MacDailyNews - Where Mac news comes first

Finally! I've resisted submitting this personal opinion since Thursday.

"Napster To Go's model does not work for the artists and music labels because a user can simply pay one low monthly subscription fee and strip the DRM off every song in the library."

Actually, you can get a free trial w/ Napster, so you can steal all the music for free.

NMFY,

That one stays in honor of your creativity and persistence.

Theoretical fun:

Three computers, one fast networked drive, and a few dedicated people: Turning Napster's 14 day free trial into 252 full 80 minute CDs of free music.

Each song can only be burned after the duration of the track length has elapsed in realtime:

14 day trial = 336 hours = 20,160 minutes of potential music = 252 80 minute CDs

Computer 1: Dedicated to downloading new music off of Napster
Computer 2: Dedicated to building WAV files for each CD
Computer 3: Dedicated to burning CDs

All computers share one fast networked drive where new files are downloaded to, converted WAVs are saved to, and CDs are burned from.

http://blog.kordix.com/marv/archives/000400.html

NoMacForYou:
you are really stretching for it now. what is next? anagrams? You should get some kind of an award for that.

Speaking of thwarting, I see MDN has found a way to thwart the pop-up blocker in Safari. Too many more pop-ups and this site will be relegated to a RSS feed for me.

BG, "Hey, what's that circling the bowl when I flushed it?"
SJ, "Napster, Janus, and your whole strategy to dominate the media world. You should have listened to me when I told you that subscriptions were a bad idea."

The music lables will pull their contracts with Napster now. This will only continue to fuel the iTunes fire as well as push the future of online media distribution to video as well...

Safari still blocks popups for me on this site...

I don't get any pop-ups with Safari's pop-up blocker and MDN. Strange.

DRM sucks no matter what version it is.

Hey JadisOne,
Popups aren't showing up with Firefox. Add this line to your /etc/hosts file:

127.0.0.1 z1.adserve.com

That redirects the z1.adserve.com to your localhost which prevents it from finding anything.

The recording of subscription music is nothing new. People have been able to do this ever since the new Napster & Real Networks began their subscription services. The added ability to move the subscription to a portable hasn't changed this fact.

Nelson sez: HA HA!

Gorog was right!!! Users can pay $15 bucks for the first month, download 10,000 songs, crack them and use them forever, and then cancel the subscription. If you want 10,000 songs form Apple, you would have to chunk out $10,000 dollar!!! The math was right after all!! What a moron!!! Well, at least you can’t spell moron backward like you could with gorog!!!

Where's Ben?

Right here, you Mac zealot slob. Go suck on Dark Lord Gates' tailpipe!

i'm here, licking my chops from all the insults from earlier stories.

they hurt my feelings. some of you guys go over the line.

I like calico kittens, warm summer breezes, and pink cotton candy.

To get the popup blocker to work again you need to reset the cache in Safari, but you will lose all your cookies.

Once I did it, Safari started to block the popup ads on MDN.

i have been getting popup ads all over the web

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Napster use Micro$oftopoly's Janus DRM for it's subscription service? If after almost 20 years they cannot make a secure OS, what would make you think they could make a secure DRM system.

"Speaking of thwarting, I see MDN has found a way to thwart the pop-up blocker in Safari. Too many more pop-ups and this site will be relegated to a RSS feed for me."
DITTO.
It's almost as annoying as the seizure-inducing flash ads below the masthead a while back.

This is news to Napster? After all these years of cracking and hacking and stripping and burning Napster thought their method of keeping thousands of songs on your hard drive was impossible to breach?

Doesn't Napster have .... TECHNICAL people on staff to tell them better?

Years ago when 'subscription' meant 'streaming' to your PC I thought that the quality of the music was reduced to a level that made it not worthwhile to steal. Sort of like the 'Radio' in iTunes. Which is worth listening to, but burning CDs made it iffy if you were picky.

So Napster gives you (roughly) iTunes level quality, then places a flimsy figleaf of protection to keep it from being copied. And it sits on your drive for YEARS waiting for someone to poke around and crack it.

Wow.

david vesey

Janus's DRM hasn't been cracked.

The record labels are now drunk on the success of iTunes and have gone overboard. I wonder how long it will take them to realize their mistake. If the speed with which they have moved so far is any indication it could take years.

Gorog was right, the math favors Napster. It costs 100 dollars to steal 100 songs from iTunes. It only costs 15 dollars to steal thousands upon thousands from Napster.

Janus - the two faced god of gates. Really. Look it up.

No pop-ups on safari here.

Microsoft's Janus DRM -- I wonder if that was invented by my old friend at Microsoft - Hugh Janus!

I keep getting pop-ups when using Safari, block enabled, but only at MDN. Why? Here is the source of the latest crap.
http://www.partner2profit.com/

magic word GETTING ....like this is getting annoying.

WOW. It Seems BSOD has nothing better to do in life but post on the MDN forums..Oh well, Whatever makes him happy....ROTFFLMFAOBBSODITBFMIEHIAF!!!!

Oh and ANY DRM is Crackable, Including iTunes.

NoMacForYou,

You're so kewwwt heehee

Happens with Macslash and macosrumors too. I guess we'll start seeing popups on ALL the mac sites soon

>sigh<

Magic Word NEVER...as in I never thought I'd see the day....

I was also attacked by a pop-up ad. Actually, it was a pop-under ad, which is worse. I saw a brief flash of it when I clicked "Submit" to submit my posting.

What's up with MDN and its aggressive ad campaign? If they want money, I offered to pay them via amazon.com gift certificates (cuz I hate paypal). But, I didn't get a response from my e-mail.

The whole argument can be boiled down to this.

The iTunes model is honorable, and encourages honorable behavior. It is honorable to charge a single, low fee, and then grant ownership of something, even if it's only a perpetual license. The honorable behavior encouraged is downloading of the songs AFTER payment.

The Napster-to-go model is dishonorable, and encourages dishonorable behavior. It makes you keep paying forever if you want to keep the songs you "own," and thus encourages the behavior of getting around the DRM. And because it's a dishonorable way of doing business, people don't feel guilty about stealing the music via getting around the DRM.

Magic word: least, as in "iTunes follows the path of least resistance; Napster is the least-secure system out there."

No popups, no banners. See: http://www.privoxy.org/

emmyache, your words are eloquent and true. And reveal the psychology of the situation and how human nature reacts.

.99 IS a very good price. I'm 55 years old and remember paying a dollar for a single back in the mid '60's when I was in High School. If you adjust for inflation that single should cost about $5 today. It's true that the record companies save money in production, storage, shipping, etc. (which means that the single today should be CHEAPER for technical reasons) A compressed single will keep it's level of musical quality FOREVER. Which is a value not to be taken lightly. 45's started to lose their 'highs' after about 100 playings. So I think it averages out very well, and that .99 is a good price for the value.

However, on my $2500 speakers in my living room the songs from iTunes come up a bit... short. Which is odd because the tunes sound pretty good on my $60 Sony earbuds. And pretty nice on my Creature Speakers in my office.

Maybe I need to EQ my speakers. Because I DO want to listen to these songs, and enjoy them, in my living room. Not just everywhere in the world EXCEPT on my decent home system. Any true audiophiles out there with an opinion on this?

David Vesey

Oh yes, one more thing.

Pop-Ups.

I use OmniWeb, a browser that costs $29.95. Very powerful, LOTS of features. I would never use anything else. It's still just out of beta so it's not as racy as Safari or Firefox. You have 30 days after download to try it before you need to buy it.

Anyway, it has a pretty good ad blocker. Some things are better than Pith Helmet, some not. But whatever it has, it has powerful Mojo on the MDN web sight. I notice none of the things you guys are being plagued with.

OmniWeb

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/

dv

Thanks Jeff. That helps. And it was only Safari that was getting the pop-ups. Firefox and Shiira were not getting the pop-ups.

Very weird.

This "hack" has been blown out of proportion. Recording the music in real-time is not very practical. Too much editing is involved in this process. When someone figures out a way of stripping off the DRM of a file without having to play and record in real-time, then we will have something to talk about.

By the way, HiJack Pro and Wiretap are two OS X applications that will let you do the same thing with DRM AAC files. Of course the difference is that you have to pay to listen to those files in the first place and besides, iTunes lets you burn them as Audio CDs.

For David Vessey:

You HAVE to try out the "WOW Thing" from http://www.srslabs.com. It costs $29. You won't have a need to complain about the sound quality of iTMS songs on your high end system no more. I've been using the sound-enhancing "WOW Thing" for quite awhile and have been very pleased with the sounds coming from compressed music such as mp3's and AAC's.

(You're welcome in advance

to: david vesey

Your iTunes tunes simply are not going to sound great on a great sound system. Excellent speakers will let you "hear what's missing" if you know what I mean. ACC compression loses some of the quality of a good recording, especially in music with a wide spectrum of sound. Pop music is not so bad, but symphonic, classical, etc. just loose some of their "sheen." When I encode stuff at 128kbps, i can tell the difference on good speakers. If I encode stuff at 192kbps it's much harder to discern the original from the encoded version.

Anyways, don't EQ your speakers for iTunes unless you can easily go back and forth between settings for iTunes and higher quality sources.

David Vessey:

Don't listen to that turd synthmeister he is absolutely ignorant of the fact that you CAN enjoy iTMS songs with your sound system. The "WOW Thing" is a little box that you connect to the AUX of your stereo and your iPod (iPod -> WOW Thing -> stereo). You will be amazed at the difference in sound quality in compressed music! I recommend the WOW Thing to synthmeister too..

Jeff wrote: "Add this line to your /etc/hosts file:
127.0.0.1 z1.adserve.com"

Thanks, Jeff,

Very useful tag line there!

One word of advice: you have to either su as root or sudo first to allow your editor to save the hosts fiie. Just thought I'd throw that in there.

Do the ads bother you that much?

magic word 'special' as in
heres a special way to make safari block all ads
http://67.15.54.122/article.php?story=20030910162652193

I just read a story on cnet which contained the following statement:

"More recently, Apple has repeatedly changed its iTunes software to block hackers who have figured out ways to remove the copy-protection software from songs purchased at its online store."

Is there any truth to this statement?

Yeah, the hackers they refer to is Real Networks.

: )

Optional,

I'm know that your comment was made tongue-in-cheek... and I did find it amusing.

But.... Real Networks "hack" doesn't match what the statement implied.

The following quote explains what RealNetworks "hack" accomplished. In no way did RealNetworks remove Apple's copy protection (i.e. Fairplay) from songs purchased from iTunes and convert them a non-protected format. So, I'm still interested in understanding the "truthfullness" of the cnet statement... since I don't believe that there is any.

"Back in April, RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser asked Apple to license FairPlay to them as part of a “tactical alliance” against Microsoft. Apple declined. Locked out by Apple, RealNetworks then proceeded to crack FairPlay in July. Called Harmony, RealNetwork’s DRM software mimicked FairPlay and allowed RealRhapsody to offer tracks at their music store which would play on the iPod. Apple responded angrily, accusing RealNetworks of having the “ethics of a hacker,” going on to say that it was “highly likely” that Harmony would stop working on the iPod at some point in time.

That point in time came in November, when Apple released an iPod firmware update that thwarted Harmony on some iPods."

Safari and pop-ups on MDN: I got nothing, zero, zilch.

Clear your cache, re-enable the block on Safari.

A 100% pop-ups Safari user here, even on MDN.

David Vessey et. All:

I have used my iPod with songs purchased from the iTunes music store on professional sound equipment at my church. Haven't had any problem with the way it sounds. Although... Being a sound tech I do tend to play with the EQ on just about every song because it sounds BETTER when you do. That's what I love about iTunes, I set the EQ in iTunes for the song so that it sounds good to me, and then I'm done. With my iPod I'm used to changing the EQ from my truck, to the sound system at my church, to the ear phones... So why bother listening to badly EQ'ed music when you can very easily set it in iTunes?


Magic word: Saying.... As in, "That's all I'm saying Do what sounds good to your ears"

This is an authentic note posted on the Napster web site:


A note from Napster's CTO

It has come to our attention that there are a number of inaccurate statements posted by various sources on the Internet regarding the security of Napster and Napster To Go. As Napster's CTO, I would like to officially state that neither Napster To Go, Napster, nor Windows Media DRM have been hacked. In the interest of providing the most accurate information to consumers, the following is some background on the subject.

There is a program that allows a user to record the playback of tracks directly from the computer's sound card. This process can be likened to the way people used to record songs from the radio onto cassette tapes, but instead of capturing the music on a tape, the file is converted into a new, unprotected digital format. This program does not break the encryption of the files, which can only be recorded one at a time making the process quite laborious. It would take 10 hours to convert 10 hours of music in this manner. It is important to note that this program is not specific to Napster; files from all legal subscription and pay-per-download services can be copied in this way.

We hope that the information provided above clarifies the matter and puts questions regarding the security of Napster and Napster To Go to rest. Napster's mission is to provide consumers with a legal environment in which they can experience and discover the world's largest collection of digital music. We believe that artists should be compensated for their work and intellectual property rights should be respected. While we acknowledge there are always going to be those who do not share our belief, we remain committed to providing the most enjoyable and flexible digital music experience for those who do.

TO WHA . .

"You HAVE to try out the "WOW Thing" from http://www.srslabs.com"

windows media player on the wintel platform (version 8 and up I think) includes a WOW/SRS option with their EQ. I listened to it and was not really impressed. Manual EQ still got a better sound. Furthermore, when the audio is encoded to a manageable file size the sound information is actually stripped away, so no eq/sound enhancer will bring it back.

So, what are the appropriate WinAMP/Output Stacker settings supposed to be? I've tried several, and each time I get "error initializing output" or something like that.

Has anyone figured out the right settings?