Wednesday, April 30, 2003

You can buck dharma, but instant karma is going to get you In the minor avalance of stories on Apple's new music file downloading service. Which origniate out of their own iTune music store for 99 cents a pop and are in AAC format (a reasonably widely available compression standard similar to MP3). Steve Jobs offers an interesting gloss on the problem stated in this C|net article (the comment itself was apparently delivered from the stage at the Moscone convention center). "On the good side, (services like Kazaa) are instant gratification, showing the Net was built for music distribution," Jobs said. "On the downside, it is stealing, and it's best not to mess with karma." Thus spake the one, succinct and to the point. Steve Jobs ought drop the pretence that he runs a computer n software company and just run with the guru thing. For myself though there was an element of practical longing amidst the instant gratification. I was never in the game of running to the record store friday afternoon and buying my stiff little fingers record and racing back home to consume it utterly until the next friday when the new Dream Syndicate might be on the shelf. I was always a radio listener and needed that 50,000 disc record library a good station had which I could never hope to match. Of course that didn't stop some folks I knew (Logan Perkins) from trying. But radio demographics will out run you unless you have ultra convential tastes or only care about whats new and selling. File sharing offered the whole stack of wax, the record companies saw it only as a dangerous leak in their preferred way of doing business and made people outlaws. But now our karmic balance will be restored and we can download cheap trick's live at buddakhan from apple. Addendum. Originally in the above I wrote ACC format - it's AAC. I've been at Maryland too long I got ACC on the brain. Mp3s were just the audio layer from a motion picture streaming protocol. AAC is the audio layer from the follow-on format Quick Time currently uses, call it MP3.4. What they're actually calling it is: .M4a and .M4p. Here is a link to a page on MacRumors which explain this better than I can, and gives a rundown on what deals apple cut with the digital rights management devil. 9:57:43 PM    comment [];trackback [];

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. 2006 Paul Bushmiller. Last update: 10/21/06; 2:53:43 PM.