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Bowie Distributes New Album Using SDMI Format 98

Posted by Roblimo from the falling-from-the-earth-to-the-internet dept.
Twink writes "David Bowie announces that his new album 'hours...' will be available to download via his website for the two weeks prior to its store release. Interestingly he's using the 'secure' Microsoft Audio 4.0 and Liquid Audio. Both of these systems have been cracked and it pains me to see anyone endorsing SDMI, let alone someone whom I admire. I think, on balance, I'll wait for the insecure Compact Disc version. See the official press release."
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Bowie Distributes New Album Using SDMI Format More

Bowie Distributes New Album Using SDMI Format

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  • Ohh goody, another retro nostalgia chance to seel out on old ideas.

    The new crop of "glam" make the old crop look damn near respectable, not an easy task at all. They prance and flash but under it all its like Greenday was to punk, like perl jam is to rock, like puff daddy is to hip hop.

    No matter how much you try you cant rewrite history, you cant live in a time thats past, and you cant BE when your just a WANABE.

    Kill your idols, live your own life.

    And nothing, nothing, can ever touch Zigyy Star Dust.
  • It was merely circumvented. SDMI is a lossy compression. Recompressing it again with another lossy compression. This results in playback qualit y loss (not too significant tho).

    The player itself can still be cracked however. If you reverse engineer the player, you can come up with your own player that can play the format unlimited number of times. You need a license with the new player, which is something SDMI-backers are not willing to give me. Thus, SDMI format is litigiously secured, not technically secured.

    Hasdi
  • The trouble with this analysis is that it assumes that information is thrown out in the same manner by both MP3 and SDMI. This is not necesarily the case, and once "lost", you can never get it back.
  • Has Liquid Audio even announced an interest in developing a Linux version? I won't even ask about Microsoft...
  • 'Dunno why everybody is excusing Bowie for his choice as if he were too saintly to criticize. Heck, it hurts me too, being a great fan of his old stuff, but no way is he as technologically challanged as folks are making out. He understands the MP3 scene very well --- he was even on the cover of the UK's Internet magazine about a year ago and featured in a leading article about online music.

    Far more likely is that he's just one more greedy author who wants to continue shoring up the old power base of institutions that made him so much money in the past.

    If the "greats" don't support us, it's time to support instead the newly emerging bands that don't feel obliged to pay back any such favours to the industry.
  • Isnt the SMDI initative to start producing copy protected Compact Disks soon ? All I know is that has to go, I have a right to make a backup for personal use of my own collection.
  • Yes, I hear the difference too, and I mean at the highest normal bitrates (I haven't tried anything beyond 256K though). I wish somebody would do a proper scientific blind A-B test and publish the results to debunk the myth of no loss of fidelity.

    I wouldn't say it sounds like crap though, just not hifi, and the high frequency artifacts are probably more irritating then FM radio.

    'Pity that Shorten gives you only a 60% inprovement. That's so poor that MP3 isn't threatened at all.
  • Thanx for the Info, I think it was wired news that said somthing about watermarking cd's now that you mentioned it, Ill have to check and see if i can find that article again.
  • It depends on the content. If the MP3 file loses different frequencies than the SDMI file, you could get something that had a lot of irratating artifacts. Or you could get lucky and get something that sounds great.

    It's kind of like converting between lossy graphics formats - sometimes it looks great, sometimes you get complete crap.
  • Just to set the record clear and straight here

    as much as PE goofed up on mp4 and there own deal with Atomic...
    THEY MIGHT BE GIAINTS were 1st to offer their album

    and before them there were HUNDREDS OF INDI's on MP3.COM

    All you people spouting the PE hype line should by three clues, cause in thisplace you sounds as stupid as a glory hole in an elevator.

  • I guess you could call me "in-the-know" about SDMI, MP3, and all that since I work at mp3.com. For the record, if you check mp3.com and dmusic.com. Both our tests confirmed that unfuck.exe actually removes the security wrapper. It does not, as you claim, simply re-record output to disk.

    I hope this clears this up. Microsoft's SDMI compliant solution is crackable...with no sound quality lost.

    -Davidu
  • I guess you could call me "in-the-know" about SDMI, MP3, and all that since I work at mp3.com. For the record, if you check mp3.com and dmusic.com. Both our tests confirmed that unfuck.exe actually removes the security wrapper. It does not, as you claim, simply re-record output to disk.

    I hope this clears this up. Microsoft's SDMI compliant solution is crackable...with no sound lost.

    -Davidu
  • Bowie already sold "Heroes" to M$.
  • I bet you TMBG will get more paying downloads than Bowie. First of all, they've been doing stuff with the internet for years, and they released their last album as MP3's, thus showing that they have a clue. Bowie, on the other hand, is old enough to be part of the "I just got my son to set up the 'e-mail', but I haven't tried to use it yet" generation. Do you really think he will have any appeal with the online music crowd?

    TMBG's album really was shareware music, because you only have to pay for it if you want to support the band. MS Audio is music as Warez. This is a Micros~1 PR blitz in exactly the same vein as when they used the Rollings Stones to launch Win95.

    Using Microsoft software is like having unprotected sex.

  • And what music is there nowadays that is not a rehashing of previous music in some way or another?

    There is none... everything you could possibly listen to has its roots and influences.

  • Long gone are the dys where Mr Bowie strutted and fretted his hours on stage. The mascara and glitter are now put aside for the serious nature of his retirement funds and of keeping the corporate entity know as DAVIDBOWIE.COM satiated.

    So to will many groups and artist go into this great good future, not with a loud bang of rock-n-rebellion but with the dull whimper of press releases and sponsorships.

    Another hero has failed me
    He's a guest VJ on MTV
    Jack's in his corset, Janie's in her vest
    Lou's hawking scooters and American Express
    Guys quote Michael Stipe in bars
    To pick up girls who own their cars
    While we renounce what we once loved
    To prove that we can rise above
    Too Much Joy


    Its nothing new, its something old, the Biz of The Music Biz is BIZ!

    Even the often touted Chuck D, who has done some great things in his time, has fallen to teh siren call of the False Tech. MP4 was a bad move at best.

    Happily folks are begining to call the Emperor on his lack of New Clothes. TMBG, as has been pointed out on this forum, have been doing this for a long time. The bands on MP3.com, myself included, have been doing it and with a better biz model for a while as well.

    You would think, though, that the PR folks would know enough not to make such statements caliming thier artist is the FIRST to do something long since done. I think it was Billy Idol who tried to foist himself ont he net early on and got the bums rush in return. Its a shame the record companys did not learn form that.

    If your gonna front the net populace, at least do it properly.

    I think maybe Mr Bowie needs to harken back to his own songs to maybe grabt he glam back some, to learn the leason he tried to teach the world of two decades past.

    There's a Starman waiting in the sky
    He'd like to come and meet us
    But he thinks he'd blow our minds
    There's a Starman waiting in the sky
    He's told us not to blow it
    Cause he knows it's all worthwhile
    He told me:
    Let the children lose it
    Let the children use it
    Let all the children boogie
    David Bowie--Ziggy Stardust

  • I don't understand why he's even signed to a record label. At last count, he is worth about $900 million. I suspect that David Bowie can do whatever he wants. Virgin is just along for the ride. If he _really_ disagreed about the format, he could just leave. Maybe he doesn't know what he's doing, but he really is quite "with it", more than any other popular musician. In response to an earlier comment, I think he _does_ know the difference between SDMI and MP3 and TCP/IP, but maybe he doesn't really understand all of the political issues about it. And I'm sure he doesn't use Linux.
  • Granted, they haven't been at it (mp3 releases that is) anywhere near as long as TMBG, but it was in the news recently so you'd think the fickle mind of the press would remember.

    But maybe it's that TMBG and PE didn't do this in conjunction with a "leading record company"?

    But I'm under the impression that TMBG and PE coudn't give a sh*t about any "leading record company". While DB didn't go from from being very near bankruptcy in the late 70's to being richer than Paul McCartney today, by thumbing his nose at the recording industry.

  • There is a marked difference between being INFLUENCED and RIPPING OFF. Its obvious when you watch Pat Boone do a Little Richard song that it was a Rip Off , and a bad one at that.

    When I first heard Green Day, before i even knew how they were, I thought "oh wow the buzzcocks got new songs out?".

    Taking a thing, a meme, an influence and then crafting it to make something all togther your own is a special talent. When done even half way it is a magic greater than all the corporate hocus pocus that springs forth the BackStreet Boys or Menudo part 23(ricky martinez)

    There is a tendenacy to attribut actual creative worth to groups that are doing little more than dressing up in thier parents/older siblings clothes, playing air gtr, making faces in the mirror and calling themselves a group.

    Entertaining? Sometimes. Creative? Not often.

    Influence is a great thing, being the Rich Little of Goth/Punk/Glam/Wahtever is a poor substitution.
  • Nobody deserves an expectation of being paid for any artistic work. I cough on a sheet of paper, is my expectation to be paid $1000 for my effort warranted?
  • When will everyone understand that there will be no 100% secure, uncopyable music format? You can throw the best mathematicians in the world at the problem, and still people will be able to copy the music. One can make it tough as possible - waiting to decoding the stuff in licensed top secret speakers for example - but inorder to hear it, the music has to be decoded, at which time it can be copied. Is this too complicated for the industry to understand? They will not be able to apply their old business model to the new world. When will the day be, that they sit down and figure that out?

    ( Unless they come up with a technology to charge me everytime I hear some tune in my head... that would be scary. )

  • No. (Score:1)

    by acb ( 2797 )
    SDMI on an open-source operating system is impossible, as anyone could hack the kernel to capture audio or snoop into the decoder's memory. SDMI depends on the system restricting the user's access.

    You can bet that the owners of the SDMI technology will never licence their patents for a Linux-based software decoder, just as you'll never see a Linux-based software-only DVD video player. In either case, the copyright industry would oppose any such move.
  • It is not technically possible to make Red Book (i.e., conventional audio) CDs uncopiable whilst keeping them compatible with current players.

    CDs already have an ineffectual "copy protection" mechanism; a flag in the table of contents can specify whether copying is permitted for each track. Most commercial CDs have this set to 'no'. In theory, this affects the SCMS code sent on digital outputs, so if you copy a protected CD to a DAT, you can't later copy it. CD-ROM drives, however, will happily read any CD audio track, regardless of the flag.

    The only other protection mechanism I can think of is individually watermarking each CD with a serial number and using that to trace the origins of pirated copies. The problem with this is that manufacturing non-identical CDs would get rather expensive. It could be done with CD-Rs burned from SDMI data, though.
  • I guess the money does matter to him after all. Given that Steve Ball was one of his students, though, that explains a lot.

    Is the power of Microsoft indeed, as it indeed seems to be, infinite?

    If Einstruzende Neubauten or Orbital go that route, though... *shudder*
  • In January, Bowie was said to support the mp3 format as mentioned in this Slashdot article [slashdot.org] from january
  • If he wants to give it away using a known-insecure method, than its just one more free music site as far as I'm concerned.

    /*He who controls Purple controls the Universe. *
  • It would be interesting too see if someone takes the SDMI coded version and creates an MP3 version that misteriously gets distributed over the net...

  • TMBG (Score:1)

    by lee ( 17524 )
    "For the first time ever in the history of the music business, a major recording artist and a leading record company are joining with retail to bring a complete album to music fans via download from the Internet."

    So TMBG aren't major? Gee, I bought and downloaded a few of their albums. and they were in nice MP3 format. They Might Be Giants might not be as old and as famous as Bowie, but they seem like big time to me.

    I really like Bowie's music, but he has let MS us his music before. This was to be expected, but it turns my stomach.
  • How much do you think Bowie is making from Microsoft to push their tech for two weeks before the album is released?
  • Does anyone really think that Bowie made the decision to distribute via SDMI? Or could it possibly have been his record label that agreed with Microsoft and the Liquid Audio folks to use their formats so show "solidarity" between "The recording industry" and "The computing industry" that they "won't stand for any more of this pirated MP3-based music" or some crap like that.

    Bowie, no offense to him, probably doesn't know the difference between SDMI, MP3 and TCP/IP.

    -=-=-=-=-

  • thanks! (Score:3)

    by Signal 11 ( 7608 ) on Tuesday August 31, 1999 @06:55AM (#1714447)

    (allegedly) from the warez community:

    Hey, thanks man. We'll have this cracked and available for download within the hour.

    We appreciate your patronage!

    --

  • Everyone's been assuming that just because the format is crackable, no-one'll pay for it. This is the same argument people used against shareware, and while certainly 90% of people don't pay for shareware, a lot do.
    Of course, people are more inclined to give money to a struggling programmer than to a monolithic music corporation. However, if we were to wait for an uncrackable format, we'd wait forever. Internet music is very much happening now, and anyone who doesn't release -- in mp3, sdmi or whatever -- will be left behind.
  • And you thought SDMI was dead...

    Is there a hierachy concerning audio compression standards? Does anyone have listing of different standards and their size ratios/audio quality/security(if any)?

    What ever happened to Bell Lab's PAC?

    thanks,

    - j

  • The Artist as Flack (Score:3)

    by Lemmy Caution ( 8378 ) on Tuesday August 31, 1999 @07:03AM (#1714453) Homepage
    At first, I was going to comment that Bowie probably didn't have the least idea what technology was being used to put his music online - I suspected that he was focused on making the music, and that some schlemiel in Virgin was responsible for the format and the context of distribution.


    But then I reread his comments:


    "I couldnt be more pleased to have the opportunity of moving the music industry closer to the process of making digital download available as the norm and not the exception. We are all aware that these broadband opportunities are not yet available to the overwhelming majority of people. However, just as colour television broadcasts and film content on home video tapes were required first steps to cause their industries to expand consumer use, I am hopeful that this small step will lead to larger steps by myself and others ultimately giving consumers greater choices and easier access to the music they enjoy. Concurrently, the Internet, with its low barriers of entry will allow retailers large and small to compete on a level playing field. This can only be of benefit to the consumer"

    While I know that Bowie was always sensitive to the vagaries of pop-culture-as-industry, and was always a competent and astute businessman, I get a sense of this extending to a "music as commodity" attitude that, to be honest, I don't feel makes for very good music. Even if the idea of artistic purity is a fiction, artists that subscribe to that fiction seem to produce better work.

    Of course, Bowie is enough of a wily satirist that he may, in fact, simply have been aping typical press release rhetoric out of ironic instinct.

  • At first, I was going to comment that Bowie probably didn't have the least idea what technology was being used to put his music online - I suspected that he was focused on making the music, and that some schlemiel in Virgin was responsible for the format and the context of distribution.

    But then I reread his comments:

    "I couldnt be more pleased to have the opportunity of moving the music industry closer to the process of making digital download available as the norm and not the exception. We are all aware that these broadband opportunities are not yet available to the overwhelming majority of people. However, just as colour television broadcasts and film content on home video tapes were required first steps to cause their industries to expand consumer use, I am hopeful that this small step will lead to larger steps by myself and others ultimately giving consumers greater choices and easier access to the music they enjoy. Concurrently, the Internet, with its low barriers of entry will allow retailers large and small to compete on a level playing field. This can only be of benefit to the consumer"

    While I know that Bowie was always sensitive to the vagaries of pop-culture-as-industry, and was always a competent and astute businessman, I get a sense of this extending to a "music as commodity" attitude that, to be honest, I don't feel makes for very good music. Even if the idea of artistic purity is a fiction, artists that subscribe to that fiction seem to produce better work.

    Of course, Bowie is enough of a wily satirist that he may, in fact, simply have been aping typical press release rhetoric out of ironic instinct.

  • Someone moderate that down, PLEASE?

  • I wrote this email to the contact listed on the press release. Hopefully someone important will read it, but probably not.

    Hi, I am writing to you in response to a press release from David Bowie's official website at this address [davidbowie.com] on August 30th. The Outside Org [outside-org.co.uk] website is listed to obtain more information at the end of the release and on David Bowie's page on Outside Org [outside-org.co.uk], this email address is listed as the contact. Forgive me if I am directing this to the wrong place and I would appreciate it if you could forward to the right person.

    While I certainly believe that digitally downloaded music is the far, if not near, future of music, I am disappointed with David Bowie's (and/or his record label's) decision to release his album in only Liquid Audio and MS Audio, encoded with SDMI. I, along with many other consumers, would have preferred the open and flexible MP3 standard, which started this digital music revolution. Because anyone is free to write an MP3 player and anyone is free to write an MP3 encoder (as long as they do not use a patented algorithm) without paying licensing fees, there is a much wider selection of MP3 players for a wide variety of computer systems. Personally, I use the open source Linux operating system, for which I believe there is no Liquid Audio or MS Audio player. A quick search on the de facto website to get Linux software (Freshmeat [freshmeat.net]), reveals no matches for "SDMI" or "Liquid Audio" (I also looked at Liquid Audio's official site [liquidaudio.com] which only has players for Windows and Macintosh), while almost 100 matches for "MP3". This includes MP3 players, encoders, and graphical frontends which make it simple for people to create MP3's from their own purchased CDs. Without a doubt, an MP3 release would enable many more people on different hardware to have access to David Bowie's music. Not only is it wrong to force people to deal with one or two companies (in this case Microsoft and Liquid Audio) as the sole source for a certain format, it is also bad business. While the technically superior Betamax was held tight by Sony, the open VHS standard won the consumer war. I expect that formats such as Liquid Audio and MS Audio (and maybe even SDMI, though it is open) will fail in the same way.

    There is a concern growing in the traditional record industry that downloadable music is more subject to piracy than normal purchased CD's and that a secure, encrypted standard that only allows play only on one device is necessary for commercially released music. This is wrong for, at least, two reasons. First, most of the music available illegally in MP3 format was not originally downloaded from a website. It was originally purchased on a CD and then encrypted to MP3 and put on the internet. There is no way to stop this from happening. If you release your album on a CD and it is popular, it is subject to being encrypted into MP3 and put onto the internet. In fact, if you ever intend for music to be listened to, then it will always be technically possible to copy it. Secondly, as fast as new "secure" formats are being created, they are being unsecured. Read this article [wired.com] about Microsoft's WMA format being cracked for evidence of this.

    While there will always be some people who insist on pirating music, the majority of consumers simply don't have the time for it. It usually takes more than $15 worth of effort to find a CD that you would pay $15 for in MP3 format illegally on the web, especially if you want a certain CD in particular. When given the choice between affordable, easy-to-use, downloadable music in a popular format from reputable companies and illegal, hard-to-find from who-knows-where, _most_ consumers will pick the former. By using non-open standards to release digital music, such as Liquid Audio and MS Audio, and using encryption such as SDMI, you are simply making it harder for consumers to get and enjoy legal music.

    There are also some interesting "facts" about David Bowie's involvement with digital music and how he is the "first" to do this and the "first" to do that. He is most certainly _not_ the first major recording artist to release an entire album online (some have even made some albums available _only_ online). Check out Emusic [emusic.com] for this. Some of the more notable artists are Frank Black (former lead singer of the Pixies and a guest at Bowie's 50th birthday bash, where he performed with Bowie on stage at Madison Square Garden) and They Might Be Giants. But press hype is what it is. I suppose I should expect it.

    Despite of this, I am a very big fan of David Bowie. I will buy his new album, though not online, because I couldn't listen to it even if I did. I will wait for the CD and encode it myself into MP3 format so that I can listen to it through my computer and on a portable MP3 player. I hope that in the future he will realize the demands of market and use an open standard that is available to everyone.

  • .....where?
  • Intellegence in the music industry? (I hope i spelled the I word correctly!)

    The DAT in DAT stands for Audio. DAT's were supposed to compete in the market against CD's... Too bad the Music Industry got the legislated out of the market.

    The Music Industry is trying in Canada (according to /.) tax all media that digital music can be encoded on, but specifiaclly CD-R's...

    The Music Industry has on several occassions forbade artists from posting their music on their own websites.

    The industry is NOT eager for the internet to catch as a music distribution channel because once that happens, there's much less need for them. Right now, they finance artists studio time, hire artists to do cover art, pay for the pressing of the CD's, etc... this gets artists into very repressive contracts in order to "make it big". Once that happens, it makes it difficult to escape to independence...

    Now, a band merely needs to come up with enough $$$ to get into a studio, and then aquire a web-presence. True, today MP3 doesn't completely stack up that well against CD's and such... But in a few years, the MP3 craze will be over as a new lossless format emerges... MP3's small file size won't be so cool once the country as a whole is using DSL, etc...

    But once that happens (digital music distribution), you've effectively killed off the main reason to have the "music industry" in the first place.
  • Yeah, no kidding....

    I'm sickened and saddened by Bowie's decision.

    Am I the only one who thinks SDMI stands for SoDoMI?

    -----

  • Even though I am not a huge fan, I do recall Public Enemy being the first to offer albums in MP3. They have been behind the MP3 scene for quite some time now. SDMI may not die (because it will come with EVERY copy of their fucking OS) but it will not take off and get huge like MP3's.

  • How can you say to use Realnetworks and avoid proprietary formats in the same breath? The "Real" stuff is just as proprietary as the Microsoft stuff.


    ---
    Have a Sloppy day!
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Having worked with Mr. Bowie once (a few years ago) on a web-based project I find it easy to believe he had some say in the chosen format. While not an overly technical man he is always quite eager to learn about new technologies and when I spoke to him he was well on his way to geekdom. For the last two years he's been pushing all his spare time into the web and multimedia development so I could see him having at least a rudimentary understanding of audio compression. (not that I'm agreeing with his choice, he probably just made a bad judgement call). And, if I'm not mistaken, his son is sort of up on his technologies too. I wouldn't be suprised if he had something to do with this as well. Bowie may be a shrewd business man but he's damn smart too.
  • Please. Bowie never said that. No human speaks like that. That there's a PR Dept. talking.
  • And Real isn't proprietary? It belongs to one company, no formats published, runs on 1 player? Thats proprietary to me.
  • If check this August 19th article [dmusic.com] dmusic changed their stance. To quote from them:

    Unfuck.exe takes an already registered WMA file and outputs it as a WAV, at which point it re-encodes it into an unprotected WMA file.

    I checked mp3.com but I see no reference on this.

    I'll wait for the "rogue" SDMI player to come out. It will be shot down by lawsuits. Hasdi

  • If you hadn't noticed glam rock IS making a come back - what do you think Placebo and Kulashaker are? Oh and did you see Velvet Goldmine? And I would call Pulp and Suede semi-glam anyway...

    Actually, saw Kulashaker here a few weeks ago - fab!! It's really good to see a band that would usually play to 5,000 in a club with 500 people.

    Nick

  • It will be interesting to track the sales of the album - i.e. will they be dented at all? Let's face it, if you're a Bowie fan you're going to buy the album anyway. A few people might even listen to it out of curiosity if they can get a hold of it and then buy it.
    The most pirated thing of the year - The Phantom Menance - chewed bandwidth but not sales. Here in Europe it was only released a few weeks ago, but EVERYONE who wanted to had seen it. In Greece at the holiday resorts there were videos cut from the VCD - months before release. But it probably hasn't damaged the take at all.
    Anyway, I'd love to see some figures on this.
    Afterall if piracy killed industries then there would be no computer games industry......
  • I'd be surprised if Bowie wasn't pushed towards a "secure" audio format by his record label. So far, major labels have been cool at best towards the idea of digital distribution.

    Bowie probably has enough economic clout (and willingness, and tech savvy) to force a lukewarm reception through to completion. However, a non-secure format would have got the corporate knee jerks going and the project stopped from the get-go.

    --
  • Also, just because the format is crackable, that doesn't mean that "Joe Average" knows that it is, that the tools exist, and where to get said tools... Besides, a crackable format is better from a security standpoint than one that doesn't even try. Granted, Bowies got money, but it's his work he's putting up there, and he has the reasonable expectation of getting paid for it. If someone goes and pays for it, cracks it, then redistributes it in MP3 format, you're doing him a disservice, and you're stopping the hundreds of other artists stuck on repressive record labels that want to distribute their music on line who'll be told: "look what happeend to Bowie: someone cracked his music and gave it away for free and no one bought his CD..."
  • The last I heard, David Bowie was wealthiest entertainer in Britain, and worth close to a billion dollars. I doubt he's overly concerned with money!
  • Door locks keep the honest people out
    out of your house.


    Civilized people live behind locked doors.
    Savages live in open huts.

  • King Crimson beat Bowie to the punch (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Robert Fripp beat him to the punch by about 2 weeks. He released King Crimson live in Mexico City (1995) about 2 weeks ago. Check http://www.disciplineglobalmobile.com/dgm/dgm.htm for more info. RF took a _lot_ of flack from the anti-MS camp, and he also has a few things to say about his decision to go with the MS format.
  • Yes, I'm sure that if I really wanted to, I could download the MP3 version of the album the day it's released and so forth but, dammit! I'm a huge Bowie fan..I have all the cd's and a LOT of albums and I would have probably bought a few songs in mp3 format but no way in HELL am I buying that SDMI crap. Guess I'll just have to wait the 2 extra weeks for the cd.
  • Afterall if piracy killed industries then there would be no computer games industry

    It may not have killed the PC game industry, but it at least contributed to the death of other less popular platforms, Atari comes to mind.



    In the same way, music won't hurt the wildly popular artists and groups, (Britney Spears, Spice Girls, Ricky Martin, etc.) you know, the ones that you can't stand.



    It WILL hurt the ones who are much less popular, that don't have mass-market appeal, the ones who live from album to album. In other words, the ones that you probably like.

  • as in "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars." I think you'd seem a lot more credible as a Bowie fan if you knew what you were talking about.
  • "David Bowie is one of the most technologically well informed and culturally progressive artists in the world. It is only natural that he be the first musician to bring his art to his fans in this manner. "


    Whatever.

  • It is true that it would be compressed twice, but no quality would be lost! The quality was already lost on the MP3 side. Lossy compression works by taking sequences of numbers, e.g. 2-3-2-2-6-7-8,
    and compressing them into similar sequences with fewer numbers (by spotting the smaller differences and eliminating them), e.g. 2-2-2-2-6-6-8. The threshhold is the "quality" setting you see in JPEG problems. One you have a similar string of numbers (2-2-2-2-6-6-8), normal RLE algorithms and other compessional methods are highly effective. Since the SDMI program would have the sequence into 2-2-2-2-6-6-8, when a MP3 programmer recompressed it, it wouldn't spot any new thresholds and compress as-is, assuming that the MP3 quality is >= the SDMI quality.
  • Stupid me....

    Asides from that, I occasionally have a clue.
    How embarrassing... believe it or not, I was *playing* the damn album just last night!

    The Velvet Goldmine is spectacular by the way.
    I wish Shudder to Think performed in that manner more often.

    Arg.
  • There are way too many people here bashing The Immortal God of Rock n Roll... I offer up the following quote in defense of my personal favorite artist:

    see this article [tunes.com]
    ------------------------------------------------ --
    As for his theory on the controversial MP3 format, Bowie said that although you won't find any MP3 files of Bowie songs on his site, he does support the idea of free musical downloads. "MP3s?" he said. "Oh, the more the merrier. I think MP3's are great. No plans to do any yet, but it's down the road."

    ------------------------------------------------ --

    Just because he isn't providing them himself doesn't mean he thinks they're evil...

    Just because he isn't doing it today doesn't mean he never will.

    Also worth mentioning is DB's excellent track record wrt independent fan sites (unlike some artists we've read about here recently, DB actually seems to care about his online fan base), and the fact that Bowie has already made music freely available from his website (Telling Lies single in mp2 format about 2 years ago).
  • Hmmm... this is fairly interesting. Bowie definitely loses a point or two in my book for this one. sigh.
    someone out there commented that the more likely victim of us bad-ass cracker types is not the label or the BIG-name-annoying-pain-in-the-ass-MTV-heavy-rotati on "artist" (Brittany Spears was one of the named examples. ha! perfect!) rather, the person who we would be harming is the performer who is trying to sell albums in order to _eat_ at least daily. think about it...
    now, on yonder hand, i would not like to see my fellow /.ers going out and doing whatever nasty stuff MS wants you to do to get at their little secure audio files there, like giving them (more) money, giving over your first-born into indentured cube-slave servitude, or whatever.

    i propose a solution!
    like, if you really really like Bowie, think he's rad, and need to have that music _right now,_ well, go buy (or whatever) it.
    now if you're more like me, and find that you really really like bowie, but have no desire to fan the flames that are burning down our house, (or, like me, you realize that everything recorded in the last TWENTY YEARS is mindless garbage, with a few notable exceptions that i choose not to note here...) you can do what i shall do:
    don't buy the shit.
    just don't buy it. case closed. boycott it.
    lower sales figures for a service show the seller the level of demand for said service. if noone shows up for your big grand opening sale, it's safe to say noone wants to buy your big grand opening :)
    now, i am not implying that the entirety of David Bowie fandom either read /. or care what i have to say about the matter, but for those of us who do, it seems a pretty simple matter. go buy the CD when it comes out. you get Bowie's album, Bowie gets (some of) your money. not a perfect transaction by any means, but it's what there.

    anyway, there's my two bits...do what you can do to improve things, and at least give a good go at what you can't.

    "Respect was invented to fill the space where love should be." - Anna Karenina

  • Lossy Audio Compression In General... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Am I the ONLY person in the world who thinks lossy audio compression sounds like crap?

    I have a high quality soundcard (~94db SNR) and a pretty good system, and I can definitely hear compression artifacts even at MP3's higher bit rates.

    I certainly wouldn't PAY for a lossy-compressed version of something I can pick up in it's full digital glory down the street!

    Now, I'm not arguing that this stuff is BAD, I just really don't get the whole MP3 phenomenon. I guess most people just don't listen carefully? Or they listen to their MP3's through crappy computer speakers/crappy soundcards/crappy headphones attached to RIOs?

    I personally prefer Shorten for audio compression/transfer over the net. Check it out at http://www.softsound.com/ - Shorten is LOSSLESS audio compression. Compresses up to 60% and, on decompression, remains bit-for-bit the same file as the original. We use this in the Phish/GratefulDead/JamBand online-trading community. It's open-source, too, and compiles on most OSes...

    AC

  • Oh, my God! (Score:3)

    by Chris Johnson ( 580 ) on Tuesday August 31, 1999 @11:27AM (#1714496) Homepage Journal
    There Fripp goes, blowing my mind again! That man _rules_.
    Fripp on industry practice:
    What is a "real" record company? A "real" company seeks to take as much from the artist as it can. It does this firstly by paying as little in royalties as it can. It has become harder, following the abolition of legal slavery, to pay scandalously low rates, like single figures. So today a new artist might get 12-14%. This is paid on 70% of CD sales, because the technology of CDs is "new technology".
    Q. But CDs aren't "new technology" any more.
    A. You're quick. But this is company "standard practice". Then this figure is itself paid on 90% of sales, because of damage to the shellac or vinyl.
    Q. But CDs aren't made of shellac or vinyl.
    A. You're very quick. But that is also a "standard practice" from the time of 78s breaking in shipment to the stores. Then, that figure in turn is paid on 10/14ths of the money the record sells for.
    Q. Why?
    A. Because company policy (in this case Virgin) determines that record shops in the UK sell the record for £10.
    Q. But your CDs sell for around £13.99.
    A. Now you're really getting up to speed...
  • Unless I missed something, these "secure audio" formats weren't cracked.

    Rather, someone found a way to bypass them, and extract them to some other, non-protected, format.

    Ask any cryptographer if pgp has been cracked because Unix provides a ptrace(2) interface. Even Windows provides a usable debugging interface. By extension surely all copy protection on these has been cracked.

    This is why the DVD people have put entensive restrictions on implementations, particularly in software.

    I'm not in favour of any of these so-called secure formats, because I think that they represent a rather extensive missing-of-the-point, but I see no evidence that the technology (specifically the mathematics) behind them has been "cracked" or otherwise broken.

    Matthew.

  • SDMI wasn't cracked. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Just for the record, SDMI wasn't "cracked". Someone wrote a driver to re-encode the data after the music was decoded.

    That's like saying that PGP mail is insecure because someone could write a hack into a video driver, lift the pixels off the screen as someone reads a PGP-encoded letter, and then store that information unencoded.

    This is not to say SDMI is good or bad, just that it's another case of how little intelligence goes into Microsoft bashing.
  • Not withstanding any of the good comments you made, I assume that this quote was written by some marketing department somewhere. From my experience, the vast majority of press releases work this way. At best they read the paragraph to Bowie, and he agreed that they could attribute the quote to him.
  • It seems to me that money works in a way such that the more you have the more you want, at least until you get old, realize it all ain't worth shit, and give it away to try and gain some type of immortality. Ever been to Rockefeller Plaza or Carnegie Hall? The Gates CS Builings?

    BTW get with the times: "It's All about the Benjamins" (or pentiums if you like the WeirdAL slant)
  • ... so MP3 crowd will have to wait for the CD version to come out, then rip it.

    This whole thing about copy-proof formats seems silly to me, because it is so clear that (unprotected) CDs will be with us for a long, long time.

  • Mick Jagger sold Microsoft the right to use "Start Me Up" during the release of Win95; Bowie was once caught in bed with Jagger; hence Bowie uses Microsoft for musical format.

  • well not that this has anything to do with Bowie, but the ones that really wanted to see the phantom menace didnt see it before it came to the big screen because they dont want to spoil the event by seeing it on a bad vcd filmed with a regular videocamera with an ugly z floating around..

    enuff said :)

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