(Okay - it does in that the machine is more complex than it need be, potentially, I do accept that).
If you shop carefully, you can find DRM free players. I have one. It's simple drag and drop loading. No software needed. Compatible with Mac, Windows, Linux, or anything that supports USB flash drives. Plays MP3's and WMA (non-DRM only). Records off the mic or radio and saves the result as MP3's which can be copied off the device.
I won't trade it for Fairplay, Zune, or Plays for Sure compatibility if it removes any of the above features.
Not a plug, just so you know what I found. I bought a $40 Coby flash player and a few extra SD cards.
However, if they did offer Zunes at a substantial (30%-50%) price advantage over iPods, AND if they beefed up the applications for the WiFi feature,
And had a store for the tunes with prices 50% lower with a full catalog....
People buy iPods because they can use it at the hottest online music store. Nobody buys a Zune so they can shop at the MS Zune store. I haven't heard one rave review of the wonderful selection and prices at the Zune store except one person here in this thread. Someone likes the Subscription model for unlimited downloads. Other than that, I have not heard anything about the online music store.
Are there any good players out there that are affordable that I can slap 15 GB of oggs, mp3s and older (ver 8) wma files on to?
Will you take 2 out of 4? I have a cheap Coby flash player. It plays WMA and MP3's. It doesn't do DRM at all. It takes SD cards, so a small collection of SD cards will hold your 15 GB.
The best part is it is compatible with drag and drop on Mac, PC, and Linux. iPod owners can spend $25-30 for a third party application that returns this basic functionality back to an iPod. My player is in the price range of the other players add on software.
The killer feature, to me, is the unlimited download subscription service. I've been having a lot of fun with that.
Remember that subscription songs are not squirtable, just in case you ever meet another Zune owner. The Zune has only one store. Plays for Sure stores are somewhat plentiful and have unlimited download subscription services. So what is the advantage to the Zune again? Bigger screen?
I also suspect that the "latest data" is a complete lie.
Maybe it's the after Christmas closeout sale stuff that didn't sell. Most other players were sold out. I went to 3 stores looking for a 30 Gig Zen. The droid at Best Buy thought I said Zune and didn't know about the Zen.
For example, if a user were viewing medical imagery concurrently with playback of video which required image constraint, only the commercial video would be constrained -- not the medical image or other things on the user's desktop.'"
I wonder how they do the mixed content when the degradation is done at the hardware driver level. It must make for a pretty complicated driver to degrade only part of a screen. Maybe the driver is able to do video overlays and degrade just one overlay.
Audio must have the same multipath drivers, one for each application. The phone will work fine while the online subscription radio station is disabled due to the lack of a fully secure audio path to the speakers.
I don't understand how this differs from the ipodservice which runs in the background searching for a device or the crippled way that itunes interacts with the ipod on different computers.
I used MS as an example. iTunes also suffers from DRM and the single computer handshake. Changing computers and establishing a new handshake deletes all the songs off the player. It's not very consumer friendly in that regard.
It's one of the reasons I didn't get an iPod and got something which connects as a flash drive instead. Drag and drop to and from a player is much more important to me than the ability to playe one of the competing DRM formats of Plays for Sure, Zune, fairplay, Sony AAC, or some other format I don't know about yet.
All the DRM formats are walled gardens to keep the locked-in consumers from using the competition. For example, take your iPod and download a few tracks from Yahoo Music Service. Take a Creative Zen and try playing a few iTunes tracks. They are all incompatible walled gardens.
But drag-n-drop sucks for music management, because you have to manually manage the tracks on your player. Most people don't want to go manually deleting files on their player to make room for the new ones.
I use playlists. It's not a problem. I often simply delete everything on the player, then drag a directory of stuff with a playlist to the player. What is nice, is I am able to keep stuff on the player and add to it from several computers which is a major shortcoming of many players. The ability to record from the mic or radio and copy the MP3 off the player to a computer is often not possible with players that have the datalink one way restricted. The ability to copy to and from the player is more of an advantage to some people then automatic music updates on the player.
Microsoft and its partners failed to come up with compelling hardware and had difficulty getting software to properly connect music collections on computers with their devices.
Before USB, I had a handheld computer. It required MS Active Sync. That by itself was not a problem. The problem was the software remained active looking for the device to connect. This was a major problem for everything else I have that uses a RS-232 port. The solution was to abandon Active Sync and let the handheld be it's own island so I could have my serial ports back.
After USB, Flash drives worked quite well and would work on Mac, PC, and Linux. MS desicded to play a do it our way game which crippled some flash players. Some manufactures kept the devices open so they would attach and transfer as a flash drive. Some went so far as to play music transfered in this way and allowed copying to and from the device. This was not in Microsoft's best interest as they wanted full DRM handshake and a one way transfer. You can delete songs off the device, but copying from it is prohibited. This needing someting other than drag and drop, means a special application which may mean Windows only which is a problem in addition to any other USB port driver issues and corrupt handshakes and keys.
Drag and drop worked. Flash player manufactures know that. Making a player that has to change mode to handle connections for Plays for Sure simply added a level of complexity to the device. MS tried arm twisting to drop the complexity of 2 modes of operation. In doing so, it broke compatiblility with everything else. For an example of broken drag and drop, try a Creative Zen. You can set aside space for drag and drop, but it won't play any files there, including non-DRM MP3's.
I bought a Coby flash player. They work fine in drag and drop mode. It will record off the mic or radio and save it as MP3's. I can drag the MP3's off the player. For Coby to have these fine features, they simply dropped support for DRM WMA Plays for Sure content. The player will play MP3's and non-DRM WMA files. The best part is I can save files to it from home on Windows PC's, Linux PC's and at work. It doesn't delete everyting to sync to a new PC unlike Plays for Sure, Zune, or FairPlay crippled things.
Two years from now that Goodwill thrift store a hop and skip away from Microsoft where I get all my software is gonna have more $4.99 Zunes than they had Jar Jar Binks action figures in 1999. They'll stick 'em over by the 8-tracks.
They won't go that cheap. They still play MP3's so they are still useful for the old Kaza and Napster music.
Kids will like them. There is still no restrictions (even 3 day 3 play) on video squirting. It'll be the rage for schoolyard porn sharing and worth more than $4.99 just for that. Does anybody know if the video is picture only or can sharing of music video's run unchecked?
Maybe where you live it is a bit different, but, in the south in the US, MANY homes have guns in them, we grow up with them...protection, hunting, etc
Very true. I grew up in the country. Police were too far away to be of use in a crisis. At home and at my grandparents, a loaded shotgun was right behing the front door in the entry. Another one was kept in the bedroom. My Grandmother shot someone breaking in late at night when my mom was little. It didn't kill him as far as we know, but he didn't finish making it in the broken bathroom window. Home protection in the country is common. Home protection in inner cities is the next common. It gets more news because with more people, use of weapons in home protection is more frequent.
I had hoped, however, that the giant music conglomerations would grow up and let it go through.
I more expected the industry to simply withold the content so the Zune would have very little music to offer. It would be like the Beatles who simply refuse to permit distribution in any format except physical albums in either LP or Compact Cassette.
It would have been funny if the Zune marketplace had very little content and then the remainder of providers pulled out simply due to too small a marketshare.
XM has argued it is protected from infringement lawsuits by the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, which permits individuals to record music off the radio for private use. The judge said she did not believe the company was protected in this instance by the act.'"
They took the wrong arguement. The device in question has full DRM protection. It is not a way to record and keep XM songs.
They need to look at the Rio music player for an example that already has been in the court and prevailed. The XM device is a playback device, It is not a recording device. Look up the Rio case for good lawyer fodder. The device in question is just like the Rio in it's function. It's a playback device, not a copying device.
With that arguement, it should be an open and shut case which has already been decided.
Bad timing bro. Several sites are already reporting that iTunes will be carrying the Beatles, not Sony. Just sayin'.
Wow, I missed it. I was under the impression The Beatles were never going to be released online. Maybe there was enough piracy that they decided they needed a few bucks instead of nothing from online content.
George Lucas did the same thing. I had a copy of the original Star Wars overseas 4 years before it come out on the vidio market.
not having to pay for electricity, being able to run my Christmas lights 365 days a year,
I was interested in the service when it first came out, but the restricted items in the contract let me know I didn't want to pay that much for that little.
I think it's funny that they have so many restrictions, but as a non-subscriber, I can find things like the Howard Stern show on Bit Torrent. I grabbed one show just to see what the fuss was about. I didn't care for the language. Call me a pirate. There is no way I would pay for that crap.
I can't believe the media providers are having a lawsuit over this highly DRM'ed almost useless item.
not having to pay for electricity, being able to run my Christmas lights 365 days a year,
Whoa cowboy (slashdot line) having free power is not unlimited. It's just like dropping off the city water system and depending on rainwater collected on the roof. Just because it's free does not mean in any way way that it is unlimited. Just because you collect water from your roof, does not mean you can water your lawn everyday. By the same token, the energy effecient house is not running excess lights everyday. Believe me, they monitor their energy usage very close, much more than we would ever consider.
Over-use of the free electricity is a quick trip to dead batteries and long dark winter nights.
If you do run Christmas lights 365 days a year, may I recommend LED lights?
I could buy a hybrid car. I don't. Why? No payback
People play the no payback card all the time but few stop to do the math.
I bought a used Prius (1 year old) for $18,000. My Wife bought a minivan at at the same time for the same price. The math for the no payback was for new vehicles for those who drove fewer than 20K miles/year and gas was $1.50/gallon.
I had the forsite to know the resale value whould hold up on the Prius (have fun, look up the resale of a 02 Caravan and a 02 Prius). I am not singing the depreciation blues. I can get most of my money back out today if I wanted. With gas at near $3.00 a gallon and I'm reaching 100K miles, I am seeing my payback now. Some cars need a transmission replacement for nearly $4K after 100K miles. The $5K battery replacement everyone was afraid of is now a $3600 dollar item, It is cheaper than a transmission replacement. It is possible to replace a failed 7.2V cell instead of all 36 in the entire pack.
As a bonus, my Prius doubles as a replacement source of electric power while traveling or during outages. I have installed a 1KW inverter. While not driving the power not used for the heater/AC, lights, defroster, power steering, air brake compressor, etc, is easly diverted without overloading the electrical system. It is the most fuel effecient electrical generator I have ever used. The car side of things is 20KW. When parked the engine shuts off instead of running constantly. It starts up and runs a few minutes then shuts back down to repeat in about 20 minutes. This is perfect for running the freezer in an outage. I don't have the engine running all the time when it isn't needed.
Add a few CF lights, the laptop, and the TV to the mix and a tank of gas lasts for days unlike a portable generator. I have run 3 days this way and used less than a quarter tank of gas. (13 gal tank)
Slashdot Mirror
(Okay - it does in that the machine is more complex than it need be, potentially, I do accept that).
If you shop carefully, you can find DRM free players. I have one. It's simple drag and drop loading. No software needed. Compatible with Mac, Windows, Linux, or anything that supports USB flash drives. Plays MP3's and WMA (non-DRM only). Records off the mic or radio and saves the result as MP3's which can be copied off the device.
I won't trade it for Fairplay, Zune, or Plays for Sure compatibility if it removes any of the above features.
Not a plug, just so you know what I found. I bought a $40 Coby flash player and a few extra SD cards.
in Europe to see how it could be modified for a European consumer.
DRM free? Working WiFi for wireless home networking and streaming maybe?
MS need Apple to really f*$%-up badly!
;-)
Maybe they will include the Sony rootkit and Sony batteries. After all I heard Sony is starting to use Apple's AAC format. Maybe they traded tech.
However, if they did offer Zunes at a substantial (30%-50%) price advantage over iPods, AND if they beefed up the applications for the WiFi feature,
And had a store for the tunes with prices 50% lower with a full catalog....
People buy iPods because they can use it at the hottest online music store. Nobody buys a Zune so they can shop at the MS Zune store. I haven't heard one rave review of the wonderful selection and prices at the Zune store except one person here in this thread. Someone likes the Subscription model for unlimited downloads. Other than that, I have not heard anything about the online music store.
Are there any good players out there that are affordable that I can slap 15 GB of oggs, mp3s and older (ver 8) wma files on to?
Will you take 2 out of 4? I have a cheap Coby flash player. It plays WMA and MP3's. It doesn't do DRM at all. It takes SD cards, so a small collection of SD cards will hold your 15 GB.
The best part is it is compatible with drag and drop on Mac, PC, and Linux. iPod owners can spend $25-30 for a third party application that returns this basic functionality back to an iPod. My player is in the price range of the other players add on software.
The killer feature, to me, is the unlimited download subscription service. I've been having a lot of fun with that.
Remember that subscription songs are not squirtable, just in case you ever meet another Zune owner. The Zune has only one store. Plays for Sure stores are somewhat plentiful and have unlimited download subscription services. So what is the advantage to the Zune again? Bigger screen?
the mere fact that they're having to mention just one catagory of the total player sales in the US to find a decent number is rather telling.
Claiming to have 100% of the brown 30 Gig player market was too obvious.
I also suspect that the "latest data" is a complete lie.
Maybe it's the after Christmas closeout sale stuff that didn't sell. Most other players were sold out. I went to 3 stores looking for a 30 Gig Zen. The droid at Best Buy thought I said Zune and didn't know about the Zen.
Oh, i completely agree.. which why anapod is such a godsend
I chose a DRM free player instead. I would not want to deal with a DMCA lawsuit. Sell me un-encrypted or not at all.
For example, if a user were viewing medical imagery concurrently with playback of video which required image constraint, only the commercial video would be constrained -- not the medical image or other things on the user's desktop.'"
I wonder how they do the mixed content when the degradation is done at the hardware driver level. It must make for a pretty complicated driver to degrade only part of a screen. Maybe the driver is able to do video overlays and degrade just one overlay.
Audio must have the same multipath drivers, one for each application. The phone will work fine while the online subscription radio station is disabled due to the lack of a fully secure audio path to the speakers.
I don't understand how this differs from the ipodservice which runs in the background searching for a device or the crippled way that itunes interacts with the ipod on different computers.
I used MS as an example. iTunes also suffers from DRM and the single computer handshake. Changing computers and establishing a new handshake deletes all the songs off the player. It's not very consumer friendly in that regard.
It's one of the reasons I didn't get an iPod and got something which connects as a flash drive instead. Drag and drop to and from a player is much more important to me than the ability to playe one of the competing DRM formats of Plays for Sure, Zune, fairplay, Sony AAC, or some other format I don't know about yet.
All the DRM formats are walled gardens to keep the locked-in consumers from using the competition. For example, take your iPod and download a few tracks from Yahoo Music Service. Take a Creative Zen and try playing a few iTunes tracks. They are all incompatible walled gardens.
But drag-n-drop sucks for music management, because you have to manually manage the tracks on your player. Most people don't want to go manually deleting files on their player to make room for the new ones.
I use playlists. It's not a problem. I often simply delete everything on the player, then drag a directory of stuff with a playlist to the player. What is nice, is I am able to keep stuff on the player and add to it from several computers which is a major shortcoming of many players. The ability to record from the mic or radio and copy the MP3 off the player to a computer is often not possible with players that have the datalink one way restricted. The ability to copy to and from the player is more of an advantage to some people then automatic music updates on the player.
Why is Google using inconsistent terminology in its products for such an important term? Is there a real difference between a tag and a label?"
They are getting big like MS and are testing their infuence on the market. Quick, do you save the location of web pages as Bookmarks, or Favorites?
Same thing, new player.
Microsoft and its partners failed to come up with compelling hardware and had difficulty getting software to properly connect music collections on computers with their devices.
Before USB, I had a handheld computer. It required MS Active Sync. That by itself was not a problem. The problem was the software remained active looking for the device to connect. This was a major problem for everything else I have that uses a RS-232 port. The solution was to abandon Active Sync and let the handheld be it's own island so I could have my serial ports back.
After USB, Flash drives worked quite well and would work on Mac, PC, and Linux. MS desicded to play a do it our way game which crippled some flash players. Some manufactures kept the devices open so they would attach and transfer as a flash drive. Some went so far as to play music transfered in this way and allowed copying to and from the device. This was not in Microsoft's best interest as they wanted full DRM handshake and a one way transfer. You can delete songs off the device, but copying from it is prohibited. This needing someting other than drag and drop, means a special application which may mean Windows only which is a problem in addition to any other USB port driver issues and corrupt handshakes and keys.
Drag and drop worked. Flash player manufactures know that. Making a player that has to change mode to handle connections for Plays for Sure simply added a level of complexity to the device. MS tried arm twisting to drop the complexity of 2 modes of operation. In doing so, it broke compatiblility with everything else. For an example of broken drag and drop, try a Creative Zen. You can set aside space for drag and drop, but it won't play any files there, including non-DRM MP3's.
I bought a Coby flash player. They work fine in drag and drop mode. It will record off the mic or radio and save it as MP3's. I can drag the MP3's off the player. For Coby to have these fine features, they simply dropped support for DRM WMA Plays for Sure content. The player will play MP3's and non-DRM WMA files. The best part is I can save files to it from home on Windows PC's, Linux PC's and at work. It doesn't delete everyting to sync to a new PC unlike Plays for Sure, Zune, or FairPlay crippled things.
Two years from now that Goodwill thrift store a hop and skip away from Microsoft where I get all my software is gonna have more $4.99 Zunes than they had Jar Jar Binks action figures in 1999. They'll stick 'em over by the 8-tracks.
They won't go that cheap. They still play MP3's so they are still useful for the old Kaza and Napster music.
Kids will like them. There is still no restrictions (even 3 day 3 play) on video squirting. It'll be the rage for schoolyard porn sharing and worth more than $4.99 just for that. Does anybody know if the video is picture only or can sharing of music video's run unchecked?
Maybe where you live it is a bit different, but, in the south in the US, MANY homes have guns in them, we grow up with them...protection, hunting, etc
Very true. I grew up in the country. Police were too far away to be of use in a crisis. At home and at my grandparents, a loaded shotgun was right behing the front door in the entry. Another one was kept in the bedroom. My Grandmother shot someone breaking in late at night when my mom was little. It didn't kill him as far as we know, but he didn't finish making it in the broken bathroom window. Home protection in the country is common. Home protection in inner cities is the next common. It gets more news because with more people, use of weapons in home protection is more frequent.
Link? The Christmas tree thing sounds more interesting than this discussion.
o ld=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=17682316
OK, it is here. Please don't mod me offtopic.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=217778&thresh
I had hoped, however, that the giant music conglomerations would grow up and let it go through.
I more expected the industry to simply withold the content so the Zune would have very little music to offer. It would be like the Beatles who simply refuse to permit distribution in any format except physical albums in either LP or Compact Cassette.
It would have been funny if the Zune marketplace had very little content and then the remainder of providers pulled out simply due to too small a marketshare.
XM has argued it is protected from infringement lawsuits by the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, which permits individuals to record music off the radio for private use. The judge said she did not believe the company was protected in this instance by the act.'"
They took the wrong arguement. The device in question has full DRM protection. It is not a way to record and keep XM songs.
They need to look at the Rio music player for an example that already has been in the court and prevailed. The XM device is a playback device, It is not a recording device. Look up the Rio case for good lawyer fodder. The device in question is just like the Rio in it's function. It's a playback device, not a copying device.
With that arguement, it should be an open and shut case which has already been decided.
Bad timing bro. Several sites are already reporting that iTunes will be carrying the Beatles, not Sony. Just sayin'.
Wow, I missed it. I was under the impression The Beatles were never going to be released online. Maybe there was enough piracy that they decided they needed a few bucks instead of nothing from online content.
George Lucas did the same thing. I had a copy of the original Star Wars overseas 4 years before it come out on the vidio market.
OK, something strange is going on.
Trying again to paste...
Having one of the devices in question, I can say that it definitively does have copy protection.
Hopefully this time it did paste..
My cut and paste didn't work and pasted something from another thread.
I meant to paste:
not having to pay for electricity, being able to run my Christmas lights 365 days a year,
I was interested in the service when it first came out, but the restricted items in the contract let me know I didn't want to pay that much for that little.
I think it's funny that they have so many restrictions, but as a non-subscriber, I can find things like the Howard Stern show on Bit Torrent. I grabbed one show just to see what the fuss was about. I didn't care for the language. Call me a pirate. There is no way I would pay for that crap.
I can't believe the media providers are having a lawsuit over this highly DRM'ed almost useless item.
not having to pay for electricity, being able to run my Christmas lights 365 days a year,
Whoa cowboy (slashdot line) having free power is not unlimited. It's just like dropping off the city water system and depending on rainwater collected on the roof. Just because it's free does not mean in any way way that it is unlimited. Just because you collect water from your roof, does not mean you can water your lawn everyday. By the same token, the energy effecient house is not running excess lights everyday. Believe me, they monitor their energy usage very close, much more than we would ever consider.
Over-use of the free electricity is a quick trip to dead batteries and long dark winter nights.
If you do run Christmas lights 365 days a year, may I recommend LED lights?
I could buy a hybrid car. I don't. Why? No payback
People play the no payback card all the time but few stop to do the math.
I bought a used Prius (1 year old) for $18,000. My Wife bought a minivan at at the same time for the same price. The math for the no payback was for new vehicles for those who drove fewer than 20K miles/year and gas was $1.50/gallon.
I had the forsite to know the resale value whould hold up on the Prius (have fun, look up the resale of a 02 Caravan and a 02 Prius). I am not singing the depreciation blues. I can get most of my money back out today if I wanted. With gas at near $3.00 a gallon and I'm reaching 100K miles, I am seeing my payback now. Some cars need a transmission replacement for nearly $4K after 100K miles. The $5K battery replacement everyone was afraid of is now a $3600 dollar item, It is cheaper than a transmission replacement. It is possible to replace a failed 7.2V cell instead of all 36 in the entire pack.
As a bonus, my Prius doubles as a replacement source of electric power while traveling or during outages. I have installed a 1KW inverter. While not driving the power not used for the heater/AC, lights, defroster, power steering, air brake compressor, etc, is easly diverted without overloading the electrical system. It is the most fuel effecient electrical generator I have ever used. The car side of things is 20KW. When parked the engine shuts off instead of running constantly. It starts up and runs a few minutes then shuts back down to repeat in about 20 minutes. This is perfect for running the freezer in an outage. I don't have the engine running all the time when it isn't needed.
Add a few CF lights, the laptop, and the TV to the mix and a tank of gas lasts for days unlike a portable generator. I have run 3 days this way and used less than a quarter tank of gas. (13 gal tank)