Current mood:

energetic

DRM Be Damned!
When I bought myself a Christmas gift of the Sansa MP3 player, it had come bundled with a complimentary month of the Rhapsody music service. For one month, I had “all you can eat” unlimited music downloads from their vast library—as long as the destination was the Sansa “portable device”. It seemed like a dream come true. I filled up the Sansa with music, then made backup copies on my computer hard drive so I could switch the songs back and forth at whim.

It was then that I had a lesson in DRM, or the Digital Rights Management scheme that seriously limited the ways in which I could use the music. If I tried copying the WMA tracks back to the device from the hard drive, they wouldn’t work. “Content licensed to Rhapsody” was the error message, much the same as what happened if I tried playing the same files on the PC at work.

Having dealt with DRM matters in the past when downloading Microsoft licensed clips from the MSN “Rock Star” site, I figured one must simply resign to the limitations since the scheme was hard to beat.

Then along came Tunebite from RS Audials. Using a brilliant method of extracting the legally owned clips from the Sansa player, it digitally “re-records” the audio into a DRM-free version of itself freeing the track to be played on any device. Hallelujah! True portability at last!

The Rhapsody DRM agenda shows the limitations and frustrations of such a tech when the use is severely restricted. A great case in point happened when I renewed my Rhapsody account under a different user name—and all the tracks on the MP3 player suddenly became invalidated. They were there and usable one day, but owing to a glitch in the DRM process they were suddenly unplayable after the next time I logged into the service.

Fortunately, I had already made copies that stripped the DRM restrictions from most of the tracks, so I was able to reload the player with the DRM-free versions instead of taking time and bandwidth to download them all a second time. It’s the kind of annoyance cited by Steve Jobs recently when he called upon the major music companies to drop DRM encryptions in their downloads. (Shall we even go into the case of the copy protection software attempted by Sony-BMG that ended up being exploited by hackers if the user simply played the audio CD on their computer?)

The great minds at RS Audials developed Tunebite to free the music from the limitations of DRM. The legal catch is that you have to own the rights to the tracks in the first place to be able to strip the DRM from them. In the Rhapsody example, the monthly $15 fee includes unlimited downloads to authorized portable devices. Hence when you download from the service to your player, you have purchased the right to transfer the music. If you run the resulting tracks through Tunebite, you’re not only protected in the event of a DRM glitch but the resulting file is playable on any device not just the one specific portable player.

Tunebite also works with iPods and iTunes which is undoubtedly a larger audience. It is configurable to output files as MP3, WMA and OGG formats at selected bitrates. It also has provisions to remove DRM protection from video files.

Also from RS Audials is a wonderfully inventive program called Radiotracker. Though I am embarrassed to admit it, once upon a time I was an XM subscriber. (The entire concept of paying to listen to “satellite radio” is embarrassing, but I digress.) Back in the day there existed a program called TimeTrax that would record and cut the satellite programming into MP3 files with tags. At first the RIAA flinched at the idea, since now the XM subscriber (and later a Sirius version was also created) had the ability to create digital copies of the transmissions. TimeTrax kept a low profile for a while, all the time basking in the publicity over the legal controversy. The company was later purchased by XM themselves and similar recording tech was built into XM radios.

Radiotracker takes advantage of the multitude of Internet radio streams to offer a highly customizable method of harvesting specific genres of music, all neatly tagged and encoded into the format of your choice. And you’re not stuck with radio subscription fees, either! To my ear, the “college” genre has opened a never-ending fountain of new artists—so many I wouldn’t have time to listen to them all. With XM, the playlists were restricted to what the individual programmer liked and featured more repetition than I could handle. With Radiotracker you have the mix of hundreds of possible Internet radio stations, all featuring differing tastes. In addition, the tagging not only includes the track title and artist (where available), but also the album name, cover art and lyrics all compressed into the archive! (Let’s see XM’s recordings pull that off!)

For those of us who hesitate at the thought of “Internet radio”, allow me to add that with default settings Radiotracker rips four different stations at a time and can be set to only record stations with selected bitrates or higher. If you prefer only to record music streaming at 192kbps or higher, that can be set. (Personally the 128kbps joint stereo streams are of decent quality for casual listening.) Radiotracker also fades the tracks in and out at the beginning and end to give the resulting file a more finished feel. How this turns out will depend on the station. If you have music that includes a DJ, inevitably there will be instances where a voiceover will appear at the beginning or end of the track. But hey, no subscription fees! (And you still had voiceovers with XM radio anyway!)

Praise to RS Audials for the innovative new inventions!