flowerpot Posted September 15, 2006 Share Posted September 15, 2006 Now that Microsoft has released some hard facts about Zune we can finally begin to sort out how much of an impact the product might have on the digital music market. For weeks we’ve been hearing rumors about how Zune’s wireless capabilities will be used to enable new types of music sharing and discovery. It’s the one feature that could potentially set Zune apart from the iPod. Unfortunately Zune’s wireless music sharing is turning out to be one of those features that seemed better when it was just a rumor. While Zune users will be able share music with friends, there’s a catch (isn’t there always). As Jim noted earlier, recipients of shared songs will only be able to listen to them three times or for three days, whichever comes first. It sort of sounds like a really bad tire warranty. Zune accomplishes this amazingly stupid feat by wrapping shared music in a proprietary layer of DRM, regardless of what format the original content may be in. If Microsoft’s claims are to be believed, this on-the-fly DRM will be seamless and automatic - which must be some kind of first for Microsoft. What Microsoft has created is a new form of viral DRM. Zune will intentionally infect your music with the DRM virus before passing it along to one of your friends. After three listens the poor song dies a horrible DRM enabled death. Talk about innovation. Microsoft will undoubtedly claim this limitation is designed to support artists and prevent piracy. There’s just one problem. Not all artists want their music protected by DRM. Furthermore, not all artists benefit from having their music protected by DRM. While it may come as a surprise to Microsoft and the major labels, independent musicians frequently promote their music by posting unencrypted mp3 files on their websites in hopes of finding an audience. If Zune is really all about community, as Microsoft claims it is, then it would allow music to spread virally, instead of DRM. Meanwhile, if you’re a musician who is more concerned with building your audience than you are with restricting access to your creative works, you might consider adopting an appropriate Creative Commons license. Based on the item below it appears that Zune’s viral approach to DRM is in violation of all of Creative Commons licenses. It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes before someone actually challenges Microsoft on this. What happens if someone tries to protect a CC-licensed work with digital rights management (DRM) tools? If a person uses DRM tools to restrict any of the rights granted in the license, that person violates the license. All of our licenses prohibit licensees from “distributing the Work with any technological measures that control access or use of the Work in a manner inconsistent with the terms of this License Agreement.†medialoper.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liam Posted September 16, 2006 Share Posted September 16, 2006 The firmware will be hacked within weeks, no doubt Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flowerpot Posted September 16, 2006 Author Share Posted September 16, 2006 More indicative of Microsofts general direction for future products.ie:not good direction. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liam Posted September 16, 2006 Share Posted September 16, 2006 More indicative of Microsofts general direction for future products.ie:not good direction. Anything that unseats the iPod is good. The iPod is a very poor product considering recent technological developments. If you know anything about data storage, you know it's all about perpedicular HAMR. Toshiba are the one to watch. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flowerpot Posted September 16, 2006 Author Share Posted September 16, 2006 Yes, sure.More Microsoft product is great.What does anything you just said have to do with viral DRM?(rhetorical) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ripple Posted September 16, 2006 Share Posted September 16, 2006 More indicative of Microsofts general direction for future products.ie:not good direction. Anything that unseats the iPod is good. The iPod is a very poor product considering recent technological developments. If you know anything about data storage, you know it's all about perpedicular HAMR. Toshiba are the one to watch. Do you mean the Toshiba that is taking care of half the hardware in an iPod? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deft Posted September 16, 2006 Share Posted September 16, 2006 Apparently iPod sales are now pretty flat since they have kind of reached saturation point - plus a lot of kiddies are now happy to use their phones to play music as they become more capable. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deft Posted September 16, 2006 Share Posted September 16, 2006 Just seen that the new generation iPods finally do gapless playback (though not sure if that is for normal MP3's though or only Apple Codecs).But then you can Rockbox them suckas anyway so you can get it somehow........ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chee Posted September 17, 2006 Share Posted September 17, 2006 Just seen that the new generation iPods finally do gapless playback (though not sure if that is for normal MP3's though or only Apple Codecs).But then you can Rockbox them suckas anyway so you can get it somehow........ Gapless playback is on all tracks - mp3, aac, lossless, etc. It's tied in with iTunes 7 and the new 1.2 firmware for the newer iPods (ie 5th Gen & above, incl the Nanos). It works well too - my 60GB ipod automatically sets gapless playback as default for all the tracks on it, all I needed to do was sync it with iTunes and wait 10 minutes of so while it did it's thing on my iPod. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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