It’s not often you see a product that is both cool, and designed to embarrass one of the technology suppliers that created it. One particular case makes both an interesting product and an interesting back story. Not only did one of the major parts suppliers abstain from its announcement, the company did its level best to try to stop the product altogether.
Tag Archive: Floyd
Sad Music For Sad Times?
In some ways it’s not a surprising correlation. When times are tough, we become depressed, and that leads us to sad music.
It seems to be borne out by recommendation service TheFilter.com, which says there’s been a large spike in people listening to downbeat music like The Smiths’ “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” and Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” – also in the top ten are R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” and “Comfortably Numb” by Pink Floyd, according to Vnunet.
David Maher-Roberts, TheFilter.com’s chief executive, theorized:
SpiralFrog Gets EMI Music
The free, ad-supported music service SpiralFrog has announced that music and videos from EMI will be available to North American users. The deal means music from artists like David Bowie, Coldplay, Norah Jones, Keith Urban, Lenny Kravitz, Pink Floyd, Miles Davis, and many others will be available via Spiralfrog.
“We are ecstatic about adding EMI’s content to SpiralFrog,” said SpiralFrog founder and chair Joe Mohen, in a statement. “Not only does this significantly expand our catalog of music and videos, it also demonstrates our continued content deal momentum.”
Falling in Love Again with High-End Audio
I’ve just gotten back from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And the 2008 shindig has me brimming over with excitement and optimism for the future of both affordable and high-end audio gear. This is extremely unnatural for me. First of all, pessimism is my natural state. Second, having covered audio and video since 1980, when I was first employed by Video Magazine, I have learned to express enthusiasm only when I feel it. Sometimes I feel it, sometimes I don’t. Third, trade shows are tiring, and the bigger they are, the more they drain me. CES is as big as they come so it drains me heavily. Fourth, I loathe Las Vegas with a vigor that most people reserve for those who do bad things to kittens and puppies. Going there makes me feel sick, depressed and angry. I stopped going to CES altogether from 2001 to 2005 and recall them as the five happiest years of my career. Yet here I am, just back from Vegas and there’s a song in my heart. I saw—and better yet, heard—immense amounts of great-sounding stuff. As both an audio editor and an audiophile, I was pleased, heartened, and occasionally even thrilled by what I found. Some of it was from companies I’ve never heard of (or noticed) before. How unfortunate, then, that the mainstream media should totally miss the story. Read just about any non-audiophile publication’s CES coverage and you’d think the show was nothing more than wall-to-wall flat-screen TVs, gimmicky cell phones, and assorted novelties, with a little Vegas sleaze around the edges.
As someone who covers video as well as audio, I was indeed impressed by the quality of the next-gen LCD and plasma sets on display, as well as the growth of a/v-centric wireless and server technologies. But surround sound, another major part of the home theater equation, was also present at the show, along with its older and possibly wiser brother, high-end two-channel. All you had to do was set foot in the Venetian and there they were in all their glory.
Amazon Opens DRM-free MP3 Store
While many small start-ups have tried to topple iTunes Store as the dominant digital music seller, none have had quite the heft of its latest competitor, Amazon. The Seattle-based company introduced the public beta test of its Amazon MP3 music service on Tuesday, which offers a la carte music downloads for 89 or 99 cents per song with no technical restrictions on the use of downloaded songs.
Apple Puts Personal Data In DRM-Free Tracks
Apple’s iTunes has made a grand fanfare of offering digital rights management (DRM) free songs from EMI, which the storesells at a premium price. But what they haven’t told you is that those tracks contain data about the person who purchases them, including e-mail address. The first tracks, by majorartists such as Pink Floyd, Coldplay and Frank Sinatra, went on sale on Wednesday. With a higher sound quality of 256 kbps, rather than the regular 128 kbps, they retail at $1.29 each, instead of 99cents for tracks covered by DRM. Apple uses the Fairplay technology for its digital rights management, although it can supposedly be bypassed by burning the downloaded tracks to CD thentransferring them to another format, such as mp3. But it’s the tracks without DRM that are causing concern. New site Ars Technica discoveredthe embedded information, which includes the purchaser’s name, e-mail and account information (this information is included on tracks with DRM, too). The speculation is that thisinformation can discourage file sharing on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, but an added worry is that this information could easily be spoofed by anyone with experience, which could lead to unfortunatelegal ramifications for innocent folk. The story has already brought mixed comment from users. Some find no problem with it, seeing it as no problem unless people share music with friends– what the music industry calls “casual piracy” – while others are outraged. One commented, “Isn’t that even worse than DRM? Sure, I can move it, and do what Iwant with it, but it tracks me? Thanks, but no thanks Jobs.” However, Apple’s privacy policy would seem not to permit the sharing of this data with record companies Applehas had no comment on the revelation, so no one yet knows what uses Apple plans for this personal data. It’s not yet known just how deeply the data is embedded in each track, whether it’spart of the metadata, the listing of album and artist, or buried further down. Some users have said that it will probably only be a few days before someone develops a program to strip out thispersonal data.
Apple Launches DRM-Free iTunes Plus
Apple today launched iTunes Plus, a new addition to its existing iTunes service which offers AAC music tracks from major label EMI at 256 Kbps encoding (twice the rate of standard iTunes purchases) at $1.29 per track—and without Apple’s FairPlay digital rights management (DRM) technology. That means users can play iTunes Plus tracks on any music player (or using any application) which supports AAC encoding, rather than the tracks being restricted to playback using iTunes or Apple iPods.
“This is a tremendous milestone for digital music,” said Eric Nicoli, CEO of EMI Group. “Consumers are going to love listening to higher quality iTunes Plus tracks from their favorite EMI artists with no usage restrictions.”
EMI Says Goodbye to DRM
In what may prove to be a sea change in the way the music industry thinks about digital music sales, UK record label EMI has announced in conjunction with Apple that it will offer its entire music library for sale without digital rights management (DRM) technology. Tracks will go on sale via iTunes in May, 2007, and Apple will offer the non-protected tracks at twice the bit-rate of current iTunes selections: 256 kbps AAC encoding, as opposed to the 128 kbps encoding applied to protected AAC content currently for sale.
EMI Considers Selling Unprotected MP3s?
Following on the heels of Steve Jobs’ open letter this week declaring that the best digital music solution for consumers would be if record labels agreed to sell their music without digital rights management technologies impeding consumers, rumors are surfacing in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere that record label EMI is considering offering some or all of its music catalog for sale in unprotected MP3 format.
New Multi-Platform Entertainment Co. Arises
There’s a new entertainment company in town which is looking to capitalize on the growing number of venues by which people seek their programming. Network Live, co-founded by “Live 8†executive producer Kevin Wall, is drawing upon the expertise and distribution platforms of sports and entertainment giant AEG, online portal America Online and satellite radio provider XM Radio to create a new world of multi-platform live entertainment programming.
