Yahoo! Music Going Dark, Taking Keys With It 396
iminplaya writes with a link to an excellent article at Ars Technica, extracting from it a few choice nuggets: "The bad dream of DRM continues. Yahoo e-mailed its Yahoo! Music Store customers yesterday, telling them it will be closing for good — and the company will take its DRM license key servers offline on September 30, 2008. Sure, it's bad news and yet another example of the sheer lobotomized brain-deadness that has characterized music DRM, but the reaction of most music fans will be: 'Yahoo had an online music store?'... DRM makes things harder for legal users; it creates hassles that illegal users won't deal with; it (often) prevents cross-platform compatibility and movement between devices. In what possible world was that a good strategy for building up the nascent digital download market? The only possible rationales could be 1) to control piracy (which, obviously, it has had no effect on, thanks to the CD and the fact that most DRM is broken) or 2) to nickel-and-dime consumers into accepting a new pay-for-use regime that sees moving tracks from CD to computer to MP3 player as a 'privilege' to be monetized."
Re:People are still buying DRMd music. (Score:5, Informative)
Not that I'm all for DRM, this just isn't as big of a deal as the article makes it sound. This won't be the wake-up call that makes the average user see the evils of DRM, because most of them won't even notice.
No! Downloading ROMs ain't necessarily so... (Score:1, Informative)
I am not a Lawyer (And I refuse to say IANAL - it took me 3 months to figure out what that meant), so I'm curious as to what the legal implications are for downloading DRM free versions of songs you LEGALLY own (in one form or another)?
I know that in the case of software, it's perfectly legal to download pirated versions providing you legitimately own it (ROMs in particular are a good example of this), but what about media?
It depends upon the jurisdiction that you're in, in many places this is also illegal. The USA (and any country that has a trade agreement with them) have anti-circumvention measures that make obtaining ROMs illegal.
For example Nintendo products are generally protected in this way as the storage mechanism is always custom designed for the console unit it question, it's not like making a "backup" of a Playstation DVD.
nb. I'm not condoning the fact that downloading of ROMs is illegal, just making an observation.
appropriate captcha: echelon
For now, DRM doesn't interfere with my music (Score:2, Informative)
I buy several albums from iTunes a year (probably 20+ albums). Since I have a Mac, and an iPod, and I burn the music to CD to play in the car during my lengthy commute -- Apple's DRM doesn't really bother me. When possible, I buy their DRM-less albums, and I have occasionally used the "convert to MP3" feature so I could make an MP3 CD... but so far, Apple's DRM has not interfered with my music listening.
Maybe if I wanted/needed a different music player, or I cared about saving a few pennies and buying music from Wal-Mart, then I'd start caring about this. But for now I don't.
Re:Yahoo Music is a Rental Service (Score:2, Informative)
According to their FAQ you can also buy individual songs : http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/music/music/getmusic/launch-11.html [yahoo.com]
(Disclaimer : I don't use Yahoo Music so I don't know if the FAQ is outdated or not)
Re:long live Amazon (Score:5, Informative)
Thank you very much for mentioning the Amazon MP3 store! :-)
In short, Amazon's MP3 store is the first truly viable alternative the iTunes Music Store for these these reasons:
1) The cost in many cases is much lower than iTMS on a per-song and per-album basis.
2) Amazon encodes their MP3's using the LAME 3.97 encoder with 256 kbps variable bit rate encoding, which results in excellent sound quality that is almost the same as the uncompressed CD original.
3) Because the MP3 files have no DRM restrictions, that means no hassles copying the music with third-party programs to your portable music player.
4) Amazon's MP3 downloader program automatically puts the playlist into either Windows Media Player 11.0 or iTunes, which means easy syncing with your favorite portable music player that uses these programs to copy music to your player.
It's small wonder why I've bought several albums through the Amazon MP3 store and are searching for more albums to download. That explains why older music stores that use DRM restrictions are rapidly falling by the wayside.
S/PDIF Interfaces can save your music (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to save your Yahoo! music, you can re-record it using two S/PDIF interfaces without losing any quality. There are no D/A conversions involved. You just need some decent recording software. Just tell Windows to use the S/PDIF as the default audio output device.
On Linux, I recommend Ardour for recording. www.ardour.org
On Windows, Audacity does a nice job.
Three months? Ever hear of "google"??? (Score:4, Informative)
Go to google.com, type "IANAL" into the little box...
Well that sucks... (Score:4, Informative)
Furthermore, Yahoo Music's 0.99c songs are all, as far as I know, Non-drm'd MP3's. People that bought the songs should have no problem listening to them. DRM is really a non-issue here, as it doesn't affect anyone in a manner that they wouldn't expect.
Re:S/PDIF Interfaces can save your music (Score:3, Informative)
the S/PDIF output of such compressed audio file has already the audio artifacts from that compression (excluding "lossless" compression formats)
Converting this raw output back to a compressed file format will introduce artifacts AGAIN to the resulting wave (double compression), sounding awful enough.
The background story (Score:4, Informative)
Just a little FYI.
If anyone remembers this more clearly, please let me know.
Re:S/PDIF Interfaces can save your music (Score:1, Informative)
That's still D/D conversion, same amount of loss as transcoding -- That is to say, enough that if you redistribute your files as pristine you'er a jerk and will get nuked, but fine for casual listening or rare songs.
get free music (free as in beer) (Score:2, Informative)
Forget about the people whoring their music and see what else is out there, you might be surprised (in a linux over windows kind of way). Try these:
http://www.last.fm/music/+free
http://www.jamendo.com/
http://www.em411.com/
http://www.archive.org/
The missing link is finding music that suites your taste without trial and error, but the more people start listening and recommending to friends the easier it will become.
Re:Well duh? (Score:2, Informative)
I can't vouch for most music store's top 10 lists, but suffice to say there are still plenty of good musical acts around. Hang out at sites like Pitchfork Media (http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/) and Tiny Mix Tapes (http://www.tinymixtapes.com/). Once you're past all the pretentious hipster attitude, there's some pretty good sound to be found.
Beyond that, you can discover good music in television commercials (the only thing that make them worth watching), from late night talk shows, and from that one song you heard on Youtube, Pandora, or Last.fm.
Nobody's a slave to top 40 radio. Music is playing in so many other places you're bound to hear something you like.
Protected Music Converter (Score:2, Informative)
This program, while shareware, has done wonders for me when converting from DRM-ridden music to MP3s with no restrictions. For those who lack decent recording capabilities, this program will do it for you. It has a shareware limitation of 14 days, and you also have to be at the computer to keep clicking the "OK" button (it's nagware too). I can't speak for quality differences either, not being an audiophile, but I know I've not heard any loss of sound quality.
Our campus signed up with Ruckus, a music site where we can download songs for free, but they're full of DRM (have to phone home once a month to stay active.) Using PMC allowed me to not have to worry about that anymore. Give it a shot [betanews.com].
Re:People are still buying DRMd music. (Score:2, Informative)
which number basis are you using for your order of magnitude ?
Base 4 ?
Last I heard rental movie prices were going down, but at the highest point they were selling at 4 time the price of the normal one. At least up here .. =)
Re:S/PDIF Interfaces can save your music (Score:2, Informative)
As long as you record the S/PDIF losslessly, for instance on a CD or using FLAC, you will have the same quality as listening from the yahoo music original.
If you encode it back to mp3/aac/ogg, etc., then it will have another lossy compression generation and the quality will degrade.
This is not as bad a reduction in quality as using the "analog hole":
Yahoo Music -> decoder -> D/A -> A/D -> encoder
Re:People are still buying DRMd music. (Score:4, Informative)
Certainly not fixing the DRM issue, but, still an important detail.
At least they know ahead of time (Score:2, Informative)
In defense of Yahoo Music service (sort of) (Score:5, Informative)
I am/was a subscriber to the Yahoo Music Service. I loved it. I had extremely convenient access to almost everything. I no longer worried about what I owned and just focused on rating stuff.
I believe that the value for my money that I got for this service - even if it dies today - is much greater then with buying CD's or buying individual tracks from iTunes. I paid a reasonable amount of money ( $10 a month) for a great music experience.
Let's face it, all of this music is pretty crappy sound quality, so I don't want to buy tracks at $1 a pop that will be obsolete in 5 years when higher quality multi-track formats become available. The stuff from Yahoo is 192Kbps WMA which is reasonably good by today's standards but still pretty crappy.
And now that the service is going dark, everything is transferred to Rhapsody. I have 8 months remaining on my Yahoo account and they are transferring that 8 months to rhapsody, along with my music collection (if I want). So I do not loose the music as others seem to be implying. As before, I have to keep paying to keep my collection alive - that is the deal that I have agreed to.
BUT now the negative.
From the FAQ it appears that Yahoo is not going to transfer my music rating to the Rhapsody service. The music rating ARE my collection, so this really screws me up. If someone wrote an app that culled my rating from the Yahoo Music service I would be thrilled.
Rhapsody is Real. That sucks. I'm scared to install their application on my computer.
Rhapsody is only available in the US. Yahoo Music was available in other countries. What are the users in other countries supposed to do?
Re:People are still buying DRMd music. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:People are still buying DRMd music. (Score:3, Informative)
Don't even need to do that. Just use a VCR designed for (semi)professional video production. Since they typically don't use any AGC on the incoming video signal, they also aren't affected by Macrovision. You'll pay a lot more for the VCR, of course, but....
Or you could probably design a circuit that notches out that part of the signal fairly easily. No, I will not design the circuit for you, but I think I could build one for under five bucks with a handful of parts that I have lying around my house already if I wanted to....
As you said, Macrovision is designed to keep casually dishonest people honest and nothing more. It certainly shouldn't be considered real content protection.
Re:People are still buying DRMd music. (Score:3, Informative)
It is different today, so called "rental-pricing" never made the leap from vhs to dvd.
At first the rental places were paying wholesale, just like wal-mart. Now there are revenue-sharing agreements such that they pay next to nothing for the physical discs in return for sending some percentage of rental revenue back to the studio... In some cases this also kills the used market - part of the agreements are to send back 'a lot' of the physical discs (for destruction) once rental rates on a title drop below a certain amount. It still leaves some discs in stock that eventually do get sold as used, but not the flood of them that they used to.