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.)

Comments

Why is RIAA asking this?

[BabbageTuring]

Is this to prevent home grown artists from recording their own high quality material?

Re:Why is RIAA asking this?

[Lumenary7204]

Parent modded as "Funny", but you know, the "Independent musician invoking antitrust against the RIAA" thing might just have something going for it.

Too bad you'd need a huge chunk of capital just to get the legal ball rolling...

Re:Next Story:

[Free the Cowards]

Actually you can still take screenshots. There are three easy ways. One is to use Grab.app. Another is to use the 'screencapture' command line tool in Terminal. And lastly you can use any third-party screen capture program. Apple half-assedly only disables the standard keyboard shortcuts. This is typical of their compliance with required terms for media playback. For example, the standard DVD player contract also requires making a reasonable effort to disable debuggers. Apple does this by calling ptrace(PT_DENY_ATTACH, 0, 0, 0) during application startup. This causes the application to crash if it's being run in the debugger, and causes any debugger attached to the application later to crash. It's laughably easy to work around, though; just set a breakpoint on the ptrace function, then tell the debugger to return immediately when it's hit. Presto!

Re:Use?

[billcopc]

Yep it's ridiculous but true. For all you disbelievers, try recording "silence" on your Stereo Mix. Not so silent now, is it ?

I actually hadn't used this feature in ages, but I did a few weeks ago to rip a friend's tune on some lame-ass artist site... the MP3 download was "disabled" and the guy wasn't answering his phone, so I just recorded the streamed output from my onboard sound. Hello noise! I was seeing -48db peaks, maybe -58db average; it's almost inaudible but still not what I expected.

So just to be sure it wasn't the actual source file that was noisy, I did the same thing via my old M-Audio Audiophile 2496, using its "Monitor Mixer", and that one was perfectly clean. I would expect any card with an Envy24 chip to perform the same, as it does this virtual mixing at the digital stage, right on the chip.

There used to be a nice "virtual audio cable" freeware, but Google only turns up some $30 whoreware offering that's clogging up the index.

Re:Use?

[TheGratefulNet]

this MAY be only for the 'junk' cards like creative.

yes, you heard me. creative resamples (!) to 48k. always. even if the input is ALREADY at 48k!

historically, they have been evil like this.

and so, its not surprising that you get resampled junk when you put silence on the input.

also, while I'm on the subject, 'dolby digital LIVE' is also junk. it tried to convert regular stereo to '5.1' but it does some analog conversions (I'm pretty sure) where you should have an all digital chain. the fidelity is NOT there, its NOT good and should be avoided. if you have 2 channel audio, just LEAVE it as 2 channel and don't get caught in this marketing LIE about upsampling to 5.1 channel mode. you gain nothing good from that and the DD live chipsets are junk.

good ones: cmedia (cmi) 8738 series. better one: envy24 chipset. those do NOT resample and are bit-perfect.