3DGalaxy

According to BBC, the iTunes DRM Fairplay used to prevent people from playing their music on music players other than iPods and other computers / music software other than iTunes has been cracked.

I’ve lost the post I made several months ago regarding how to get around this problem so here goes.

iTunes music can be backed up to cd pretty easily. You create a playlist and drag an album downloaded off iTunes to it, then click burn disk. Once you have a burned disk of an album, that music is in audio cd format, not .aac files with DRM. Therefore you could delete the album with the DRM from from iTunes and then just import the CD you burnt. Now you will have the album you bought with no DRM whatsoever, the ability to play the music in other players like songbird or windows media player. Plus of course other mp3 players just by dragging them to the player once you plug it in. This will certainly work with windows explorer and probably with the finder too although I havn’t tried it.

I’m not sure exactly why Apple keeps maintaining that iTunes music only works on iPods when that isn’t the truth exactly. Steve Jobs has said in a recent interview that he thought the decision to block other players out was a good one. I’m not sure if they would be able to sell less iPods this way or not but I would have to guess that they would be selling well if the music was compatible with other players without ripping cd’s. People buy iPods because they are good, easy to use and look nice, not because they can listen to iTunes music on them.

So would iTunes be bigger and more successful than it is now (they havn’t done too badly) if they didn’t use digital rights management to prevent people from accessing the music on more than five pc’s / mac’s?

I guess inevitably it would benefit from not using DRM. The one thing I don’t get is why they do it at all since it’s easy to just burn the music to a disk and rip it back to get it DRM free forever.

I guess the thing is they are under pressure from the music companies that want them to do it because they don’t believe people are clever enough to think of that, even though apple express the importance of backing up to CD when you finish downloading anything from the store. I guess you could argue backing up is backing up and not creating a drm free copy to a lot of users.

If they didn’t have DRM, like eMusic don’t then they would also be limited to just the independants because the big record companies won’t have any of it. I’m sure if Apple had a choice in the matter they would ditch DRM in an instant.

The only reason they should keep the technology (but not the DRM itself, and only if it is this technology that enables it) is to allow the functionality that enables iPods to recognise itunes accounts on another pc and upload content from the iPod to the computer.

I just got my new iPod Nano yesterday. I thought it was about time to upgrade from my old iPod Mini I bought in 2004. The new nano may look like a sized down version of the mini but that’s about where the similarities end.

The new nano has the same capacity (4gb) as the old one but seing as my music collection adds up to around 2.3 gb its not a massive concern. The capacity may be the same, but the storage medium has changed dramatically. The Mini, like the iPod had a small hard disk that would whirr away wasting battery life constantly which wasn’t ideal looking back. Now the nano has flash memory (no moving parts) which speeds things up and allows it to use less power.

It has a colour screen which looks really nice and allows you to view album art either small next to the track info or larger on it’s own but pressing the middle button a few times. You can view pictures on the small screen in surprisingly good quality which is a nice feature.

I’m not really bothered about the lack of video on the nano which is one reason I bought it over the iPod. The second reason would be the fact that it costs significantly less than the Mini did, £129 compared to £169 for the mini back a couple of years ago.

Finally, the most obvious reason for upgrading is the difference in size. The nano is so small and light it makes the mini feel like a brick in comparison. The mini was considered small and light enough to not feel it in your pocket (which was true). However, the nano truly is small and light enough to forget your carrying it. It’s a true marvel of engineering and build quality from Apple. I’d advise anyone to go and grab one. Especially people with a mini or earlier ipod.

Despite the success of Apple iTunes, few people stock their iPod with tracks from the online store, reports a study.

The Jupiter Research report reveals that, on average, only 20 of the tracks on a iPod will be from the iTunes shop.

Far more important to iPod owners, said the study, was free music ripped from CDs someone already owned or acquired from file-sharing sites.

The report’s authors claimed their findings had profound implications for the future of the online music market.

BBC NEWS | Technology | iPod fans ’shunning iTunes store’

I’m pretty sure this is non-news.

Surely anyone could guess that most people will have most of their music on their iPods from CD’s. Simply because CD’s have been around for a long time, iPods for 4 years. Plus, I’ve never read anything that states you can only listen to downloaded music purchased from The iTunes Store and nowhere else. (Obviously that means other legal sites and not limewire).

eMusic have an image of an iPod and it says that all music from eMusic will work on iPod and other MP3 players quite promintently on their front page. Content from all download sites will work on iPod. Even sites that download in wma format. iTunes can convert them when it imports them to the library. Then of course there’s the fact that people use Limewire / bittorrent / whatever other illegal download service they may use to obtain tracks.

I think I may be in the exception from this report who do have a large proportion of their music from the iTunes Store. At first I only had CD music (proves my point) but my iTunes collection has probably grown almost as big as the CD collection by now. The only other music I have is a couple of albums from the eMusic trial offer.

I think you get to a point when CD cases become clutter and there is no novelty in having the inlay and album art. How much of a better idea is it to have all you’re music (complete with high quality album art) on your small macbook rather than in huge CD rack?

Going by that and the fact that people who still buy CDs may just be worried about losing the files or losing the rights to play them, as people get more confident with the technology it will grow bigger and bigger. Plus if you backup the music to more than one pc, external hard drive, iPod and of course CD’s then how is it in danger. It’s no less secure than having bought a CD from a store and ripping it.