Codecs and formats

Universal Music Group, the largest of the four big music labels, has become the second major to offer DRM-free MP3 downloads.

EMI was first to take the plunge, selling DRM-free files first on Apple's iTunes (in the AAC audio format) and later offering MP3s through a variety of other services via a deal with MediaNet.

Unlike EMI, the Universal deal is only a five-month trial, and the company hasn't announced any such deal with Apple--not surprising, given the two companies' recent history. In fact, nobody should see this as an act of kindness on Universal's part. Rather, … Read more

SpiralFrog is a proposed online service that would let users download songs for free in exchange for viewing some sort of advertising. It got some press coverage last August when it announced an agreement to license the music catalog of Universal Music Group, the largest of the four major labels. Over the next few months, however, a missed launch date and executive shake-up led many to write it off as dead.

But the company survived, and now its founder, Joe Mohen, is heralding the beginning of a closed beta test in the United States, with wide release expected by the … Read more

Yesterday, mobile phone giant Nokia announced it would license PlayReady, a new digital rights management (DRM) technology developed by Microsoft. This is the first win for PlayReady, and represents a pretty major shift for Microsoft.

Until about two years ago, Microsoft's DRM strategy was tied up with the Windows Media platform. Microsoft invested considerable research and development into improving Windows Media DRM. For example, in 2004, Microsoft rolled out a new version of Windows Media DRM that made it viable for content owners to allow music from subscription-based services to be transferred to portable devices. With Windows Media DRM 10, … Read more

Back in February, a jury in the District Court of Southern California found Microsoft guilty of infringing two patents held by Alcatel-Lucent related to MP3 technology, and awarded Alcatel-Lucent $1.52 billion. It was the biggest patent-infringement verdict in U.S. history, and also the biggest fine ever levied against Microsoft. (Although the company did pay a larger amount--$1.95 billion--in 2004 to settle antitrust and patent infringement claims brought by Sun Microsystems.)

I'm not a patent lawyer, and Microsoft has certainly been found guilty of illegal business tactics before, but this verdict seemed crazy at the time. … Read more

[This entry has been revised: I didn't read the MediaNet release carefully enough...they are offering DRM-less MP3s, not WMA files. Apologies to anybody whom I misled. My bad.]

Back in May, EMI--one of the big four record labels--agreed to sell its songs through Apple's iTunes without digital rights management (DRM) protection.

Before this move, iTunes and the iPod were technically linked: if you bought a song from iTunes, you could only play it on an iPod (unless you burned it to CD then re-ripped it into an unprotected format). Offering DRM-less downloads severed this link, allowing … Read more

Hardware geeks are gleefully prying their new iPhones apart to see what's inside them. Given the topic of this blog, I'm naturally most interested in the audio components--how does thing sound?

According to this breakdown by Semiconductor Insight, reported by EE Times, the iPhone uses the same hardware audio codec from Wolfson as the last generation of iPods, meaning it should sound similar. However, Wired's review suggests that the audio doesn't go as loud as most iPods, particularly the Shuffle, which could be a real problem if you listened to a lot of Rushover headphones … Read more

Just to let you know a little bit more about me, here's the obligatory "hit random shuffle and tell me the first ten songs that come up" post. Only instead of using an iPod like most bloggers, I'm using my Zune.

(Full disclosure: this Zune is a review unit I received from Microsoft. I use it as my main music player for two reasons. First, my iPod's hard drive died out of warranty, and my wife is devoted to hers and won't let me steal it. Second, I convert a lot of vinyl using … Read more