RIAA declares DRM dead. It's about time.

[Daddy Dee]

http://torrentfreak.com/drm-is-dead-riaa-says-090719/

DRM has been among the most frustrating things ever for the music industry to "help" the consumer.

I've kept my software legal for years and wouldn't have cared all that much about it, (if it had worked) but it so often prevented me from playing music that I had paid for to license. It was a complete PITA.

I understand that Itunes would allow consumers to redownload their DRM protected tunes for a fee. Don't know how much it was. I was a Napster user, but they would not allow such a courtesy. I converted all my napster WMA's to DRM free mp3's. Suppose I should be thankful that I could do that at least. There was not a noticeable degradation in quality converting one compression scheme to another.

Never did understand how DRM encoding worked. I read a few websites with supposed step by step instructions for stripping DRM. Seemed like one needed to be a hacker to accomplish that. Also, whenever a DRM stripping solution was identified Microsoft issued an update to patch the hole.

ding dong the witch is dead.

[Chris A]

Do the big music industry providers provide their web-based music distribution in a format that preserves the quality that WAV files represent? I'm thinking high-quality lossless format here at a data rate at least as good as CDs. I believe that the market for used CDs on Amazon, et al., is still large.

I've invested in a good optical-disk resurfacing machine that has already paid for itself for such occasions. I don't buy music online because of this, DRM or not.

Chris

[Daddy Dee]

Chris,

what is the disk resurfacing machine? sounds interesting.

[Chris A]

http://www.amazon.com/DSR-R1-DVD-Repair-Machine-Kit/dp/B000GX31G6/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1248112957&sr=8-4

I've not had the opportunity to try on a Blu-Ray disk, since all that I've had work well (even used). Must be the (thin) hard coating that is used on these disks to protect the close-to-the-surface data layer.

[Daddy Dee]

that's a cool gadget.

[JL Sargent]

Finally some rationality to DRM. Big waste of time and money. What a pain. Bought about 100 songs from Wally World with DRM and jumped through a bunch of hoops to keep listening to em. Finally burned what I could to CDs.

[Chris A]

that's a cool gadget.

Yeah, it's saved at least 3-4 movie nights at home that were brought to a standstill due to disk mistracking. It takes about 5-10 minutes to setup and polish the most scratched up DVD and CD (at least until the scratches reach to the data layer).

The unit's motor will sometimes stall when I've really heated-up the disk being cleaned, and it's on the last polish compound/cleaning disk cycle, but the solution is to pop the lid latch and push the start button until it starts rotating, then relatch the lid after it is moving again at full speed. No big deal.

I've saved some really awful disks even to the point of saving just a few tracks off of disks where the data layer is visibly compromised, i.e., translucent in some areas and altogether missing in other areas. I've not had any scratched disks whereby the machine wasn't able to save something--amazing performance, really.