ugh... made some mistakes in the last post... here it is, corrected.
It isn't the end user's concern whether Microsoft is interested in marketing and selling a vertically integrated music player and store.
If they had simply stuck with their Plays4sure program, they could have easily "unleashed" the product to do whatever you want to do to files that are not DRMed, creating a much more enoyable (and useful) experience for the end user.
If Microsoft doesn't have the guts to stand up to a bunch of record industry thugs who are not allowing sharing of unDRMed files, files that they have no business caring about anyway, Microsoft simply doesn't deserve the money for selling a purposely crippled product.
We know Microsoft is kowtowing to the record companies, but would the record companies simply have pulled their support for all online stores using Plays4Sure and left Apple's store as the only one standing? Doubtful.
The reason Microsoft is paying Universal (and crippling their hardware) is because of greed; they want to own their own music store and not share it with Napster, Real, et al.
It isn't the end user's concern whether Microsoft is interested in marketing and selling a vertically integrated music player and store.
If they had simply stuck with their Plays4sure program, they could have easily "unleashed" the product to do whatever you want to files that are not DRMed, creating a much more enoyable (and useful) experience for the end user.
If Microsoft doesn't have the guts to stand up to a bunch of record industry thugs who are not allowing sharing of DRMed files, files that they have no business caring about anyway, Microsoft simply doesn't deserve the money for selling a purposely crippled product.
We know Microsoft is kowtowing to the record companies, but would the record companies simply have pulled their support for all online stores using Plays4Sure and left Apple's store as the only one standing? Doubtful.
The reason Microsoft is paying Universal (and crippling their hardware) is because of greed; they want to own their own music store and not share it with Napster, Real, et al.
The FLAC support argument is something that occasionally comes up, but I feel like it's lacking in merit.
The iPod already supports lossless audio; ALAC. Lossless to lossless conversions are non-lossy, so Apple would gain very little (other than goodwill from the open-source fans); for most people, if they have audio in FLAC, it's trivial to convert to ALAC and listen on an iPod.
If you are running Photoshop on an Intel Mac, you should know that it is running in emulation (Rosetta). Performance with an Intel native binary would likely be faster.
As far as your "small tools" complaint, have you tried to find smaller, faster tools? Irfanview isn't included by Microsoft in Windows by default...
Last thing: what keyboard commands are wonky, exactly?
Comment is not very insightful, as it merely says the same exact thing as I was saying; the change is in marketing names, not anything else.
Audioscrobbler effectively became last.fm (try going to ; it simply redirects to last.fm.
So while the plugin is still called Audioscrobbler, it's not like it's a separate product; in fact, before the site and plugin used to be called Audioscrobbler, and now just the plugin is. But again, it's just a name change.
I suppose you can say that when they went commercial, they added a new feature to the site (the radio). Submitter is still a dolt for phrasing it as "a couple of folks seem to have rediscovered the joy of Audioscrobbler and sharing the stuff via last.fm".
It's the same guys, it's the same underlying technology and methods (Audioscrobbler) and they've simply made a pretty page and a radio player that has some Audioscrobbler "smarts" in the backend.
They didn't need to "discover" the joy of Audioscrobbler, they literally invented it!
Submitter is a dolt... Audioscrobbler started off as a school project, but after a while, they went commercial, and are now last.fm.
It's the same technology, it's just a new marketing name for it.
freedb has sucked for ages, though...
on
Freedb.org Ending
·
· Score: 3, Informative
freedb has sucked almost since it's inception. Multiple entries for the same album, hard to do Various Artist albums, lots of misspellings and mistakes, and no way to ""fix" the problems.
I really hope people take this opportunity to check out Musicbrainz, a MUCH nicer alternative. It's (mostly) open source, runs on Linux, Mac and Windows.
Also, it's community moderated like Wikipedia, and it has loads of information about releases, something which was nonexistent on freedb.
Why not just use Skype? While I'm at it, are there any better VOIP packages that are standards based (I tried Gizmo project, but I never got it working)?
While CDDB and freedb may be fraught with errors, another database exists, with the distinction of being editable (a la wiki) by the masses, with voting, so that the metadata is generally correct.
Slashdot Mirror
ugh... made some mistakes in the last post... here it is, corrected.
It isn't the end user's concern whether Microsoft is interested in marketing and selling a vertically integrated music player and store.
If they had simply stuck with their Plays4sure program, they could have easily "unleashed" the product to do whatever you want to do to files that are not DRMed, creating a much more enoyable (and useful) experience for the end user.
If Microsoft doesn't have the guts to stand up to a bunch of record industry thugs who are not allowing sharing of unDRMed files, files that they have no business caring about anyway, Microsoft simply doesn't deserve the money for selling a purposely crippled product.
We know Microsoft is kowtowing to the record companies, but would the record companies simply have pulled their support for all online stores using Plays4Sure and left Apple's store as the only one standing? Doubtful.
The reason Microsoft is paying Universal (and crippling their hardware) is because of greed; they want to own their own music store and not share it with Napster, Real, et al.
It isn't the end user's concern whether Microsoft is interested in marketing and selling a vertically integrated music player and store.
If they had simply stuck with their Plays4sure program, they could have easily "unleashed" the product to do whatever you want to files that are not DRMed, creating a much more enoyable (and useful) experience for the end user.
If Microsoft doesn't have the guts to stand up to a bunch of record industry thugs who are not allowing sharing of DRMed files, files that they have no business caring about anyway, Microsoft simply doesn't deserve the money for selling a purposely crippled product.
We know Microsoft is kowtowing to the record companies, but would the record companies simply have pulled their support for all online stores using Plays4Sure and left Apple's store as the only one standing? Doubtful.
The reason Microsoft is paying Universal (and crippling their hardware) is because of greed; they want to own their own music store and not share it with Napster, Real, et al.
The FLAC support argument is something that occasionally comes up, but I feel like it's lacking in merit.
The iPod already supports lossless audio; ALAC. Lossless to lossless conversions are non-lossy, so Apple would gain very little (other than goodwill from the open-source fans); for most people, if they have audio in FLAC, it's trivial to convert to ALAC and listen on an iPod.
Aiwa is a subsidiary of Sony, yes.
Mod parent up!
If you are running Photoshop on an Intel Mac, you should know that it is running in emulation (Rosetta). Performance with an Intel native binary would likely be faster. As far as your "small tools" complaint, have you tried to find smaller, faster tools? Irfanview isn't included by Microsoft in Windows by default... Last thing: what keyboard commands are wonky, exactly?
No, Last.fm is a company and website.
Last.fm Player is the player application that they produce.
Audioscrobbler is the brains behind both the player and the website.
They are all owned and developed by last.fm, and the last.fm website effectively subsumed the original Audioscrobbler site.
Audioscrobbler wasn't always just the name of the plugin, it was the whole website and tracking system as well!
Not exactly what you were saying.
Comment is not very insightful, as it merely says the same exact thing as I was saying; the change is in marketing names, not anything else.
Audioscrobbler effectively became last.fm (try going to ; it simply redirects to last.fm.
So while the plugin is still called Audioscrobbler, it's not like it's a separate product; in fact, before the site and plugin used to be called Audioscrobbler, and now just the plugin is. But again, it's just a name change.
I suppose you can say that when they went commercial, they added a new feature to the site (the radio). Submitter is still a dolt for phrasing it as "a couple of folks seem to have rediscovered the joy of Audioscrobbler and sharing the stuff via last.fm".
It's the same guys, it's the same underlying technology and methods (Audioscrobbler) and they've simply made a pretty page and a radio player that has some Audioscrobbler "smarts" in the backend.
They didn't need to "discover" the joy of Audioscrobbler, they literally invented it!
Submitter is a dolt... Audioscrobbler started off as a school project, but after a while, they went commercial, and are now last.fm.
It's the same technology, it's just a new marketing name for it.
freedb has sucked almost since it's inception. Multiple entries for the same album, hard to do Various Artist albums, lots of misspellings and mistakes, and no way to ""fix" the problems.
I really hope people take this opportunity to check out Musicbrainz, a MUCH nicer alternative. It's (mostly) open source, runs on Linux, Mac and Windows.
Also, it's community moderated like Wikipedia, and it has loads of information about releases, something which was nonexistent on freedb.
Why not just use Skype? While I'm at it, are there any better VOIP packages that are standards based (I tried Gizmo project, but I never got it working)?
I hope someone posts a .torrent link for the intel binaries...
While CDDB and freedb may be fraught with errors, another database exists, with the distinction of being editable (a la wiki) by the masses, with voting, so that the metadata is generally correct.
See MusicBrainz: http://musicbrainz.org/
Haha. Brilliant Little Britain reference.