Music Pirates Won't Rush To iCloud For Forgiveness

An anonymous reader writes "Lots of people have suggested there's a loophole in Apple's new iCloud that will allow people who illegally download music to somehow 'launder' their dirty music files, getting a nice clean, and legal, license to the music stored on iCloud. This argument is flawed for two main reasons. The first has to do with how the laws of copyright work and the second is to do with why people share or download music (and movies) in the first place."

Comments

Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[winterphoenix]

One thing the article missed was the fact that iTunes match will allows users to download 256kbps versions of the music in their libraries, regardless of the bitrate the user originally had. I know a lot of people who would be willing to pay $25 to upgrade their entire music collection to that bitrate, regardless of whether their collection was obtained legitimately or not.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Lunaritian]

True audiophiles listen to lossless though.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Hatta]

Correct. True audiophiles use $100 speaker cables too. There's unfortunately no word that means "normal person who wants his music to sound good without buying into the woo".

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[SanityInAnarchy]

There are practical reasons for lossless, however. Where lossy media hurt is a generational loss -- maybe on my desktop or on devices which support it, I'd prefer Ogg Vorbis. Maybe if I had an iPod, AAC would be better. My feature phone likes MP3, and that's also useful if I want to share it with people. And maybe someone wants me to burn a CD, and maybe they will then rip that CD into their own lossy format.

AAC 256k sounds fine. But generational losses do eventually add up, and disk space is cheap, so there's no good reason to put up with them.

And no, I don't have $100 speaker cables. I'd much rather have $100 headphones.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Skarecrow77]

Audiophiles get a bad rap for spending money on things that nobody can really tell a difference between, but really it's all a sliding scale of how much "better" (or "different") do you want to get vs. how much money do you not care if you spend.

I bought the $200 headphone cable for my $400 headphones back when I had money to burn (ah the good ole days). Was it noticeably better than the $12 cable that comes with the headphones? yes. was it $188 better? Hell fucking no. not in my opinion anyway.

Are my $400 headphones better than my $250 headphones? maybe. probably. not by very much though. Are both of them better than my $100 headphones? yes. Are $1200 headphones better than anything I own? Probably... but also likely not by very much.

Just like any given hobby, the first small/medium sized chunk of money into gets you 90% of the ultimate potential quality, and then you can spend hundreds more to get to 95%, then thousands to get to 99%, and then possibly never get to 100% no matter how much you spend.

When you hear audiophiles rave over "how much product X is than product Y", what they're generally doing is disregarding that first 90% of quality that everybody has, and talking about the differences, the remaining 10% or so. Because that's not clear to the casual reader, they look like idiots for spending $100 on a cable that makes almost no difference. Perhaps they are spending irresponsibly if that money should be going elsewhere to bills, etc... but if they have the money to spend, who is to say that whatever enjoyment they're getting out of their super low oxygen, quadruple shielded, magnesium tipped, fluorescent purple cables isn't worth every penny they spent, to them at least?

Note, I'm not talking about the people who are off the scientific deep end and debating which brand SATA cable attached to their hard drive produces the best sounding mp3s.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[mcgrew]

The nice thing about digital sound is that you no longer need such expensive equipment (except your speakers/headphones). That's good for us normal folks who don't have mountains of cash, bad for audiophiles. In the analog world, the more you spent, the better it sounded. A $500 turntable sounded far more lifelike than a $50 turntable. With digital, there's no audible difference between a $500 CD changer and a $20 CD player. High quality amplifiers have gotten so cheap that what used to be a $2,000 amp now is more like $50 (like all electronics; an IBM PC with no hard drive, 4 mz chip and 64k memory was $5,000. A twenty five inch TV cost $600 in 1976, these days you can get a 42 inch high definition flat screen for less).

An LP on a high end turntable through an amp with less than 1 db of distortion or noise played through a pair of four-way enclosures with eighteen inch woofers, a pair of different sized squawkers, a tweeter and a supertweeter will fool you into thinking it's a live performance; that's what hifi (high fidelity) means. It will sound better than the same record in CD format (provided the original studio tapes were analog).

However, with a low end (more affordable) system, the CD will always sound better than an LP. The low end turntable will lack bass, since it will be attenuated to reduce rumble, and will lack treble to make up for the lack of bass. It may also have speed slightly off and may even have a tiny bit of flutter (but you usually only get flutter from tape). It will also introduce distortion and may not have very good separation. Cheap CD players, on the other hand, send the same numbers to the DAC as as an expensive one, and until it reaches the analog DAC the cable the signal runs through doesn't matter at all; it either works or doesn't.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[bmo]

I have a PhD in Digital Music Conservation from the University of Florida. I have to stress that the phenomenon known as "digital dust" is the real problem regarding conservation of music, and any other type of digital file. Digital files are stored in digital filing cabinets called "directories" which are prone to "digital dust" - slight bit alterations that happen now or then. Now, admittedly, in its ideal, pristine condition, a piece of musical work encoded in FLAC format contains more information than the same piece encoded in MP3, however, as the FLAC file is bigger, it accumulates, in fact, MORE digital dust than the MP3 file. Now you might say that the density of dust is the same. That would be a naive view. Since MP3 files are smaller, they can be much more easily stacked together and held in "drawers" called archive files (Zip, Rar, Lha, etc.) ; in such a configuration, their surface-to-volume ratio is minimized. Thus, they accumulate LESS digital dust and thus decay at a much slower rate than FLACs. All this is well-known in academia, alas the ignorant hordes just think that because it's bigger, it must be better.

So over the past months there's been some discussion about the merits of lossy compression and the rotational velocidensity issue. I'm an audiophile myself and posses a vast collection of uncompressed audio files, but I do want to assure the casual low-bitrate users that their music library is quite safe.

Being an audio engineer for over 21 years, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. While rotational velocidensity is indeed responsible for some deterioration of an unanchored file, there's a simple way of preventing this. Better still, there have been some reported cases of damaged files repairing themselves, although marginally so (about 1.7 percent for the .ogg format).

The procedure is, although effective, rather unorthodox. Rotational velocidensity, as known only affects compressed files, i.e. files who's anchoring has been damaged during compression procedures. Simply mounting your hard disk upside down enables centripetal forces to cancel out the rotational ruptures in the disk. As I said, unorthodox, and mainstream manufactures will not approve as it hurts sales (less rotational velocidensity damage means a slighter chance of disk failure.)

I'd still go with uncompressed .wav myself, but there's nothing wrong with compressed formats like flac or mp3 when you treat your hardware right

--
BMO

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[woolpert]

An LP on a high end turntable through an amp with less than 1 db of distortion or noise

Yea, because the amp is the weakest link in that chain. LOL

It will sound better than the same record in CD format

This is nothing more than an unsubstantiated claim that LPs are capable of fidelity beyond what 16bits @ 44.1 kHz PCM can deliver.

Where, exactly, do LPs have the advantage?

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Skarecrow77]

*golf clap

I was going to give you a "cool story bro", but that's actually a rather impressive piece there, I award you one internet.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Alex Belits]

I bought the $200 headphone cable for my $400 headphones back when I had money to burn (ah the good ole days). Was it noticeably better than the $12 cable that comes with the headphones? yes. was it $188 better? Hell fucking no. not in my opinion anyway.

No. Headphone cables have no effect on sound (as long as they are not torn or shorted).

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[winterphoenix]

According to this article, the iTunes match copies are iTunes Plus tracks, which are DRM free. I have no idea about the metadata, though I'm sure it wouldn't be extremely difficult for someone to write a script to merge two sets of ID3 tags.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[idontgno]

True audiophiles only listen to the voices in their heads.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[creat3d]

If you notice a difference between 256, 320 and lossless, there's probably medication for that condition.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[greed]

I got a noise floor of about -35dB on my turntable. Which, granted, isn't an "audiophile" unit; it's just a Dual from the '60s. (With a modern Ortofon cartridge; with the OEM Shure cartridge the noise floor was closer to -25dB.) Which means the effective dynamic range was 35dB.

16 bit linear on CDs has a dynamic range of, what was it... clickyclicky... 96dB.

What people seem to ignore--and they do it with tubes vs. transistors too--is that CDs enabled a level of crappy mastering that wasn't possible before. (Just like cheap BJTs enabled crappy amps which weren't possible before.)

If you did the "loudness war" thing with an LP, the stylus wouldn't track. And I've owned LPs which were a pain to play; you'd have to fiddle the anti-skate and tracking force because they'd packed the grooves too close together (to get more music on a side), or made the excursions too big (to get louder music) and they'd just skip if you didn't adjust things for that particular album.

We just don't remember the crap.

Oh: LPs also only had a channel separation of about 20dB; so CDs made from the original tapes with hard separation (all vocals in left, all instruments in right say) that didn't take that into account sound ridiculous. That's, again, not a CD problem, but a mastering problem.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[m.ducharme]

So that's it! You've figured out how to tell if someone on the Internet is a dog! Well done, sir!

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[GauteL]

"There's a reason Sony produced the SCAD [wikipedia.org] and theres a reason it's popular among audiophiles."

There is a reason Denon supplies a $999 ethernet cable for their stereo systems and the reason is not that it sounds better.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[hairyfeet]

That is one of the reasons I try to listen to local indie artists instead of the mainstream crap, as the loudness war has pretty much destroyed quality audio and I'm by no means a snob, I'm just a humble geek and bass player.

To show my band why there will be NO compression allowed anywhere near the recording (the only compression being on my 5 string live to even out the tone) I took them by an old friend's house and had him play "Hey Bulldog" by the Beatles off an LP from the 70s, and then had them listen to the modern "digital" CD version. The first thing they said was "hey, that sounds like shit!" and I said exactly, as over compression sounds like shit yet that is what every damned CD you get nowadays has!

So frankly you can have a thousand bitrate for all I care, it is still just gonna be really accurate shitastic sound. Thankfully the nature of LPs means you can't over compress them as they won't play, so if you can get an LP version and rip THAT, all is well and good. But frankly since the late 80s the level of compression all the major studios have done to CDs have made them so much plastic Frisbees, certainly not any good for listening to.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[creat3d]

Alright, let me put it this way: if you notice a difference between 256, 320 and lossless, you're spending way too much time and money on your audio setup.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[dgatwood]

I couldn't disagree more. Uncompressed music works fine for a very thin mix (e.g. guitar and voice, piano and voice, etc.). Add in drums, and it sounds like ass without compression unless you're listening at 24-bit resolution. The tops of the peaks for drums are so high relative to the area under them that you blow all your dynamic range on them just trying not to clip. The result is that everything sounds weak and distant.

Now I'm not saying today's music isn't massively overcompressed dynamically, but it's just as bad to undercompress stuff that needs it.

BTW, LP audio can be just as overcompressed as audio from any other source. They just tend not to be because anybody doing a vinyl recording is likely working from an analog tape master that already builds in some tape compression, because they are mostly older recordings, and because there is no consumer demand for them to be so compressed. (More on this later.)

More to the point, your comment about overcompressing to vinyl breaking the vinyl is just plain backwards. If you don't compress audio enough when going to vinyl, it won't play. There's only so much loudness you can achieve on vinyl before the cutter excursion is too great and it breaks through into the next track over. And you have to leave a certain amount of wall thickness between tracks, or else the needle will break through while you're playing the LP. This means that there is an absolute limit for maximum loudness on vinyl (at least for any given duration and RPM setting).

Add to this the baseline noise caused by mechanical imprecision during the cutting process, and you get a typical SNR of about 60-75 dB on average (Source: itrax). And many albums have even lower SNR because if they compress the audio more and lower the maximum volume, they can cram more tracks per side. Thus, if we're talking about the ability of the medium to reproduce the sound, LPs must be compressed more than CDs, not less.

In short, the only reason CD audio tends to be worse than LP audio is because the industry thinks people want to listen to music that way. And unfortunately, with the number of people listening to music in cars or on iPods while walking around loud city streets, they're probably right. People who listen to music in an environment that lends itself to high dynamic range are, unfortunately, a rarity, and modern digital music production merely reflects that unfortunate reality.

That said, I'd really like to see the overcompression moved into a special hint track and implemented by the player instead of permanently marring the sound. This would require some significant retooling, but it's not inconceivable. Alternatively, provide two separate mixes: a high compression track and a low compression track. Either solution would let the audience decide when they listen rather than when they buy the CD.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[dgatwood]

If you did the "loudness war" thing with an LP, the stylus wouldn't track.

I don't know why people think this. The loudness war didn't make the loud parts louder. It made the soft parts louder. If anything, the more consistent excursion should make it easier to adjust your hardware.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[hairyfeet]

But what you and I are talking about are two different things. you are talking about level compressions which is pretty much a "have to" as its the only way to get instruments like drums (and 5 string bass, i nail that low B and can stomp the low end) to record accurately without slamming the needle in the red. that's fine, all well and good, SOP. What I am talking about is what is called "musical compression" where after the recording is done running the entire mix through compression which gives that tin can all midrange sound.

And maybe it is the fact they can't spike the volume right up to the edge with LPs like they can CDs, hell if I know I'm just the bass player, but I've found even modern LPs don't have that tin can compressed all to shit sound. And I'd argue that the reason people with iPods and the like listen to that is they don't know any better as those I've played a non musically compressed song for, even on my crappy $15 Behringer cans, has said "holy shit that sounds MUCH better!"

So I agree there needs to be a way to give people the choice instead of the current "shit sandwich or nothing". I'd argue that CDs are cheap enough they simply ought to package two discs, one with the original non compressed and a "road mix" that is compressed all to shit. I bet they'd find people ignoring the road mix disc and simply turning up on the softer songs than having everything sound like it is coming through a tin can.

That is the nice thing about indies though, most really care about the music and don't compress all to hell, at least not the ones around here.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[dgatwood]

I agree that compressing the final track sucks, for multiple reasons. You should never do much (if any) dynamic compression after mixdown, as it tends to result in odd problems where the drum hits cause your vocals to sound different.

That said, you can get the same level of loudness by doing heavier dynamic compression on the individual tracks. The most important decision is choosing the right amount of compression, rather than choosing whether to compress on the way into the mix or on the way out. :-)

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[mcgrew]

That's the thing -- CDs are capable of a far greater dynamic range, but the studios don't use it. Not only does digital enable a level of crappy mastering that wasn't possible before, I believe they just don't give a damn these days. Maybe because they don't have to, I don't know.

Well mastered LPs could be loud and have tons of bass, but you couldn't fit as much music on an LP like that. The Beatles managed to fit more than a CD's worth of music (White Album) on two LPs by attenuating the bass. I'd rather they'd just left "Revolution #9 off.

Cream's "Wheels of Fire" had that skipping problem you mention, as did Steppenwolf's first album. It was just bad engineering. But I don't remember very many like that, those two are the only ones that come to mind.

Listen to Van Halen's first album on a high-end system and you'd swear they were in your living room. In fact, once when I moved the new neighbors saw us moving guitars and such in, when we were done we put my brand new Van Halen LP that had just come out that day and cranked it to 9. The next day when I met the neighbors they said "wow, man, your band kicks ASS!"

I simply don't believe the 20db separation figure -- the last song on Led Zeppelin 3 has a singer and a guitar, with the singer on one channel and guitar on the other. Turn the balance all the way over and you don't hear the singer at all, turn it the other way and you don't hear the guitar. It depends on the electronics, of course -- you have both channels in the up and down movement, one channel in the sideways movement (or vice versa, I don't remember which), and the left channel (or was it the right? Been a long time...) was fed in phase with the both channels channel to excise it. If it's a little out of phase your separation will suffer. Again, in the analog days, your equipment mattered a lot more.

As to tubes vs transistors, tubes don't really sound better (or "warmer" as some say), except in a live guitar performance when the amp is cranked to distortion levels. Look at an oscilloscope trace and you'll see the square wave produced by the overdriven tube amp has rounded corners, while the overdriven transistors are almost perfect square waves. Because of this, a lot of guitar players play into a low power tube amp, with a microphone in front of the tube amp feeding a more powerful transistor amp.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[woolpert]

Of course mechanical components are the weak link and always have been. But that's not what you originally said - you proposed that it takes a special amp to enjoy an LP when the amp is far from the weak link.

The frequency response of an LP is grossly overrated. Sure there is 40kHz content possible, the first play, and 40 dB down. Since I rather suspect you can't hear 1/2 that frequency, much less that far down, it is moot.

LP's main disadvantages are:
noise
wow/flutter (jitter)
durability
non-linear frequency response
If noise was the only one most of us would never have upgraded to CDs.

Your description of how aliasing comes into play is simply wrong, as it assumes improper filtering before sampling. A square wave is nothing more than a collection of sin waves. A 15kHz square wave can not exist after filtering content below CD's Nyquest, and more importantly can not exist period on an LP. I'd like to see someone draw just how a square (or even triangle) wave would exist on a record groove. Bonus points for demonstrating how a non-theoretical-point stylus can track said groove.

If audible tones are affected by supersonic harmonics they were affected in the studio and said effects were recorded. End of story unless we are talking artificially created tones intended to cause interference only upon playback (See The Hafler Trio).

If we are talking supersonic harmonics designed to interfere on playback, ones which did not exist during recording, then we also must assume you have some brilliant speakers to be able to produce these tones in a linear fashion and not just create a bunch of HF noise.

I can show you plenty of LPs with content > 22kHz, but I challenge anyone to show needledrops with signal, not noise, that high.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Alex Belits]

1. Headphone cable. 4-12 feet with few tens or hundreds ohms of load.
2. Interference you can hear in speakers is picked at the input of an amplifier, or over power rails. Computer speakers are amplified, with high input impedance and bad power filtering -- this has nothing to do with cables.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Alex Belits]

If you have a very short cable, no difference is likely to be heard, but stretch that out to a few meters, it's possible that the overall impedance of the cheap cable can result in it behaving as a filter, and starting to attenuate higher frequencies, and if it's resistance is high, it alters the impedance matching of the amp/headphones, reducing efficiency and introducing other undesirable performance characteristics.

Headphones have input impedance from tens to hundreds ohms. "Matching" of the output for such load amounts to keeping it below 120 ohm. Do you seriously expect 4-12 feet of wire -- any wire that is not an unrolled capacitor, Christmas tree decoration, metal-coated thread or something equally ridiculous -- to have resistance and capacitance that forms any kind of meaningful filter with that?!

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Alex Belits]

upgraded my cable

You replaced headphones cable without replacing headphones themselves? Really?

(i.e. whenever I put my laptop on the nightstand).

Laptop picked it, not headphones. If your halogen lamp has a stand that affects anything sound-related, it must be a low-voltage lamp with transformer in the base. Magnetic field from transformer is picked up by the amplifier in the laptop. Results may vary depending on the impedance and sensitivity of the headphones, or position of gain/volume control. I have cheap amplified speakers with analog volume control knob that is absolutely useless thanks to the poor choice of the potentiometer for that knob -- when it is not at maximum, its input impedance is too high, so it picks up all kinds of interference. Set it to maximum, and lower impedance of power amplifier shorts the interference while keeping the signal.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[hairyfeet]

But the whole problem is you shouldn't want that level of loudness as it ruins the music! What makes music so wonderful, and one of the things I love about playing with guys who I'm able to read well, is the swells and falls is what makes the music "breathe" for want of a better term.

Let me give a little example: Brian my singer/guitarist knows my playing like the back of his hand and can read my mood just by feel, and I can do the same to him. What that allows us to do is on a completely improvised piece the music flows like a tideit is the silences in between that help to build a mood, and it is this that sadly gets lost in "musical compression".

But don't take this to mean I'm against an effect when it fits the piece on the contrary, I personally have a Zoom B1X just so I can be as nasty or as sweet as I want, and it'll probably take us until winter to get this first album out because not only do we have an abundance of songs to pick from but we want each song to have the right sonic "tone" and if it takes us all day in Audacity and Cubase just to get the right sound for a particular spot then so be it. Nice thing about being the bassist, with the exception of a few rare spots all I need is a nice clean dark tone with light compression to even out the volume across the strings. It is the guitar and vocals one sometimes have to really fuss with to get them in the right sound envelope if you know what I mean.

What I AM against, and what I hate about most commercial CDs, is this cookie cutter compressed through a tin can all midrange tone that is the signature of the loudness wars. It may give you the illusion of more volume but it is like I tell those that are thinking of doing it "You might find a Sparkomatic you can crank to 11, but would you really want to hear a Sparkomatic cranked to 11?". I don't care how sweet your rig is, how beautiful your guitar sings or your vocals soar, by the time they are run through that musical compression crap it is nothing but midrange in a can. The flip side is what I've been hearing on the newer hip hop albums of late, where they run everything off but the low end to make the subs thump, sounds like a frog farting.

So I guess what I'm saying is the difference between music and processed crapola is like the difference between a good cheese and cheese whiz, it is all in the moderation of the processing. One should not be afraid of lower volume parts of a song as those will simply make the loud parts have more impact and just because cheese whiz sells more than a nice premium cheese doesn't mean the world should have nothing but the canned crap.

Forgiveness?

[Pharmboy]

Exactly how many pirates really care about "forgiveness"? While greater than 0, /me thinks they are overestimating the crushing guilt caused by pirating music from Sony and others.

Re:Forgiveness?

[dotancohen]

Exactly how many pirates really care about "forgiveness"? While greater than 0, /me thinks they are overestimating the crushing guilt caused by pirating music from Sony and others.

I'd pay, but not for forgiveness. I download music illegally because that is the only way to get music where I live. The stores don't stock non-mainstream stuff, so if I want Pantera I need to go online for it. Amazon now sells MP3 files that will run on my Linux computer and I buy them, but before Amazon I had to download illegally. I have in fact purchased albums that I once downloaded illegally, now that I can. But I'm doing it slowly, one a month or so. I still have quite a bit to catch up.

If the *AA's wanted to prevent illegal downloading, they would have provided a legal option years ago.

Re:Forgiveness?

[TheRaven64]

Where do you live that you can get Internet access but can't get CDs delivered? In most of the world, the roads are built before the network cables...

Re:Forgiveness?

[TheRaven64]

Which doesn't answer my question. Amazon has been delivering CDs for over a decade, and their range is pretty much anything that's still in publication. So, where can you get enough bandwidth to download songs, but not get deliveries from Amazon or a similar company? The argument that people pirate music because music that they like is not available doesn't really make sense. Not available at a price that they agree with, or in a format that they want maybe, but 'local shops don't sell it' doesn't really make sense as an argument for piracy.

Re:Forgiveness?

[harperska]

I replicated my car because it was the only way to get the type of car I wanted. The local car dealerships don't stock non-mainstream cars, so when a traveler passing through my town was driving the car I wanted, I used my matter replicator to create a copy of it. If the car companies wanted to prevent car theft, they would have built a car dealership in my town.

FTFY.

That's the only way for the car analogy to really apply to music sharing. As many others have said, when you pirate a track, the original still exists.

Launder?

[betterunixthanunix]

Have I missed something? Why would someone who downloaded their music want to "launder" it? Maybe in world where we are forced to prove that our music was legally obtained, but I have not heard of anyone being put in that situation.

o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[haxwk]

This iCloud thing (haven't heard much about it, I don't follow apple products) just sounds like a way for Apple to legally collect information on stupid music pirates (and probably who has ripped back-ups on their computer) that they can sell to record companies. It's like Steve Jobs saw the South Park episode "Human CentiPad" and figured it would be a good idea to coax people into unknowingly agreeing to let Apple screw over. This program is going to scan your files with the pretense that everything is legal. But of course if it finds anything that doesn't have a proper license it's probably illegal, and therefore Apple would be "inclined" to report to the authorities.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[jessecurry]

I'd be shocked if that were the case. I think that this is really just a way for Apple to reduce storage costs. They've got this great new data center, but they don't want to fill it up with 500 copies of every song in their music library, encoded in all different formats and bitrates.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[Yvan256]

The computer can't see the difference between a tune that you downloaded from some random website/via P2P/torrent , a tune you bought from a competing service, a tune one ripped from a CD you borrowed and a tune ripped from a CD you bought.

And since users can mess with the metadata, you can't use those to detect anything either.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[gumbi west]

This will not happen.

News flash: Steve Jobs is very, very good at business.

Getting your clients sued for 100 times their net worth is very, very, very bad for business.

QED.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[JosKarith]

In the United Kingdom, making a private copy of copyrighted media without the copyright owner's consent is illegal: this includes ripping music from a CD to a computer or digital music player.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/6457369.stm

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[acohen1]

This is perfectly legal in the US. The only reason the same thing doesn't apply to DVDs and Blu-rays are laws against circumventing encryption, but it is fair use to format shift unencrypted media you own for personal use. Its no longer personal use when I rip a CD then give the original to a friend or sell it, but if I keep the CD, then the mp3s, flacs, accs, or whatever are fine.

Can this possibly be secure?

[Zone-MR]

So let's get this straight... iTunes will allow you to replace a pirated copy of your music with an official download, presumably identifying the original track based on audio fingerprinting and/or file hashes.

I can't think of any way in which this could be designed not to be broken. I'm expecting people will quickly figure out a way to trade hashes/fingerprints, bypassing the requirement to even bother downloading a pirated copy. Or maybe if the threshold is low enough we'll get a Shazam-like app - that records snippets of music then presents them to iTunes as a ripped track for replacing with a HQ version.

We are not the target demographic

[jijacob]

256kbps aac is definitely higher quality than most people would ever need, and professionally ripped audio tracks are probably better quality than what most of the target demographic for this feature will have. Apple is not aiming at the few on private trackers that download flac of V0 MP3s.

I don't think this is the studio's real concern

[elrous0]

I would bet that the studios aren't nearly as concerned with any faux legitimacy this gives to already pirated songs as they are with the possibility of users sharing username/passwords for their iCloud accounts (sharing their entire music collections en masse). Jimmy re-downloading a song he's already ripped isn't nearly as bad for business as Jimmy sharing his 8,000 song music collection with all his friends.

Sounds like a good deal, IMO...

[pla]

As a non-"Audiophile", but someone who appreciates decent quality rips, I can see a simple enough use for this...

Downloaded tracks often have questionable origins and quality - I've heard things that someone clearly recorded straight off FM radio, complete with censoring bleeps; Songs that sounded almost like they'd come from vinyl (hisses and pops); Songs that fade in and out at random; Songs with tags that look like a native speaker of 1337 just discovered the wonders of Unicode.

Now personally, if I like a track enough to care about any of the above, I'll just buy the album (not just a CYA comment - I violate copyrights not only shamelessly, but with outright pride; I very much believe in supporting artists I like, however). But as a way of converting a crappy rip into a nice shiny clean reasonably HQ and properly tagged file? My music library contains somewhere on the order of 30k files; I'd gladly pay $25 to replace all the crap automagically.

Re:Sounds like a good deal, IMO...

[greed]

There's been tracks from the iTMS that have skips in them....

(I mainly buy CDs and rip them myself, but I do have about 80 tracks from the iTMS. Two had skips, but the album they were on was removed from the store. Maybe it had other problems....)

Oh, and Lite-On BD-ROM/DVD+-RW combo drives are terrible for ripping audio; they don't report uncorrected errors, so unless you've got a full cdparanoia session going, you get junk if you even breathe near the drive. I had to re-do 50 rips. (cdparanoia crashed the drive.)

A little offtopic, but I felt it appropriate

[Sparx139]

Once in a while maybe you will feel the urge
To break international copyright law
By downloading MP3s from file-sharing sites
Like Morpheus or Grokster or Limewire or KaZaA

But deep in your heart you know the guilt would drive you mad
And the shame would leave a permanent scar
'Cause you start out stealing songs and then you're robbing liquor stores
And sellin' crack and runnin' over school kids with your car

So don't download this song
The record store's where you belong
Go and buy the CD like you know that you should
Oh, don't download this song

Oh, you don't wanna mess with the R-I-double-A
They'll sue you if you burn that CD-R
It doesn't matter if you're a grandma or a seven year old girl
They'll treat you like the evil hard-bitten criminal scum you are

So don't download this song
Don't go pirating music all day long
Go and buy the CD like you know that you should
Oh, don't download this song

Don't take away money from artists just like me
How else can I afford another solid gold Hum-Vee
And diamond-studded swimming pools
These things don't grow on trees
So all I ask is, "Everybody, please..."

Don't donwload this song (Don't do it, no, no)
Even Lars Ulrich knows it's wrong (You can just ask him)
Go and buy the CD like you know that you should (You really should)
Oh, don't download this song

Don't donwload this song (Oh please, don't you do it)
Or you might wind up in jail like Tommy Chong (Remember Tommy)
Go and buy the CD (Right now) like you know that you should (Go out and buy it)
Oh, don't download this song

Don't download this song (No, no, no, no, no, no)
You'll burn in hell before too long (and you'll deserve it)
Go and buy the CD (Just buy it) like you know that you should (You cheap bastard)
Oh, don't download this song

Re:The one thing I fear - more prosecutions

[EastCoastSurfer]

Great conspiracy and all, but just not going to happen. Apple has paid the labels in order to do the matching. I'm guessing the contract with the labels has some terms that specifically prevents the labels from attempting to use any of this data to go after people. Think about it. If Apple lets the labels go after users then their iCloud is dead hours after the first lawsuit.

This isn't about Apple being altruistic, it's about Apple wanting to do whatever it takes to move people into the iCloud (and of course start those 24.99/year fees).

RIAA Field Day?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you owned thousands of pirated tracks would you really want to open your computer so someone with close ties to all 3 major labels can scan each and every one?

Re:RIAA Field Day?

[keytoe]

If you owned thousands of pirated tracks would you really want to open your computer so someone with close ties to all 3 major labels can scan each and every one?

Who cares?

Long Answer: There is nothing in copyright law that states that owning a copy of some media, no matter the origin, is illegal. There are plenty of provisions to restrict copying, distribution or alteration - but nothing about possession.

You will note that all of the RIAA cases brought to court to date were explicitly about 'sharing music' and not about 'downloading music' or 'having music'. There is a reason.

Re:AAC? Meh.

[EastCoastSurfer]

Um, because AAC is superior to MP3 and any modern portable player/phone/device will play non DRMed AACs (like you find in in ITMS or the new iCloud) just fine. From wiki (other portable players):

Archos
Creative Zen Portable
Microsoft Zune
SanDisk Sansa (some models)
Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) with firmware 2.0 or greater
Sony Walkman
Nintendo DSi
Any portable player that fully supports the Rockbox third party firmware

Re:Article Author is a giant FAIL

[GauteL]

"Any article that has the phrase "who illegally download music" as part of it's mantra is a FAIL. Downloading music is not illegal. Distributing copyrighted material without permission/license or ownership of said material is illegal. "

Apple is a global company and Slashdot is a globally used (albeit US-centric) website, so comments that assume that everyone live in their jurisdiction is a FAIL. There are plenty of places around the globe where downloading music IS illegal and have been for at least a few years.

Mismatch

[HTH NE1]

It can be worse. What if Apple matches your copy with the Greatest Hits version, which may have verses omitted? What if your copy has profanities intact and you get "I want to ____ you like an animal" back? Even perusing the copies of "Brimful of Asha" on iTunes, only one of Cornershop's releases available on iTunes was at the correct pitch and duration; all the others are slightly accelerated. (It is apparently quite common for songs be time-compressed to fit the media.) I doubt many would want to risk losing their rare studio tracks by having them replaced with the common mass-media release. Your vinyl rip of Buckner & Garcia's Pac-Man Fever album could be replaced with the CD remastering since Apple doesn't carry ripped vinyl.

Judging by how often iTunes gets downloaded album art completely wrong, I'm not sure I'd want them replacing my content with what they think they have matched by audio fingerprint.

I don't want forgiveness

[Stormwatch]

I hate the music industry. I hate their unethical behavior. I hate how they bully people. I hate how they cater to the lowest common denominator. I hate how they try to shove crap down our throats. I don't want any "forgiveness" or "amnesty" bullshit. I WANT THEM DEAD.

The studios got paid for the "amnesty"

[Quila]

Hundreds of millions of dollars up front by Apple, and they will probably get a big chunk of that $25.

I'm okay with it. I have a huge music library that I started ripping in the 90s from 128 kb MP3 to 160 kb AAC, and this is a perfect chance for an across-the-board upgrade to 256 kb AAC. Plus all the metadata should get cleaned up.

iTunes Match 'annual fee' ?

[darkjohnson]

As I recall this fee Apple is charging is an annual one. What happens when the year is up? (I've not found this info anywhere yet) Do they turn off access to cloud stash? Also, from what I can tell, other than the improved bit rate - it's just a convenience fee to save you time uploading your library to the cloud (if you have a large library) but that you can't (yet) stream the music from the cloud like you can Google or Amazon, it has to be downloaded back to you device. Not being that much of an audio freak, I'll just copy it directly to my device, I don't carry around my full library anyway. Unless they can convince me otherwise, this seems about as useful as MobileMe or Ping.