I doubt it. Most likely, by the time a better codec is in POPULAR use, nobody will be using 16/44.1 CD audio anymore, and you'll be reripping your entire collection from SACD or whatever.
A fair point, if you neglect the fact that my music collection, like millions of others, originally came on CD. There's nothing to "re-rip" unless I "re-buy" all that music - and it's generally accepted that 22khZ is the most we can hear. Until my ears are shown otherwise, I won't be replacing those billions of bits I bought on CD.
Why not just rip to 256bits/s MP3. Save yourself the time of reencoding your stuff every time you want to take it with you and save many many gigabytes. So what if you lose a few bits
Again, a fair point - 256Kbps mp3 is universally supported. However, I don't trust apple/msft not to drop support for mp3 in favor of their own codec-du-jour. Having the ability to convert my files (with no additional loss) as needed to work with latest hardware/software is a plus.
Chances are you'll lose everything in a hard disk crash anyway, between now and a few years time.
Not a chance. I learned about backups a long time ago.
There is nothing rational about preparing yourself for an event that is less probable than slipping in the bathroom and breaking your neck.
Right - ignore wet floor next time. Thanks for the tip.
Young grasshopper, you fail to see the point of AAC. There is nothing "open" about it. Just because it's part of an MPEG spec does not make it "open", and it's most certainly NOT FREE.
Consider this: who's seriously supporting AAC right now besides Apple? (crickets chirping). That's right - Apple probably has a special deal with Dolby which allows Apple, and only Apple, to distribute free software (itunes) incorporating the AAC codec.
You know what that is?
PLATFORM LOCK-IN.
Same goes for WMA, Real, etc. The big guys get behind a format and then they get to keep everyone else out unless they pony up.
Say no to proprietary formats. Say no to DRM. It's your music.
secondly: I've had it with the codec wars. Let's let the big music/hardware/software companies keep duking it out and pissing away their resources fighting over mp3/aac/wma. Personally I'm re-ripping all my CDs once and for all to FLAC. If a better lossless codec comes along later, all I have to do is batch process them all and save some space. No worries about finding a new original to avoid lossy reencoding.
As far as my ears can tell, there is no appreciable difference between ANY of the lossy codecs about 192kbps. But they all seem to come with DRM these days, and that's just anacceptable.
What about collapsing to mono, downsampling to 8 kHz, and dithering to 8 bits? Would you call that another "way of storing samples"?
No, I'd call that collapsing to mono, downsampling to 8 kHz, and dithering to 8 bits. I wouldn't confuse the issue by calling it "compression," though I guess in the broadest sense of the word, that's what you're doing.
Digitization != data compression. It's SAMPLING.
An analog signal has infinite resolution, so of course any conversion to a digital signal is "lossy", but in a totally different sense.
It's a different kind of format. CD audio is not a lossy compression scheme, it's a way of storing samples. But you knew that.
Look, it costs a couple cents to transmit a 650MB CD across the internet - half that if it's losslessly compressed. As far as I'm concerned, if I'm paying $$ for the songs, I should get them in the best possible format within accepted standards. I.e. I wouldn't expect 96KHz/24bit, but I wouldn't complain.
You download the DRM WMA weed file and can listen to it 3 times on any computer before deciding to purchase it or not.
Sure - it's a free tril so I won't complain about the format.
If you do purchase it......then I get the song in a lossless format, complete with digitized cover art and free of any DRM, right? Because as a paying customer, I'd expect to get at least the sound quality and format versatility that the pirates are getting.
Yes, I did RTFA - the format is no surprise. When the only option for online buying is DRM, it only encourages piracy because regardless of whether you're prepared to pay for the content, it's the only way to get the music without funny restriction.
Once they start cracking and hacking, are they a legitimate owner in the language of the license? Have they voided the licence and ceased to be legitimate owners?
It is not "cracking and hacking" except in the most respectable sense of those words, and it certainly should not be illegal.
It's simply using what you've paid for as you see fit.
sorry, I didn't exactly read your entire post. I stopped at "dedicated music pirates" the saw the rest of that sentence later.
I think you should consider that there are MANY practical reasons why a legitimate owner (licensee?) of iTMS music might want to strip the DRM from their files.
However, I would like to serve up my protected AAC to my squeezebox, and this just might allow for on the fly transcoding to a PCM stream from SlimServer.
I just got home from helping set up our booth for the Macworld expo (which starts tomorrow - free passes here!). After checking slashdot, I found a message on my machine from Dean, telling me to go check slashdot.
We're just now learning about this hack of course, but basically it looks like iTunes DRM has been broken wide open now.
Of course, we've already known of a different way to play iTMS drmed files on squeezebox, at least on Mac/Win, but I can't tell you how because that would be trafficking in a circumvention device. Anyway...
What's excellent about DVD-Jon's discovery is that this allows people who have legitimately purchased iTMS music to play it on squeezebox or any AAC compatible device/software. I expect it will also be easy to simply batch process all your iTMS files into unprotected AAC without having to re-encode.
Like I said this is news to us too. All I can say right now is that it's VERY unlikely we'll support DRMed AAC out-of-the-box, for obvious legal reasons (and some philosophical ones). However it's practically certain that within the week someone will have a command-line iTMS decoder that works on all platforms.
Thanks Jon - just in time for the biggest Mac event of the year!
If he's using the key to decrypt the file, presumably the raw AAC stream can be extracted.
I.e. you could do lossless conversion of m4p -> m4a. You'll have the same exact data minus the DRM, free to use with any AAC-compatible device or software you want.
The downside here is that you're losing quality encoding to MP3 (remember that AAC is also lossy). Unfortunately, there is no way to preserve full-quality without retaining the original file format.
Now quite.
Now you can extract the un-encrypted AAC stream, thereby allowing you to play the compressed file on any AAC-compatible device or software, sans DRM.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 1
Nothing we do actually matters.
Every living thing cares about something.
If you don't believe in God (and I'm not saying I do) then it's quite easy to point at the boundaries of known life, and say "nothing matters outside of this box".
I think my white blood cells are concerned right now that I have a cold. Something matters to them, and I doubt that they have an idea of the importance of their role in my little "universe".. Likewise, every part of my body has a vested interest in seeing that the other organs keep going. I don't think any individual organ cares that it matters to myself as a whole. They're just doing their part to ensure that they themselves stay alive.
Look at any working system, even not strictly biological ones... say, freeway traffic or even a computer, and you'll find lots of little bits doing their part, whetever they were made to do, unaware of the function and purpose of their whole.
Now, if the sun implodes tomorrow, it'll matter to life on earth for a few minutes. It won't matter to the other planets unless they care about having something to orbit about. However, I don't think that the impenetrable space around us precludes the possibility that we're doing something here on earth which is REALLY important to someone else, on some scale.
You're just like the little white blood cell who has no idea why he's being sent to my nasal passages to battle a virus. You are too simple to understand your place in the bigger picture.
And my body, in turn, doesn't know exactly why it's here. However, I have stuff to do, I'm contributing something to a bigger living thing, and that's what being alive is about. I'd love to understand the bigger picture, but I'm not going to throw my arms up and say "there's nothing more" just because I can't see it.
people only seem to communicate in enclaves of like minds, reinforcing each other's narrow world views.
I agree with the first half of that sentence but not the second.
This is what makes online discussion so powerful - it brings together the few and far-flung people who have keen interests in non-mainstream things. If you only read slashdot then yes, you'll develop a narrow world view. But it's the surfer's choice how far he wants to branch out.
Sure I can go to the coffee shop and talk with friends and strangers about everything from the popular TV shows to the latest cars to the war du jour. I do that one or twice a week. But I can't go there to talk about a new RISC architecture I'm interested in, or to get tips on cabinet making or what have you.
The less specific the forum, the baser the discussion. A good world view comes from learning at a few of these strata - have a few specialties but keep tabs on the mainstream a little too.
I am currently setting up an asterisk PBX with polycom ip phones and VOIP for outgoing calls. It is incredible software. I have no doubt that in the next year or two, it will become one of the most important open source projects, right up there with Linux and Apache.
The software does have a steep learning curve (not worse that any other telco system though). Be prepared to spend a few weeks just getting a basic system with a couple of phones to go. However, once you get it up and going, it is very easy (and cheap!) to expand.
Asterisk will totally replace the current PBX and key systems, and it will also play a key role in destroying the traditional overpriced channelized telco services.
Forgot one thing... now that I think about it the building was probably about 40yrs old, and the reason there was so much crap up there was also because the ceilings were filled with asbestos so nobody wanted to spend too much time up there.
The reason it so bad is that they're letting practically anyone string wires. Need a line to the building across the street? Just throw it across. Nobody'll even notice one more wire! I'm sure that the vast majority of those wires are no longer in use - the article talks about attempts to identify who owns what and remove the stuff nobody can claim.
A few years ago I was doing IT work and the company had rented an office suite in a big 30yr old building. We were pulling cat5 about 40 meters between rooms, along the main hallways. There was a four inch thick layer of ancient wires held up by the cieling panels. At least a hundred times as many wires as there were people working on that floor! The telephone closet was even worse - huge masses of jumpers going back to the MPOE where there was no connection on the other end. There were 25pair cables for old multi-line systems... everything you can imagine. We just left it all there because we had no way of knowing which 0.05% of all that cable was still live.
Then last year I rented an office in a newer building. Lifted the cieling panels and found a rats nest but not too bad - I think it was about 10 years worth of junk, and it was a smaller place. There had been about five previous tenants and they'd all just installed new systems on top of the crap the previous one left. I just went up there and pulled out EVERYTHING except for one wire - for the thermostat. After that, installing the CAT5 wiring we needed was trivially easy, and since there wasn't a rats nest to dig through everwhere you went, it was easy to route everythign neatly and hang it way up high where it'd be out of the way of future installations.
Anyway regarding China: there's really no solution other than to dig in, start identifying the old wire, and pulling it out. It's not really that expensive, and it gets easier as you go!
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt it. Most likely, by the time a better codec is in POPULAR use, nobody will be using 16/44.1 CD audio anymore, and you'll be reripping your entire collection from SACD or whatever.
A fair point, if you neglect the fact that my music collection, like millions of others, originally came on CD. There's nothing to "re-rip" unless I "re-buy" all that music - and it's generally accepted that 22khZ is the most we can hear. Until my ears are shown otherwise, I won't be replacing those billions of bits I bought on CD.
Why not just rip to 256bits/s MP3. Save yourself the time of reencoding your stuff every time you want to take it with you and save many many gigabytes. So what if you lose a few bits
Again, a fair point - 256Kbps mp3 is universally supported. However, I don't trust apple/msft not to drop support for mp3 in favor of their own codec-du-jour. Having the ability to convert my files (with no additional loss) as needed to work with latest hardware/software is a plus.
Chances are you'll lose everything in a hard disk crash anyway, between now and a few years time.
Not a chance. I learned about backups a long time ago.
There is nothing rational about preparing yourself for an event that is less probable than slipping in the bathroom and breaking your neck.
Right - ignore wet floor next time. Thanks for the tip.
Young grasshopper, you fail to see the point of AAC. There is nothing "open" about it. Just because it's part of an MPEG spec does not make it "open", and it's most certainly NOT FREE.
Consider this: who's seriously supporting AAC right now besides Apple? (crickets chirping). That's right - Apple probably has a special deal with Dolby which allows Apple, and only Apple, to distribute free software (itunes) incorporating the AAC codec.
You know what that is?
PLATFORM LOCK-IN.
Same goes for WMA, Real, etc. The big guys get behind a format and then they get to keep everyone else out unless they pony up.
Say no to proprietary formats. Say no to DRM. It's your music.
first of all - superior to what?
secondly: I've had it with the codec wars. Let's let the big music/hardware/software companies keep duking it out and pissing away their resources fighting over mp3/aac/wma. Personally I'm re-ripping all my CDs once and for all to FLAC. If a better lossless codec comes along later, all I have to do is batch process them all and save some space. No worries about finding a new original to avoid lossy reencoding.
As far as my ears can tell, there is no appreciable difference between ANY of the lossy codecs about 192kbps. But they all seem to come with DRM these days, and that's just anacceptable.
What about collapsing to mono, downsampling to 8 kHz, and dithering to 8 bits? Would you call that another "way of storing samples"?
No, I'd call that collapsing to mono, downsampling to 8 kHz, and dithering to 8 bits. I wouldn't confuse the issue by calling it "compression," though I guess in the broadest sense of the word, that's what you're doing.
Digitization != data compression. It's SAMPLING.
An analog signal has infinite resolution, so of course any conversion to a digital signal is "lossy", but in a totally different sense.
What makes MP3s any less lossless than CDA.
It's inferior sound quality.
Its another format and thats it.
It's a different kind of format. CD audio is not a lossy compression scheme, it's a way of storing samples. But you knew that.
Look, it costs a couple cents to transmit a 650MB CD across the internet - half that if it's losslessly compressed. As far as I'm concerned, if I'm paying $$ for the songs, I should get them in the best possible format within accepted standards. I.e. I wouldn't expect 96KHz/24bit, but I wouldn't complain.
You download the DRM WMA weed file and can listen to it 3 times on any computer before deciding to purchase
...then I get the song in a lossless format, complete with digitized cover art and free of any DRM, right? Because as a paying customer, I'd expect to get at least the sound quality and format versatility that the pirates are getting.
it or not.
Sure - it's a free tril so I won't complain about the format.
If you do purchase it...
Yes, I did RTFA - the format is no surprise. When the only option for online buying is DRM, it only encourages piracy because regardless of whether you're prepared to pay for the content, it's the only way to get the music without funny restriction.
Once they start cracking and hacking, are they a legitimate owner in the language of the license? Have they voided the licence and ceased to be legitimate owners?
It is not "cracking and hacking" except in the most respectable sense of those words, and it certainly should not be illegal.
It's simply using what you've paid for as you see fit.
Is she cute?
MILF!
Shall we start the bidding at $5,000?
sorry, I didn't exactly read your entire post. I stopped at "dedicated music pirates" the saw the rest of that sentence later.
I think you should consider that there are MANY practical reasons why a legitimate owner (licensee?) of iTMS music might want to strip the DRM from their files.
However, I would like to serve up my protected AAC to my squeezebox, and this just might allow for on the fly transcoding to a PCM stream from SlimServer.
I just got home from helping set up our booth for the Macworld expo (which starts tomorrow - free passes here!). After checking slashdot, I found a message on my machine from Dean, telling me to go check slashdot.
We're just now learning about this hack of course, but basically it looks like iTunes DRM has been broken wide open now.
Of course, we've already known of a different way to play iTMS drmed files on squeezebox, at least on Mac/Win, but I can't tell you how because that would be trafficking in a circumvention device. Anyway...
What's excellent about DVD-Jon's discovery is that this allows people who have legitimately purchased iTMS music to play it on squeezebox or any AAC compatible device/software. I expect it will also be easy to simply batch process all your iTMS files into unprotected AAC without having to re-encode.
Like I said this is news to us too. All I can say right now is that it's VERY unlikely we'll support DRMed AAC out-of-the-box, for obvious legal reasons (and some philosophical ones). However it's practically certain that within the week someone will have a command-line iTMS decoder that works on all platforms.
Thanks Jon - just in time for the biggest Mac event of the year!
That doesn't make any sense.
If he's using the key to decrypt the file, presumably the raw AAC stream can be extracted.
I.e. you could do lossless conversion of m4p -> m4a. You'll have the same exact data minus the DRM, free to use with any AAC-compatible device or software you want.
The downside here is that you're losing quality encoding to MP3 (remember that AAC is also lossy). Unfortunately, there is no way to preserve full-quality without retaining the original file format.
Now quite.
Now you can extract the un-encrypted AAC stream, thereby allowing you to play the compressed file on any AAC-compatible device or software, sans DRM.
Because it stimulates the mind.
Now you go grab a beer and watch TV.
Nothing we do actually matters.
Every living thing cares about something.
If you don't believe in God (and I'm not saying I do) then it's quite easy to point at the boundaries of known life, and say "nothing matters outside of this box".
I think my white blood cells are concerned right now that I have a cold. Something matters to them, and I doubt that they have an idea of the importance of their role in my little "universe".. Likewise, every part of my body has a vested interest in seeing that the other organs keep going. I don't think any individual organ cares that it matters to myself as a whole. They're just doing their part to ensure that they themselves stay alive.
Look at any working system, even not strictly biological ones... say, freeway traffic or even a computer, and you'll find lots of little bits doing their part, whetever they were made to do, unaware of the function and purpose of their whole.
Now, if the sun implodes tomorrow, it'll matter to life on earth for a few minutes. It won't matter to the other planets unless they care about having something to orbit about. However, I don't think that the impenetrable space around us precludes the possibility that we're doing something here on earth which is REALLY important to someone else, on some scale.
You're just like the little white blood cell who has no idea why he's being sent to my nasal passages to battle a virus. You are too simple to understand your place in the bigger picture.
And my body, in turn, doesn't know exactly why it's here. However, I have stuff to do, I'm contributing something to a bigger living thing, and that's what being alive is about. I'd love to understand the bigger picture, but I'm not going to throw my arms up and say "there's nothing more" just because I can't see it.
people only seem to communicate in enclaves of like minds, reinforcing each other's narrow world views.
I agree with the first half of that sentence but not the second.
This is what makes online discussion so powerful - it brings together the few and far-flung people who have keen interests in non-mainstream things. If you only read slashdot then yes, you'll develop a narrow world view. But it's the surfer's choice how far he wants to branch out.
Sure I can go to the coffee shop and talk with friends and strangers about everything from the popular TV shows to the latest cars to the war du jour. I do that one or twice a week. But I can't go there to talk about a new RISC architecture I'm interested in, or to get tips on cabinet making or what have you.
The less specific the forum, the baser the discussion. A good world view comes from learning at a few of these strata - have a few specialties but keep tabs on the mainstream a little too.
I am currently setting up an asterisk PBX with polycom ip phones and VOIP for outgoing calls. It is incredible software. I have no doubt that in the next year or two, it will become one of the most important open source projects, right up there with Linux and Apache.
The software does have a steep learning curve (not worse that any other telco system though). Be prepared to spend a few weeks just getting a basic system with a couple of phones to go. However, once you get it up and going, it is very easy (and cheap!) to expand.
Asterisk will totally replace the current PBX and key systems, and it will also play a key role in destroying the traditional overpriced channelized telco services.
No, a union isn't the solution (at least not for American programmers).
I disagree.... for large data structures they can save a lot of memory.
Farsi is written from left to right.
!si ti egaugnul yzarc a tahw dna
If the site can't sustain itself now, I'm sure they'll be back next year looking for $100K. This is so 1999 of them!
I don't think that's really conducive to DRM encorcement.
Presumably, a mini-ipod would also have no moving parts. I.e. it's 2-4GB capacity so it must be flash.
Forgot one thing... now that I think about it the building was probably about 40yrs old, and the reason there was so much crap up there was also because the ceilings were filled with asbestos so nobody wanted to spend too much time up there.
The reason it so bad is that they're letting practically anyone string wires. Need a line to the building across the street? Just throw it across. Nobody'll even notice one more wire! I'm sure that the vast majority of those wires are no longer in use - the article talks about attempts to identify who owns what and remove the stuff nobody can claim.
A few years ago I was doing IT work and the company had rented an office suite in a big 30yr old building. We were pulling cat5 about 40 meters between rooms, along the main hallways. There was a four inch thick layer of ancient wires held up by the cieling panels. At least a hundred times as many wires as there were people working on that floor! The telephone closet was even worse - huge masses of jumpers going back to the MPOE where there was no connection on the other end. There were 25pair cables for old multi-line systems... everything you can imagine. We just left it all there because we had no way of knowing which 0.05% of all that cable was still live.
Then last year I rented an office in a newer building. Lifted the cieling panels and found a rats nest but not too bad - I think it was about 10 years worth of junk, and it was a smaller place. There had been about five previous tenants and they'd all just installed new systems on top of the crap the previous one left. I just went up there and pulled out EVERYTHING except for one wire - for the thermostat. After that, installing the CAT5 wiring we needed was trivially easy, and since there wasn't a rats nest to dig through everwhere you went, it was easy to route everythign neatly and hang it way up high where it'd be out of the way of future installations.
Anyway regarding China: there's really no solution other than to dig in, start identifying the old wire, and pulling it out. It's not really that expensive, and it gets easier as you go!
You should note that the record labels pay the RIAA, you don't directly.
Generally, when we talk about the RIAA, we're talking about the RIAA's members, i.e. the labels.
t's an Apple battery. That's $99 of quality Apple engineering you're paying for.
No.... Apple just breaks even on the music store so they can sell iPods. Then they break even on the iPods just so they can sell you the batteries!