encountered this issue just yesterday for the first time on a new Dell laptop (with SigmaTel sound) when I needed to record from the stereo mix -- for lawful uses, mind you.
I did some googling of my own and found other users who located a Dell driver (R171789) for XP that can be installed in Vista using the XP-SP2 compatibility mode option. I found this driver, installed it as prescribed, went into Vista's Recording Devices, told it to show and enable all disabled devices, and boom, there was my stereo mix. So far I have been recording without any issues.
So yeah, without question it sucks that I even had to go through that, but it took me 10 minutes of research and even less than that to enable and configure.
I hope this helps somebody.
This is the one I use:
http://www.fridgesoft.de/downloads.php
"UPDATE: HarddiskOgg is now Open Source, the source code is available on SourceForge."
It says it's not for streaming audio, but it worked on the radio interview I mentioned above.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
Unbeliever here, so just tried it. Perfect digital silence. [Relatively] old dell laptop (D505) with SigmaTel C-Major low end sound card.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Said options were disabled on my computer too. When I finally required its use, I got around to fixing it by going to SigmaTel's web site and acquiring updated drivers. The 'Stereo Mix' option then appeared and worked without issues.
Don't forget Microsoft's Remote Desktop.
It's very fast. NX might have the advantage on Unix, but RDP is certainly a legitimately good product.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
OK, here is ALL of the evidence that the RIAA has been strongarming Dell into this behaviour:
(from http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/32286847/vista-audio-solution--wh.aspx)
"Many of you may have been as frustrated as myself by Micrsoft bowing to the RIAA
and pressuring the soundcard manufacturers to remove the "What You Hear" feature
from their drivers."
Oh, yeah, and there's the other article which points to it, on http://www.ripten.com/2008/07/07/bend-over-dude-youre-getting-a-dell/:
"Some believe that Dell, and several other computer manufacturers such as Gateway and Pac Bell, were pressured by the RIAA (Record Industry Association of America) into disabling the stereo mix functionality." ...
"So that we are all clear, the evidence points to Dell appeasing the RIAA by disabling hardware, only to have their customer service reps turn around and offer a solution to their consumers that reverses the alteration they made in the first place at a premium price."
Yep, that's it. One guy claimed it with absolutely no evidence, and so it's apparently true. Another guy wilfully misinterpreted some random tech support guy's suggestion, and now we have a collusion between Dell and the RIAA. Wow, this is investigative reporting at its finest!
My Dell laptop at work didn't have a way of turning off the damned 'tap to click' feature of the touchpad. I spent ages looking for a downloadable driver to make that feature work. Based on the rules of logic illustrated above, this is clearly a sign of collusion between Dell and Logitech.
Honestly, aren't there enough examples of corporate bullshit that we don't have to invent false ones?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
How many people even use stereo mix? You record what's playing through your speakers. Any decent sound editing program is going to have some kind of mixer that will combine your recording with whatever you were playing along with.
My friend has a Dell, and for some reason you can't burn CDs with EAC on it. What we wind up doing when we're putting our LPs on CD is burn the .wav to CD as a data CD, then I take it home and burn it as a music CD. Oddly, his Dell will let you copy music CDs with no problem. So ironically, "fair use" is disabled while copyright infringement is not.
And unless by "speakers" you mean your guitar amp, if you are recording your speakers with a microphone you're doing it wrong. See an article I posted on K5 a few years ago, How to rip from vinyl or tape.
Dell is not the only one that distributes drivers that disable stereo mix. Lenovo has these problems too
So if Ford Crown Victorias explode when hit in the rear, it's OK for Chevy to make exploding cars? Your logic is quite faulty there.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest