I want my MP3!
Actually, I want my OGG, but that didn’t evoke the nostalgia of MTV’s catch-phrase from the 80’s. What I definitely don’t want is Fairplay or WMA with all its nasty DRM. But when you look around at the legit online music services, you’re gonna get DRM. Here’s my problem with the online services:
- With savings on production, packaging, and distribution costs, it should cost less to download than buy a CD.
- I’m getting encoded music with lesser quality than the orignal CDDA, so I should pay less for it.
- I want to play music anywhere I choose, including my multi-codec player that abhors DRM.
I’ve found some answers to these problems, so click the link below to read my full thoughts.
The answer to complaints of price is the subscription model. Rhapsody has done this for a while, but it never interested me. But Napster has started offering music on “to-go” capable devices. That’s more interesting. For $15/month, you can download as much as you want and sync it to your audio player. But we still have that pesky DRM to deal with, so …
There are a some options for dealing with DRM, some more legal than others. In order of least to most legal, we have:
- Break the DRM
- Work around the DRM
- Subscribe to allofmp3.com
- Burn to CD, then rip and encode
- Record off the sound card driver
For #1, both Microsoft’s WMA and Apple’s FairPlay have been broken. To remove Apple’s DRM, you run a program called “PlayFair” (clever, huh?). Microsoft’s DRM can be broken by a number of programs (”unfu*k”, “freeme”, and “DrmDbg”), but these only work on the older version of DRM. All the online music services seem to be using WMA 9 with DRM that is not currently cracked. Anyhow, you’re violating at least the DMCA with this stuff.
For #2, workarounds come and go, so you don’t know when one will get plugged. For a while, WinAmp could be used with output stacker and out-lame plug-ins to write WMA files out to MP3 files. AOL and Microsoft quickly freaked out about it and revoked the key for that version of WinAmp. Jon Johansen (the same guy who wrote DeCSS to get around DVD encryption) opened a backdoor to iTunes with his front-end client to iTMS that neglects to add the DRM after the music is downloaded. Workarounds tend to become cat-and-mouse games with fixes necessitating new workarounds.
If you don’t mind paying some Russians for music, allofmp3 at #3 is interesting if not slightly suspcious. Because of a loophole in Russian law, a small fee paid for a compulsory license lets them put any music online. It’s a bit overwhelming, really. Albums that aren’t available for download anywhere else, like The Beatles and Metallica. Choice of format and bit rate from MP3 to OGG to full CDDA. All for only 2 cents per megabyte!! The RIAA claims it’s illegal, but even the Computer Crimes division of Moscow City Police can’t find anything wrong with it. But you can’t use PayPal, and not only are they charging too little, but the artists probably aren’t receiving anything from this deal either.
Burning to CD at #4 is pretty tried and true, but it’s a bit of a pain. You can conserve CDs by using a virtual CD driver that writes to an image instead.
My favorite is #5 because it is completely legal, easy to automate, and unstoppable. Using a program like Tunebite, you play the music on your sound card and record at the same time. Tunebite will even run batches in the background and output encoded MP3s. You do want to set the bit rate a little higher since you’re going from one lossy format to another. The other drawback is that you can only convert in the time it takes to play the music. But that’s why you run it in batch overnight and put those free cycles to work.