Tag: DRM

Ripping Music Revisited

by

Bundle of CDs.

Amazon MP3 Tech Support is useless. Of course, as friendly as Amazon is, they have been consistent useless to us. From insisting our package would be delivered when UPS insisted it had been delayed to the latest, asking us to email log files repeatedly to an address that sent back it did not accept incoming emails…and it was apparently correct as we’re still waiting.

At the beginning of the month, we wrote about Amazon upgrading Cloud Player. It prompted us to break out our music collection and try uploading it. Now, we’ve gone back and forth about cloud based music, having tried the now defunct mp3tunes, Moozone, Google Music, and Amazon Cloud Player.

We’ve also bought a lot of DRM-free MP3 files from Amazon during sales. Amazon is great at sales.

So, it made sense to give Amazon a shot, as they’ll store anything you buy from them for free. Their new model is $25 a year for more song space than we can use, and a good amount of general file storage. If only they had full Linux support and/or an API. But we hope this will come soon, at least for the Cloud Drive.

So, we uploaded the entire collection overnight. However, it was several messed up in the metadata department. We spoke to Amazon, and they did not offer any suggestions. We’d had similar problems with Moozone and with Google Music.

Deciding the problem was likely with the decisions made during the initial ripping, we made the decision to rerip the entire collection. Armed with an old laptop and an external hard drive, we’ve been slowly making our way through the collection.

One of the issues came from the decision to originally rip into the Ogg Vorbis format. Now, this was a freedom based decision. We wanted to support open standards, and still do. But, the limitations of this have come to bite us many times. Most notably that Moozone is the only cloud storage that offers decent Ogg support without transcoding, and Moozone appears to be dead in terms of development.

That alone wouldn’t have caused us to go back and destroy all the old files. We’re not audiophile enough to try 320kbps or FLAC, but the original files did show some encoding glitches, and we will be encoding at 256kbps MP3 as opposed to the originally quality of roughly 192kbps, but the big issue was metadata. Our metadata was in horrible shape, and made it impossible to find things.

The hardest type of album to deal with, of which we have many, are ones with multiple artists. ID3 tags initially did not have support. The Album Artist tag came later. In fact, up until more recently, our audio file tagging program on Linux, Easytag, didn’t support the Album Artist tag. It now does, which is most helpful. The other helpful tool was the free MusicBrainz Picard, available for multiple platforms, which encodes files with metadata from the MusicBrainz database.

Even with this, being the musical mavericks we are, there are plenty of CDs we have that have nonexistent or incomplete entries in these databases, that we’ll be going through manually. Also, this has inspired us to fill some gaps in the collection. Some of the files were encoded from audio cassettes, and we’ve been using Amazon Marketplace to purchase selected used CDs of said content for cheap, allowing high quality copies to be made.

It may be time to finally throw away the tapes., however, and go completely digital. As we migrate further from analog media, it is odd we have no intention of chucking the vinyl. What makes vinyl so nostalgic and tapes..not?

So, the above chronicles the journey from freedom loving Ogg user in search of a cloud to freedom-hating individual seeking to be locked into one platform…or not. The truth is, no matter what, we’re committed to a local copy. Cloud services are wonderful for keeping a backup copy, and pulling music on the go when you have a hankering for something from your collection, but trusting any service 100% is foolish, and we all need to be more diligent about that.

Our ripping is being done with Linux based tools. Audex is currently handling the ripping, Easytag the tag editing, and Picard filling in extra metadata. Amazon is providing cover art and data for manual correction as needed from their vast library of pages. This is vastly different from last time. Although things have changed, and ripping music from CDs isn’t as popular as it once was in this digital age, would be curious to see what people think, which is the purpose for this post.

How do you build a perfect digital music collection, what tools(Linux-based preferably) do you use to build it, and what do you do with your collection?

For one, we’ve never created a single playlist. Playlists are the mix-tapes of the modern era. Perhaps it is time to find the mix tape we made in the 90s…Songs to Be Depressed By, and recreate it for the modern era. (Songs to Be Depressed By were actually uplifting songs)

Related articles

Digital Content: Do you really own it? Shouldn’t you?

by
A U.S. book and its licensed Chinese page by p...
Image via Wikipedia

Earlier, while writing the first installment of our new series, Downstreaming, the issue of digital content ownership came into play. After all, we don’t own digital content, we own a license for it. If you buy a DVD, you own it. If you buy a book, you own it. The fact that we don’t own our content is somewhat disturbing.

Let’s take the Kindle license agreement. The Kindle, of course, was a top seller in 2010. Here is the Kindle license.

“Upon your download of Digital Content and payment of any applicable fees (including applicable taxes), the Content Provider grants you a non-exclusive right to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Kindle or a Reading Application or as otherwise permitted as part of the Service, solely on the number of Kindles or Other Devices specified in the Kindle Store, and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Unless otherwise specified, Digital Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider. The Content Provider may post additional terms for Digital Content in the Kindle Store. Those terms will also apply, but this Agreement will govern in the event of a conflict.”

So, we can view, use and display content. We do not, however, have a right to download such content in perpetuity, which makes one wonder what might happen if Amazon changes the configuration of the Kindle store someday in the future. Would the content we have work on the 20th generation Kindle?

The Nook store does not cover the issue in their terms of use.

Then there is Amazon VOD, which we discussed in this article. There, if your content becomes unavailable, even though you paid for it…you are just out of luck.

For other media services, the content is stored locally, but the license requires access to a server to authenticate. And those servers will not work in perpetuity. While we think that if you buy something, steps should be taken to ensure its continuity. Companies should advise you of how they plan to do that.

A recent Pew study found that 65% of users have paid for online content. On the media side of that:  33% was music, 18% was newspaper or journal content, and 16% were movies or TV shows. The average expense being $47 per month for material downloaded or accessed overall, be it subscription(23%) or individual file access(16%) or accessing streaming content(8%).

These numbers will only be going up and these questions should be answered by companies. But they likely won’t any time soon. Companies would prefer that online, rental prevails, with no purchase. Why not make you repurchase something you’ve already bought before with no value-added…just a chance to continue to make money off their property?

It is why, despite our love of technology, physical books and physical copies of media are unlikely to die any time soon. As long as companies can rescind our ability to use something we’ve lawfully purchased, other pros and cons aside, they are not going anywhere.

Why You Might Finally Give in and Buy a Kindle

by
booting up the Kindle 3
Image by The Shifted Librarian via Flickr

It is time to revisit the pros and cons of the Kindle, which has finally plummeted into the land of reasonable pricing. Let’s go back to some of the reasons we quoted for buying and not buying a Kindle last year, and update it a bit.

Reasons to Buy a Kindle

  • It’s Great For Travel
  • You can email files to your Kindle address. With the new Wi-Fi option, you can do so for free. Over 3G it costs a few cents. But you can set a threshold to avoid overcharging
  • It looks great. Especially in graphite. The screen is much more conducive to long periods of reading than a conventional LCD screen. They’ve really improved the contrast. It is still in greyscale, but this is for reading. You want color, go to your computer.
  • Almost any book is available. And publishers and content owners can pull out old and out of print books and sell them on the Kindle as there is only a small cost to start out. Crunchgear reports the U.S. Kindle store has over 700,000 books. Barnes and Noble claims more, but includes public domain books in its tally, something Amazon apparently does not.
  • It is the future. Paper books won’t die, we don’t want them to.
  • You can switch seamlessly between your Kindle and reading the book on your computer, smartphone, etc. as Amazon has released Kindle apps for most major platforms.
  • Amazon is a large, stable company and the likelihood of them discontinuing the Kindle and taking your e-books with them is probably slim.

Reasons Not to Buy a Kindle

  • Books…old ones at least, can be cheaper.
  • There is still a value to the printed book
  • No expansion slot, but the new one has 4GB of memory, which is an estimated 3,500 books.
  • It must be charged. Your paper book never needs any batteries. Admittedly, advertised battery life is measured in weeks, not hours like most devices.
  • You are locked into the Kindle format. Your property is licensed, not owned, and you cannot move it to other platforms.
  • It doesn’t support EPUB format, which means you’d have to convert any book delivered in that format.
  • It doesn’t support lending, which the Nook limitedly does.
  • You can read periodicals for free online, why do they make you pay to subscribe to a blog?

Just remember, when we started advising against the cost of an e-book reader, it cost about four hundred dollars. For that price you could buy a computer. Now, at $139 for the wi-fi only version that we bought, or $50 more for adding 3G, it is at a price point that makes it more realistic. We’d like to see sub-$100 pricing soon, at least on the wi-fi version. The Kindle has estimated sales of about 5 million since it launched in 2007. The latest one is so popular it keeps getting sold out. The Nook, by comparison, has sold 1 million since it launched last year.

Books are are an over twenty billion a year business. About eight percent of U.S. readers use an e-book reader and in a recent poll, twelve percent of Americans said they are likely to get one within the next six months. Of course, the same poll indicated that e-reader purchasers were more likely to read(not a big surprise) and that the majority of them read more now than they did six months ago.

“”Customers tell us they love the freedom and flexibility of our Buy Once, Read Everywhere approach because they always have their full reading library at their fingertips and never lose their place in a book-whether they are reading on a Kindle or one of their other favorite devices,” said Dorothy Nicholls, Director, Amazon Kindle, in a recent press release announcing an update to Kindle for Android. The idea is this. If your platform is locked down, but you can get it on any device, is that not the type of DRM you can live with? The biggest complaint about DRM is the lack of portability. We’d like to see things more open, but given the choice between DRM content and no content at all…

In the music business, choosing between DRM-music and buying a CD kept us with CDs, which could be turned into DRM free music. We’ll see what happens. For the Kindle, the issue of library lending has to be handled. the revenue from selling licenses and services to libraries can be a wonderful one if they unveil a system to do so. Why should Overdrive Media Console and Adobe Digital Editions have this market?

To go back to the issue of EPUB and loading your own stuff onto it…you can load PDF files onto it. And if you don’t want to hook up via USB, you can email it to username@free.kindle.com to get it over Wireless. username@kindle.com to be charged for over 3G. And programs like Calibre, which we will get into in another post, can be set up to not only convert e-books from Google and Project Gutenberg, but support Kindle profiles and assemble news sources into an e-book format and autotransfer it to the Kindle every day, so you do not get charged(which you will if you subscribe to same through Amazon).

There is one final thing we have to get to. Many of us, including our editor, are Android phone users. Reading books on a 3-4 inch phone screen is doable, but it is small and can hurt one’s eyes. so, while it is doable for short periods, there is still a market for a device more conducive to reading.

And even with the larger LCD screen, the iPad hasn’t killed the Kindle yet, has it?

What do you think?

Didn’t Buy an Ebook Reader – But We Were Alone

by
The front of the Kindle 1 (Left) and Kindle 2 ...
Image via Wikipedia

For a long time, we wavered on the issue of whether to buy an e-book reader. However, after we got a lot of money this holiday season in Amazon gift cards, we wavered and considered reversing ourselves, even though we have major issues with the Kindle.

This holiday season, for the first time, Kindle books outsold traditional books on Amazon, the Kindle itself was the site’s bestselling product.

But even after this, we don’t think the technology is open enough. We didn’t get into music downloading until Amazon released a DRM-free store. It is all about the freedom.

Our latest contemplation, with the delay of purchasing an e-book reader, is to replace our physical classics with free books from the Google Books project, as they are now available in EPUB format, which can be read using the free and open FBReader. What do you think?

Update: Since this post, we have now purchased a Kindle. The price is now manageable. See below link to current Kindle offering.

[asa]B0051QVESA[/asa]

Related articles by Zemanta

NBC Direct offering HD Downloads of Shows

by
Image representing NBC Universal as depicted i...
Image via CrunchBase

For Windows only, NBC is offering an application that runs in the background and can download and watch shows offline. It works with Firefox or Internet Explorer, and contains both ads and restricted use, ensuring you can’t copy the files or transfer them to your mobile device.

Now, DRM annoys us, but ultimately, we understand it on any service offered free. We hate it on services we pay for. The software also has some downsides. By installing it, you agree to be added to the NBC P2P(Peer-to-Peer) network. So other NBC Direct users will be downloading files from your computer as you download from theirs…essentially the same system BitTorrent uses.

We object to this, as from what we’ve read, it gives NBC too much control over your connection speed. We like the idea of being able to download a file and play it, eliminating the buffer issues that plague so many of these sites. But in an ideal universe, we’d prefer digital rights management implemented in the following manner.

You download a video file. If it is to be done by P2P, a P2P client can be used. Or direct download can be offered. The DRM is in the player. The file is impossible to decode without a locked player that requires an internet connection to work to get a decryption key. And the key can be cached along with the ads to work for a certain number of hours without an internet connection. We haven’t thought out the details of how this might work, but this is similar to some schemes used before. It would also allow copying to any computer that had the player installed. We’ll leave it up to the content providers to consider this. Furthermore, if they build this player on a platform offered on Flash or Silverlight, both of which have or will soon have Linux support and already have Mac support, they can ensure the same piece of software will work on any system.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]