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Repeat after me: DRM is bad for the customer

by Volker Weber

I don't know whether I mentioned this before, but DRM is bad for the customer. There were just two more incidents this week proving the point.

• We picked up Anna's new car. As it turns out neither Lexus nor Toyota let you hook up an iPod. But the new radio plays MP3 CDs. What is an MP3 CD? It is a data CD which contains a bunch of MP3 files. Typically one MP3 CD stores as much music as ten Audio CDs. Anna has iTunes. And a lot of tracks bought from the iTunes Music Store. iTunes can create MP3 CDs. You set this in your Burning preferences on the Advanced tab in Preferences. Now you build a playlist and hit burn. This works quite well. Unless your playlist contains tracks you bought from the iTunes Music Store. Workaround: You burn those tracks to an Audio CD, and then rip the tracks back as MP3. No more DRM, no more cry.
• Now imagine you would not need MP3 CDs. You could easily leave all your files "protected" by DRM, right? Wrong. Because your tracks only play on devices somebody else lets you play them on. If you bought from the iTunes Music Store, you could only play them on an iPod. But not from a memory key in your brand new Volkswagen. Or a Samsung media player. But you have an iPod, you say? Well, let's hope that this is true in ten years from now. And even today your results from hearing "protected" files are inferior from real MP3 files. Because your iPod will run out of battery juice faster because it needs to decode the "protection". You are running a Pay4Sure device? Well, "protected" WMA files run down the battery even faster according to this review.

What is your resolve? Do not buy media crippled with DRM. Ever. And if you did, remove the "protection" while you can.

Tags: drm ipod mp3 drm+is+bad+for+the+customer

Comments

Same happened to me just a week ago. I tried to burn the music I bought from the iTunes Music Store as mp3. But it was not possible.

iTunes even has a function, to convert m4a to mp3. But not for music bought from iTunes.

After a google search I found this. I never tried it, maybe someone can? I guess burning a cd with iTunes and ripping it afterwards is still the best solution.

I use a program called Blue Coconut to remove the DRM.

Blue Coconut

We buy all of our music using one iTunes account and then use Blue Coconut to place the music in our own library without DRM.

Do you get MP3 from Blue Coconut or AAC?

AAC 128kbps, however it does in fact look like DRM is still in the file prventing burning/converting. DRM is not good for the customer.

I *used* to use JHymn to get the protection off of the iTunes files so that I could rip the tunes that I PAID FOR to mp3 and play on my non-iPod mp3 player (I did recently buy an iPod, but still do not want the protection on MY files). Then a new iTunes version came out and JHymn was broken. The only solution I've found so far is to use a program to capture any audio going through the sound card and convert it. On my Windows machine I'm using dbPoweramp (it costs a very reasonable US$14 - and that is only to stay legal with the mP3 license)...I'm told there's a similar program called AudioHijack from Rogue Amiga, but I've not tried it.

I’ve used AudioHijack on the Mac, to capture audio from an on-line radio show. It’s very good: does exactly what it says on the tin.

The review is flawed. It says "Even the iPod, playing back only FairPlay AAC tracks, underperformed MP3s by about 8 percent."

But at what bitrate? AAC comes with Long Term Prediction, Perceptual Noise Substitution and Temporal Noise Shaping. According to the specifications, MP3 has a compression factor of 12, while AAC has a compression factor of 16. This means that you can achive better sound quality with AAC at the same filesize. Or you can achieve smaller filesizes at the same sound quality. Smaller filesize means less disk access, which is by far the highest power drain in a hard disk player.

So I guess that it is very well possible that DRM AAC actually gives you *longer* playback time if you use comparable bitrates.

I don't know if the same applies to flash based players, but at the very best, this comparison between MP3 and DRM AAC is incomplete. Don't listen to flawed arguments, whether they come from the good guys or the bad guys. Besides, there are more than enough perfectly valid arguments against DRM.

Ceci n'est pas un blog

vowe.net is a personal website published by Volker Weber a.k.a. vowe. I am an author, consultant and systems architect based in Darmstadt, Germany.

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