Home | ![]() |
Updated: 5/1/2003; 12:32:45 PM. |
Synthetic Morpheme Christopher Taylor's editorials on Science, Technology, Salsa dancing and more ![]() Not to be outdone by Apple, Microsoft is offering its own music downloading service [Microsoft]. Their service will encode the music in WMP format (surprise, surprise). I can sum up their service in one simple word; "lame". 11:56:34 AM
![]() Finally, someone is launching a digital music service that makes sense. Apple is changing the way digital music is distributed with its newly launched iTunes Music Store [Yahoo! News]. Apple's new offering is doing things the right way by providing downloads in the standards complient 128kbps AAC format. You can think of it as MP3, only better. Furthermore, the service is not a subscription service, but a flat fee per download service.
Apparently, there is some kind of DRM solution involved that will prevent some types of copying, yet you can apparently burn to CD. Does this mean that they are using DRM that works even on CD's? I doubt that. So how are they keeping the recording industry happy. It seems likely that any DRM will be stripped as soon as you burn to CD. Of course, the CD's you buy in the store (with only a few exceptions) can all be ripped and encoded at any time. Well, I applaud Apple and I will likely use their service as soon as I am able to play their media on both Linux and Windows. update: Here's the inside skinny on Apple's new iTunes Music Store [Fortune].
That sounds dubious to me. What technology are they using to degrade the audio through the burn->rip->encode cycle? I can see how the DRM in the original AAC file would be able to thwart direct sharing over KaZaA, but once you burn the AAC file onto CD, any "digital key" will be stripped. Music on a CD is just digital data and can, therefore, be directly copied without degradation. It should then be possible to encode the resulting raw audio PCM data without any abnormal results, thus completely bypassing the DRM. The only thing that I can think of is that they might have included something in the raw audio that thwarts either the subsequent ripping or encoding process. It would have to be something along the lines of Macrovision that exploits some unique feature of CD technology to degrade the resulting ripped audio file. Macrovision is able to do this by taking advantage of image correction circuitry that is built into every VCR. Is there an analog to this in the rip->encode process? I'll believe it when I see it (or hear a convincing argument describing the technology). 10:32:27 AM![]()
|