Steal This Disc! (or at least don’t send it to me)

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Endgad­get whines about Jobs dis­tanc­ing Apple from DRM

This is not a home run by any means, but get­ting rid of the DRM pro­tec­tions and upping the bitrate to 256K bring me a lot clos­er to buy­ing albums that I’d like to keep… cur­rent­ly I buy indi­vid­ual songs or some­times albums that I don’t real­ly have a lot of attach­ment to.

I’m much more like­ly already to buy MP3s from labels that don’t attach copy pro­tec­tion. Six Degrees Records offers down­load­able ver­sions of many of their artist’s albums, and some of those I’d like to keep around. I don’t hes­i­tate to leave the plas­tic and pack­ag­ing at the fac­to­ry when I can have instant gratification.

I’m not antic­i­pat­ing Apple going away any time soon, but what hap­pens when they do, or when they decide that the for­mat they’re sell­ing now is at «end of life» and no longer sup­port­ed? Then I’ll be left run­ning old ver­sions of their soft­ware, crack­ing the encryp­tion, or high and dry.

I’m pret­ty sure that any play­er I get in my life­time will play MP3s. Although who knows?

Published by splicer

One Reply to “Steal This Disc! (or at least don’t send it to me)”

  1. Dou­bling the bitrate means
    Dou­bling the bitrate means that the music is prob­a­bly of tol­er­a­ble qual­i­ty. But iTunes songs already cost more than buy­ing the CD, so increas­ing the price makes me won­der: why not buy the album at Ama­zon for $10 or so and rip to what­ev­er bitrate/device you want. Or lis­ten to every sub­tle har­mon­ic off the CD. Or play it in your car stereo or at your friends house. If you just real­ly hate hav­ing a reli­able back­up handy, just mail the CDs to me. I’m not dis­parag­ing MP3 play­ers. They are a very portable way to have all your music stolen – I mean, with you wher­ev­er you go. CD play­ers are admit­ted­ly a lit­tle bulky for jogging.

    Is AAC a free codec? I have always won­dered why Apple does­n’t appear to want to sell to Win­dows users, and why the Win­dows iTunes soft­ware is so clutzy. Per­haps it is so Apple own­ers can say, “Oh, it is way sim­pler on a Mac!” but it cer­tain­ly does­n’t inspire me to buy Apple.

    Bot­tom line on the announce­ment: Hey, it’s a step in the right gen­er­al direction.”

    Dad

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