So hard to download music legally (rant)

I am researching to buy a portable mp3 and other formats player but the music industry is making it so hard to download music legally with all the different formats and the damn DMR. Make that a double damn the way I am feeling now. Ipod/Itunes uses the ACC format. Many other music services use the WMA format. I've been told that both are superior to mp3 in terms of music quality vs. size/compression rates. The Ipods of course will not support WMA. Any other portable player I looked at will not support the AAC format. I have looked at and tried a couple of programs that convert WMA to other formats but none as has worked (including itunes) because of the you know what DMR. I can't find any that will convert AAC to other formats. The only way to get around it is to burn your WMA, AAC format to a audio cd and then covert back to the desired format. This will result in a loss of quality as you are going from a lossy format to a lossless format and then back to a lossy format. Not to mention the fact that if I download a single song and want to add it to my player I have to burn a cd for this single song?

I am willing to use Itunes to download the bulk of my new music because I like the interface and they seem to have a decent selection of music. But I refused to be locked into buying a Ipod. I actually am looking into buying a 1.5G Rio Nitrus as I think it is a sufficient size and I can get it now for $150 at Circuit City but it only supports mp3 and wma.

Am I missing the boat here? Are there much simpler methods to do what I want to do? How do you feel about the different formats and the DMR? I've downloaded a thousand or more songs from the old Napster and don't feel guilty about it but here I am willing to pay for the songs I want but it seems at least in my mind, the music industry is driving the people even more then before to investigate pirated music.

Just refuse to buy music in any DRM-encumbered or secret format. That includes WMA, even without WMA with no DRM, since WMA is secret and so you're dependent on a particular company's programs to play WMA files. There are programs around that convert AAC to MP3. Of course you're converting one lossy format to another, but the results are listenable, especially if you use a high bit rate on the MP3 side. Remember that with a hard disc player, compression ratio is not all that important. You can store a heck of a lot of stuff on a 40 gb drive, even at 256 or 320 kbits/sec. MP3 is really not that bad. Sure, AAC uses less disk space to hold a compressed song of comparable sound quality, but disk space is cheap.

You might look at the new iRiver players that compete with the iPod. They support mp3 and Ogg Vorbis, which is a fully open format comparable to AAC.

I personally think the record labels are just plain evil and I avoid buying their products as much as I can. There's more stuff released these days as legal, free downloads than is being released on CD. You can find some really nice music at www.magnatune.com and it's all downloadable (mp3 format) at no charge. If you find something there that you realy like, you can pay to download it in Vorbis or FLAC (lossless compression) format, and the artist gets 50% of the payment (instead of 5% or so that they get when you buy a CD).

Buy used CDs and burn them yourself?

iTunes will convert AAC to any other format as long as it's not a DRM-wrapped AAC file.

My public library carries music CDs and they have a pretty good collection.

When you rip your own music you can go to any format.

You put 1 and 1 together to see how I get a lot of my music /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif


Real just put out a program called 'Harmony' that will wrap the music from their store into Apple's DRM format so you can play your Real songs on an iPod (Or 100s of other players). You might look into that but then you're looking at buying an iPod again (Not that you wouldn't enjoy it...)

The big problem with the Harmony approach is that Apple is going to try and sue Real's butt off. Some say that's wrong, others say Real should have known better. I say maybe it's wrong for Apple to sue Real, but Real shouldn't expect their program to continue working as Apple updates their offerings /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

Edited to add content

I've developed an aversion to the whole idea of intelectual property as it applies to products that are NOT for sale.

The idea behind copyright is that the creator should be able to profit from their work. It's been perverted such that the creators sell their rights and large corporations 'own' the copyright. When they stop selling the product they prevent others from using it forever (almost).

Case 1) The record companies have arranged for copyrights to last well beyond the lifetime of the creator. The copyright continues to be valid in the year 2004 even if they last sold copies in 1975.

I think that if they are not marketing it, it's no longer fulfilling the spirit of the copyright act. The song should be made public domain after being off the market for 1 year.

Case 2) Microsoft has sold millions of copies of Windows 95, WIndows 98, etc. There are millions of computers (notably laptops) that can not run newer OSes. Microsoft no longer sells Windows 95 and no longer fixes the security holes therein. Even if you have a perfectly working laptop from 1996, it is obsolete because the OS can not be fixed. Microsoft has abandoned it.

I think that the source code for Win95 should become public domain so that others can fix it's deficiencies. That will allow us to continue to enjoy the software that no longer works in XP, Nt, win2k, etc.

The most legal way to handle your current problem is to buy the CDs that you want to digitize and rip them yourself. It's not hard to do and yo uget to enjoy listening to some CDs that you would not have listened to otherwise.

I have to agree with others that the very presence of copy protection will cause me to avoid buying a product. That's mainly because I use off the wall hardware and software and frequently need to port to other formats.


Daniel

Apple DRM is easy enough to deal with as long as you're sticking to AAC files. Just burn a CD and re-rip. This sounds bad, but it's not and does not degrade the quality of the audio because you're going from a lossy format, AAC, to a lossless uncompressed format, CD, and then back to AAC again which will result in a file that is very close to identical to the original. You're not going to analog anytime there, it's digital the whole way. Like unzipping a file, and re-zipping it again /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif And you really should burn an audio CD of the music you buy anyway by way of a backup in a different format right?

The same is not true if you are going to convert them to a different lossy format like mp3. Since AAC and MP3 are lossy in different ways going back and forth does cause some further reduction in the quality of the music. But you should try it and see as it might not be noticeable at all to your ears or through your equipment.

That being said AAC is head and shoulders above MP3 in quality at the same bitrate. And if you increase the bitrate considerably to compensate you're going to have a lot less room on your handheld.

I haven't done any comparisons with WMV files as the DRM on those is usually much more onerous and I have no interest in dealing with that.

By the way, contrary to Apple's engineering wishes, it is quite easily possible to upload music off your iPod onto a PC (vs. Apple's engineering wishes that you only download from PC onto your iPod), of course all DRM management features still apply.

If you need the instructions, email me. The are also some 3rd party applications that automate the process.

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paulr said:
Just refuse to buy music in any DRM-encumbered or secret format...

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Well said.

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paulr said:
You might look at the new iRiver players that compete with the iPod. They support mp3 and Ogg Vorbis, which is a fully open format comparable to AAC...

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Emphasis mine.

This is the real, long term solution. Vorbis is very nice to work with, and it works very well, like the other unencumbered Ogg formats. The Ogg formats are the future. Support the hardware manufacturers who have bravely leaped into the fray with their implementation of high-quality, legally unencumbered formats in their devices.