Wednesday Waldo
The Internet changes everything and nothing. One way it changes things is that it flattens the landscape. That is, why have middlemen in a world where conversations are now one-to-one? In an environment where I can speak to someone across the globe as easily as if I were talking to a neighbor across the backyard fence, why do I need a go between? If I am a singer, I no longer need a record company to produce stacks of wax. I can burn my own CDs or provide downloads and sell them directly to the customer. In one fell swoop you reduce your costs while increasing your profits by several orders of magnitude (i.e., instead of pennies per album, you are making dollars). In addition, you get instant feedback from your customers. What is selling? What isn't? Why (your customers will make the connection to you whether you want them to or not)? Further, the harder you work and the better you are, the more you make.
What it doesn't change is market dynamics. That is, if there is an unmet need, someone will fill the vacuum and become successful doing it. For the instant availability and downloading of music, Napster; KaZaA; and Gnutella have/had millions of people using their services.
For whatever reason, people want to be able to conveniently and immediately listen to their music in forms and in places that is convenient to them. Whether it is because they don't want to spend the money on buying a complete album when only one song that interests them or because they don't want to spend money on something they can get for free or because they are tired of being pandered to on radio stations that treat them like cows to be force fed through the nose. The business models that filled those needs succeeded. Until, that is, the middlemen fought back.
The response of the music industry middlemen to this market is to create barriers. Barriers in the form of "copy protection" (AKA Digital Rights Management or DRM for short) such as NetBurn Secure and/or MediaMax (I would include a link to their site but it is so obnoxious and clueless that I can't, in good conscience, do so). Barriers in the form of treating their potential and actual customers as thieves by prosecuting them and hoping to make examples that will instill fear, awe, and yes shock into all who may dare question their power.
Into this mix comes now Apple Computer and their iTunes service (see it here). The service provides 400,000 tunes available for immediate download at a cost of .99 cents each (plus tax). However, all of the music is protected by DRM. Nonetheless, there is a way to convert the files from the proprietary formats.
The instructions below are taken from Apple themselves so one must assume they consider this to be fair use:
If your computer has a CD-RW drive, you can make your own audio CDs containing the songs you add to a playlist. You can listen to the audio CDs you create in iTunes in most consumer CD players and on your computer.
iTunes converts the songs to standard audio files before writing them to the CD. You can fit about 74 minutes of music, or about 20 songs, on a 650 MB CD-R disc. Some discs allow 80 minutes (700 MB) of music.
1 Choose Edit > Preferences, then click the Burning tab at the top of the window.
2 Choose Audio CD as the Disc Format.
3 To have all the songs on the CD play at the same volume level, select the Sound Check checkbox.
4 Click OK.
5 Select the playlist you want to burn to the CD, then click the Burn Disc button.
You can only burn a CD from the songs in a playlist.
If the playlist contains more songs than will fit on the CD, iTunes will burn as many songs as will fit on one disc, then ask you to insert another disc to continue burning the remaining songs. (You can see the size of the selected playlist at the bottom of the iTunes window.)
6 Insert a blank CD-R disc and click Burn Disc again.
If you plan to play the CD on a consumer CD player, you need to use a blank CD-R disc. If you plan to only play the CD using your computer, you can also use a CD-RW disc.
It takes several minutes to burn an audio CD. You can cancel the burn by clicking the X next to the progress bar, but if you're burning to a CD-R disc you won't be able to use the CD after canceling.
If a playlist contains any songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store, you can only burn the same playlist 10 times. If the playlist includes Audible spoken word content with chapter markers, the chapters are burned as separate tracks.
For more information about external CD burners that work with iTunes, visit the Apple Support website at www.apple.com/support/itunes.
Note that to convert their protected files you must burn them to CD first. Further, you must follow the instructions above to do it. That is, you must create an "Audio CD" (files have the standard .cda extension) rather than trying to go directly from Apple's format to anything else. Once the audio CD is created, you must then read the files using a ripper (I use AudioGrabber, see it here. But you can use Windows Media Player 9, if you don't mind converting to Microsoft's own proprietary format. Otherwise, you can buy plug-ins for Media Player 9 that convert to MP3). The ripper program would then save the target file from the CD into the format of your choice; such as wav, Ogg Vorbis or MP3.
As a side light to the above post, I did a Google News search. While looking at the hits, I noticed something odd. Page after page of hits with the exact same headline: "Decision coming on technology to prevent internet piracy...". By page after page I mean four pages of the exact same thing. The URLs for most appear to be TV stations. Of the five sites I looked at, all had the same basic layout (three columns with a banner across the top). All had the buttons in the left column. All formatted the AP story exactly the same way. I don't know what to make of this but I don't think it is coincidental.
Whatever the case, the stations are:
WKYT, KY - Oct 24, 2003 WHAG-TV, MD - Oct 24, 2003 WHNS - Oct 24, 2003 WANE, IN - Oct 24, 2003 KRON4.com, CA - Oct 24, 2003 KPLC-TV, LA - Oct 24, 2003 KAIT, AR - Oct 24, 2003 WLUC-TV, MI - Oct 24, 2003 KFOR-TV, OK - Oct 24, 2003 WHNT, AL - Oct 24, 2003 WBAY, WI - Oct 24, 2003 WLOX, MS - Oct 24, 2003 KWWL, IA - Oct 24, 2003 WSTM-TV, NY - Oct 24, 2003 WTVM, GA - Oct 24, 2003 WQAD, IL - Oct 24, 2003 KAMC, TX - Oct 24, 2003 WMC-TV, TN - Oct 24, 2003 WRIC TV, VA - Oct 24, 2003 WCAX, VT - Oct 24, 2003 KRNV, NV - Oct 24, 2003 WAVY-TV, VA - Oct 24, 2003 KSFY, SD - Oct 24, 2003 WALB-TV, GA - Oct 24, 2003 WSFA, AL - Oct 24, 2003 WAFF, AL - Oct 24, 2003 KESQ, CA - Oct 24, 2003 WTVO, IL - Oct 24, 2003 KPOM-TV, AR - Oct 24, 2003 KTVO, MO - Oct 24, 2003 KVIA, TX - Oct 24, 2003 KCAU, IA - Oct 24, 2003 WHBF, IL - Oct 24, 2003 WISH, IN - Oct 24, 2003 WHO-TV, IA - Oct 24, 2003 WOOD-TV, MI - Oct 24, 2003
Aloha!