Reclaim your music!

[babysimon]

jhg said:

As I'm sure most of you know, as of this week the Official UK Top 40 no longer requires a physical medium to be available in the shops for sales to count towards the official charts: downloads from the officially sanctioned UK stores count too.

This is as good a time as any to reiterate the following point:

If you buy a CD, you can rip it and play it anywhere. If you buy from a download service you can't.

Specifically, if you buy from the iTunes music store, you will only ever be able to play your music on Apple products (or optimistically on products licensing the technology from Apple - no such products currently exist). That's iPod and iTunes. No competing software or hardware. You might not care - you might be happy with Apple products right now. But can you guarantee you'll like Apple's products in 2010? What if you want a type of product Apple doesn't make, like a media PC, or a network audio player? Or a games console? Sorry, no music for you!

Of course this isn't specific to Apple. You can buy from other stores, and get locked into other small groups of manufacturers. Microsoft even managed to launch two incompatible download services.

Some of the other services don't lock you in as much as Apple, but you still have to pay a lot of attention to whether your downloaded music works with your (current or future) hardware. There are even some smaller download services which don't restrict you at all, but they tend not to have mainstream music on them. So, right now, as a rule of thumb:

You should buy music on CDs if you think you might want to listen to it in the future.

I know a lot of people are painfully aware of all this, but I've had conversations recently which have indicated that some people really aren't. Hence the post.

Please note, this post is not to be taken as saying I don't like Apple's products (I'm not brave enough to say that in public), just the lock-in.

Comments

[phantas.livejournal.com]

I use eMusic. Not a lot of mainstream but there is still plenty of things in there that I want to fill my monthly subscription. I have used iTunes Music Store in the past but it's unlikely I'll use it again for the reasons you point out (plus, the cost is sometimes higher than buying the CD!)

I still buy a lot of CDs and a few vinyls and I certainly have to carry as much of my CD collection in digital form as possible: I have so many CDs that some of them are in boxes or drawers...

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Just to explicitly state what you imply here: eMusic sells you DRM-free MP3 files. You will be able to copy them and play them on any device for forever.

[phantas.livejournal.com]

Exactly, though still on that subject I should point out this information I just received a couple of days ago:

On February 20th, 2007, eMusic will begin offering new plan options to new and upgrading eMusic Europe members. While the price of our eMusic Basic, Plus, and Premium subscription plans will remain the same, the number of downloads in each plan will change:

basically, plans will offer 16.7-25% less downloads. I don't know what's behind that move...

[lolliepopp.livejournal.com]

So those of use who theoretically get our music from other *ahem* 'free' sources are okay* then?

L
x
By okay I do realise that we are going to hell.....theoretically of course

[babysimon]

Sure. You will be able to listen to your music indefinitely in hell.

[lolliepopp.livejournal.com]

Hurrah!

See you tomorrow night.

L
x

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Except that it will be covers played on the accordion.

[lolliepopp.livejournal.com]

too late - i've already got about 12 of them.

Plus Leviathan has an accordian (and a trumpet, piano, flute, keyboards, guitar etc etc) so I can recreate them whenever I wish!

L
x

[jhg.livejournal.com]

And that's bad how?

[topbit.livejournal.com]

Ifit's good enough for Albert Yankovic, it's good enough for me.

[ravenevermore.livejournal.com]

I totally see your point. However you can burn iTunes purchased music to CD if you wish. Yes I know this is going to lossy > lossless which is inherrently *bad* but it can be done, and easily, and those CD's can then be used anywhere. Unless something has drastically changed since the last time I did that. I don't know if any other DRM'd services allow you to do that.
I've also removed Apples DRM fairly easily, but that was a) A while ago and b) May not be totally straightforward.

[babysimon]

I thought someone might say this.

Yes, you can burn to CD, but it's a pain in the arse and you lose all your metadata. I wouldn't like to buy a load of music and then have to do that.

And the DRM stripping options are all of dubious legality and as you say, not straightforward. I put this post up for the people who don't know DRM exists - they're not the people who will strip DRM.

[ravenevermore.livejournal.com]

ah well, i thought you thought that someone might think to say this...
And I'd hate to disappoint.

[babysimon]

:-)

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

know this is going to lossy > lossless which is inherrently *bad* but it can be done, and easily

True enough, but it gets worse if you buy music from iTunes and then ever want to put it on an MP3 player (other than an iPod). You have to burn it to CD and then re-rip it to an MP3, which is going lossy -> lossless -> lossy, which is bad enough to be audibly bad to many people. And it's fair-to-moderate amount of faff just to move your tunes around.

If you buy it on CD in the first place you avoid all that bother. And get a free CD-quality physical copy for archiving as well, saving you the hassle of backing it up!

(It's also cheaper if you buy entire albums at a time, which frankly boggles me.)

[ravenevermore.livejournal.com]

to be fair, I use iTunes music store when I want *a* song not an entire album. Because that is cheaper. I may not want an entire soundtrack for X or Y film, but I may want 1 or 2 songs. Also I know yes, you get a hard copy with CD's, and good and groovy and very well done. But I have a whole bunch of CD's I've either had to rebuy or pirate copies of, because they have died. And not through misuse, just through CD Cancer. Admittedly most of these are older CD's, circa mid 90s, but it's still annoying.

Also iTunes lets you redownload your music (albeit only once) in the case of HDD death. Which I believe is more than most DRM services allow you to do.

I personally believe DRM is a case of chicken/egg. Online music stores exist, record labels would have (more likely than not) said 'F Off' if Apple (or anyone else) approached them and said 'yeah, we want to sell your music with no strings attached and people can do whatever they want with it and share it however they want...'. But lets face it, since broadband became de-facto, piracy of music via MP3 has gone through the roof. And what's that sourced from more often than not? CD.

Record labels have only de-DRM'd CD's due to public protest and the fact it inhibits the CD's from being played in some devices. DRM will always be about, it will always be bypassed via one means or the other, and people will always crusade for/against it. It's been that way since Macrovision was introduced (although I don't personally remember quite so many people going 'Hey I can't make copies of my purchased copy of Jurassic Park' at the time...). Whilst DRM CD's are gone for now, they'll be back.

I wish more media players would support MP4 of any type. I much prefer it as a file format for sound quality, especially at lower bitrates. Since the station I DJ for introduced AAC/MP4 streaming (which amusingly you can listen to with most players except iTunes, and I have had a message along the lines of 'wtf?' passed on to a few people who work on it...), it has become the more dominant stream listened to, as people can listen to it with winamp/vlc/etc out the box, and WMP with a free plugin. And the 32kbps stream is better in quality than the 64kbps mp3 stream. Yet the only players i've seen apart from Apples which used it (and used it well) were panasonics range of Music players from X years back.

Please don't consider me to be in favour of the record industries practise in general, but DRM does exist for a reason, and sadly the honest people amongst the population suffer for the actions of the dishonest. I won't claim to be whiter than white, i've pirated stuff in the past and I'll live with those consequences. The only rule I live by is I only play on air what I legally own. Because we pay licensing fees and that is one of the terms we have to obey by and if we get audited and i'd played bootleg/downloaded mp3s then the entire station would go down the crapper and a X thousand dollar fine is ours for the keeping.

I may have had a point here, I forget what it was... I'm tired and rambling.

[jhg.livejournal.com]

Oh come on, I know all that.

I bought this to get it into the charts; if I want to hang on to it and actually *listen* to it I'll, ah, get hold of it by other means - and with a clear conscience for once!

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

For someone who was only vaguely aware of the point, and is trying to figure out the best way to get music in my study and on the move, can you/someone answer the following:

1. If I have a bunch of MP3s on my Windows PC that someone produced which happen to represent CDs I own (so presumably legal for me to own the MP3s) how do I tell if I have to use certain software/devices to listen to them?
2. If I want to make MP3s of my remaining CDs, what's the best way to do it given that I use a PC with Windows and am not touching a Mac or Linux?
3. As my phone only holds 1Gb of data, what's the most cost-effective device to play MP3s on, if I want to see listings of what I've got on there and go to whatever track? I've heard that iShuffle things only let you listen to songs at random, which sounds crap.

Leads from my hearing aids to an ordinary headphone jack have got cheap enough to invest in...:)

[babysimon]

1) If you ripped them yourself to mp3s, you're fine. That's exactly what you should do. *Everything* plays mp3s. The above rant is about the lockin you get from paid music downloads.

2) I'm not a Windows user. Trish uses iTunes. You need to fiddle slightly with preferences to make it rip to mp3 rather than the slightly less compatible aac format.

3) The shuffle does let you play in order, but you can't see what you're doing. People say good things about iPods.

Using the Apple products is fine, it's just the music store which really locks you in.

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

Using the Apple products is fine, it's just the music store which really locks you in.
Ah, thank you. Was confused.

I thought all these sites produced MP3s, just with or without DRM on the files? Am I wrong and some only let you download some other format like this aac?

[babysimon]

The Apple one sells DRMed AAC. I don't think DRMed MP3 exists.

But the rant was really about DRM, not AAC vs MP3.

[jhg.livejournal.com]

There is, I noticed, a facility in ITunes to convert a bought AAC file to MP3 format.

I have no idea whether the produced MP3 file would retain its parent's DRM.


J

[envoy.livejournal.com]

Um…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_rootkit

CD's aren't always the best bet either.

[babysimon]

Yes, I did hear about that at the time ;-)

That only applied to misconfigured Windows machines though (OK, maybe misconfigured out of the box).

I still think CDs offer you more freedom than DRMed downloads. If you wanted to pay for your music, which option would you pick?

[barakta]

If necessary I shall point my brat sister at this, she's just been given an iPod which I know nothing about and avoid like the plague. Thanks for being clear, the comments are also helpful.