MASSIVE DIGITAL MEDIA HOW-TO MASSIVE DIGITAL MEDIA HOW-TO MASSIVE DIGITAL MEDIA HOW-TO MASSIVE DIGITAL MEDIA HOW-TO MASSIVE DIGITAL MEDIA HOW-TO
3 MA XIMUMPC MARCH 200 5
PLAY YOUR
PURCHASED MUSIC
ON ANYTHING
The entertainment industry might recall
Napster’s heyday with a collective
cringe, but the rest of us remember
the thrill of grazing in endless pastures
of music, and downloading MP3s that
played on whatever device we fancied.
Not anymore. Apple’s iPod is the
only device that supports FairPlay, the
proprietary digital-rights management
(DRM) scheme employed by Apple’s
iTunes music store. So if you purchase
music from iTunes, you won’t be able
to play it on any other MP3 player. And
if you do own an iPod, don’t bother
shopping at the now-legit Napster,
because the iPod doesn’t support the
DRM scheme that’s present in Windows
Media Audio fi les. To make matters
worse, there’s music that’s exclusive
to one site or another, and there’s no
digital-audio player that can play music
from them all.Of course, DRM schemes are
doomed to be broken. Apple turned a
little sour when the Playfair utility came
to market. Playfair converted protected
iTunes tracks with the M4P extension
into ordinary AAC fi les, which could be
played on any player that supports AAC
format. In response, the iTunes DRM
was quickly updated to foil Playfair. This
development led to Hymn, yet another
DRM “unwrapper.” And so on.
Microsoft’s own DRM has proven
surprisingly sturdy. After a utility called
unf**k.exe (this is a family magazine,
so fi gure out the missing letters on
your own) was released to strip WMA
fi les of their DRM, Microsoft updated
its methods, and they hadn’t been
cracked at press time.
There is a work-around that allows
you to convert protected tracks to
unprotected tracks in any format, and
because it doesn’t involve decrypting
the tracks, it’s perfectly legal as long
as you don’t share them. Virtually all
online music-downloading services
permit you to burn your purchased
tracks to CD a limited number of
times. Once you’ve done so, the tracks
can then be extracted by any ripping
program, free of their DRM shackles.
But—wouldn’t you know it—there’s
a catch. Audio compression throws
out a certain amount of audio data in
order to reduce the fi le size: The lower
the bit rate, the more information that’s
thrown out—never to be recovered. The
audio CD you produce will sound only
as good as the source material; and if
you recompress the tracks, you’ll lose
even more data, degrading the audio
quality even further.
Here are our tips for getting the bestquality from the download-burn-and-
rip routine:
➤ If you must recompress your tracks,
do so at the highest bit rate possible.
Of course, high bit rates mean larger
fi les, so you’ll need to strike a balance
between audio quality and the number
of tracks you want to store on your
player.
➤ If you want the absolute best audio
quality, encode fi les using a lossless
codec that compresses audio without
discarding any audio information
(usually resulting in a fi le about half the
original size). Your player has to support
a lossless codec, of course; the iPod
supports Apple’s Lossless Encoder,
and the Rio Karma supports the open-
source FLAC lossless encoder.
➤ Keep a separate folder ofthe tracks you’ve converted in
uncompressed WAV format. This
way, if you want to recompress the
fi les using a different codec later,
you won’t have to waste another oneWhat’s PlaysForSure?
The next time you go shopping
for an MP3 player, you can
expect to get a whiff of assurance
from boxes stamped with the
PlaysForSure logo. But what
exactly does this logo tell you?
The presence of “Windows
Media” says it all. The
PlaysForSure logo is simply
Microsoft’s guarantee that any MP3player that bears this badge will
play any track purchased from an
online music-downloading service
that brandishes the same logo.
By associating MP3 players
and music stores that support
Windows Media Audio DRM as
a family of compatible products,
Microsoft intends to challenge the
phenomenal success of Apple’s
iPod/iTunes combo (and youknow that
success must
be driving
Microsoft
absolutely
nuts).See this logo? Any MP3 player
that has it won’t play your iTunes
tracks, so shop carefully.Ëof your burn privileges.