EMI dropping DRM - great news for us

ORIGINAL: axe

Steve Jobs has been publicly opposed to DRM and even posted a public statement asking the record companies to drop DRM.

Apple is making all the right moves and has the creative professional in mind.

ORIGINAL: Vertigo50

Two things:

1. Steve Jobs had nothing to do with this. He wrote an open letter about it because he knew EMI was considering dropping DRM, and he knew that if he wrote this letter and then it happened, everyone would think he did it. This is well-documented by many technology pundits. Just check it out. There are articles dating back way before Jobs' letter about EMI considering dropping it. If Steve Jobs were really opposed to DRM, like he claims to be, why hasn't he dropped the DRM from the independent music that the artists themselves have been asking for? There are numerous artists who are more than willing to drop the DRM, and they haven't done it yet. Thanks for the letter Steve, but I'd prefer you to actually DO something about it then to write about it.

2. Microsoft did what they had to do to convince the media companies to let you run HD on your computer. You know what's going to happen if you try to play HD on your precious Mac? NOTHING. It won't play. Period. Unless Apple does the same thing Microsoft did, and embeds DRM to make the media companies happy, you won't have HD on your Mac anytime soon.

Of course, that's if the media companies even bother working with Apple, since they'd be putting a lot of time and resources into it for only 2.4% of the market. I doubt they'll even bother.

ORIGINAL: axe


Unfortunately, rather than publicly opposing DRM, Microsoft decided to jump in bed with DRM and it is "deeply" woven into Vista robbing some of your performance.

AXE

ORIGINAL: Jason Archibald

"How does this effect Sonar users, or our "performance"? It doesn't. Unless you plan on playing hacked copies of DRm enabled movies and music" Lionsound

It affects Sonar users and all computer users because of the underlying architecture that must run in the background to check and verify everything... the more stuff running on a machine, the poorer the overall performance of user-run apps.

I thought I'd weigh in on this one. I'm not at Cakewalk any more these days, but I'm familiar with what MS is doing with audio in Vista.

To summarize: Don't Worry.

All the DRM stuff the article is describing only applies to secure content being played through a secure media path. It's not so different than today, where if you try to open a DRMed WMA file in SONAR, you can't. That's because SONAR isn't in the secure audio path.

MS gave professional authoring tools like SONAR low level hardware access in Vista. They've created a better API than the existing KS system, and they've also made some changes to the kernel to allow tools such as SONAR to run with ultra-high priority threads. Running at this low level is similar to ASIO or KS in that the application has exclusive hardware access, and runs outside the secure audio path so you can't play DRMed content that way. But you can't today, either, so it's really no change.

All disabling, decoding, degrading behavior occurs if the host is using a high level API, such the old "Wave" or "DirectSound" code. This is very similar to the infamous KMixer situation today, which resamples and adds latency - equally unacceptable to a tool such as SONAR, so these APIs are avoided by SONAR. MS knows these behaviors are not acceptable to pro audio applications so they provided a way to avoid them, albeit with the caveat you can't play secure content.

1. Steve Jobs had nothing to do with this. He wrote an open letter about it because he knew EMI was considering dropping DRM, and he knew that if he wrote this letter and then it happened, everyone would think he did it. This is well-documented by many technology pundits. Just check it out. There are articles dating back way before Jobs' letter about EMI considering dropping it. If Steve Jobs were really opposed to DRM, like he claims to be, why hasn't he dropped the DRM from the independent music that the artists themselves have been asking for? There are numerous artists who are more than willing to drop the DRM, and they haven't done it yet. Thanks for the letter Steve, but I'd prefer you to actually DO something about it then to write about it.

Unfortunately, rather than publicly opposing DRM, Microsoft decided to jump in bed with DRM and it is "deeply" woven into Vista robbing some of your performance. Too bad, with the market share the Microsoft has this would have been done already.

ORIGINAL: D.Triny



OMG Alndln...the whole point of the announcement is to say that Fairplay is now optional for the EMI catalog

and the expectation is that 1/2 of all the 5mil + tracks in iTunes will be available in non-drm versions.

So obviously when this is made available in May, the Wikipedia article will be inaccurate.

It reminds me of all the flack we took when we actually mentioned that we were thinking about using Vista... non-stop arguments by people who didn't even have it.

but he won't or can't remove DRM for i-Movies. Microsoft is bound by the same dillema so their both in the same boat.