Re: Pocket PC/Smartphones and DRM - A Completely Broken Scenario
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Originally Posted by Jason Dunn
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Originally Posted by OSUKid7
Guess I'll burn and re-rip them. On a side note, is there any way to burn/rip to a virtual CD, therefore not needing a CD-R?
It might be possible with some virtual CD mounting software, although I have my doubts that a ripper would see it as a valid music source - that seems like a lot of work to save 20 cents. :-)
Am I missing something? Why not use a CD-RW? It takes a little time to reformat, but time doesn't seem to be the issue here...
All this makes me sooooo glad I used my raise to buy an iPod and buy what little online music I do through the iTunes music store. I've never been happy with the playback quality on my Axim, and I use Hymn to de-DRM the iTunes music to move it between my laptop (I have broadband only at work) and my home desktop.
I have a Dell Axim X5 which has an CF and SD slot. I discovered (after many frustrating hours, and several customer support emails) that I can copy DRM protected content I purchased from PureTracks to my CF card but NOT my SD card :? My best guess as to why, is that the SD card on the Axim is not SDIO.
I don't think that's it -- I've heard troubles reported from SDIO-enabled devices. From what I've read in the forums, people seem to have a bit more success with CF than SD. Why, I don't know. Both are still unsupported.
Anyway, I personally refuse to burn-and-rip -- the quality degradation is too much for my ears, and the hassle is tremendous. Instead, I buy most of my music on CDs, which enables ripping into multiple formats. I do have a bunch of iTunes tracks, and if I needed to play them on a Pocket PC, I'd find a magical way to use a player that handles AAC (and I refuse to elaborate further. ) Fortunately, I've not been in that situation yet.
--janak
Well maybe that's not the problem but it is the only difference I can see. Everything else is the same. As for buying CDs, if you want to buy the whole album, your right a CD is the way to go for quality and simplicity. The trouble is I don't often want to buy a whole CD just to get one or two songs that I like.
Re: Pocket PC/Smartphones and DRM - A Completely Broken Scenario
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Originally Posted by alexkro
The encoder that media companies use is not the same as the encoder the desktop media players have. They use better, more sofisticated encoders. I bought tracks from Napster encoded at 128 Kbps. Then I compared it with the music I rip from my CDs with the same rate. The result is that Napster's tracks have wider frequency range and sound better. I was able to get closer to the Napter's encoder at the rate about 164 Kbps.
Interesting - that's something I've always wondered about, and even tried to test, but I wasn't able to find software that would do a frequency analysis on the DRM'd track. Thanks for the correction!
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I think excusing the companies because we can burn and rerip is wrong. Not only is the music then degraded, but we lose album art, lyrics and all other id3 data, which have to be re-entered manually.
I certainly didn't mean to give the impression that I was excusing them - I think the current scenario is horrible and completely unacceptable...but the only way out of it for us as consumers is to burn and re-rip, which sucks. :?
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Anyway, I personally refuse to burn-and-rip -- the quality degradation is too much for my ears
Interesting....you can hear the difference?
At one time, I figured that I had pretty sensitive ears, and I used them to buy a pretty nice hi-if system. You know, NAD amp, Mission speakers, Nakamichi cassette deck (original B series, not the Oriental crap they sell now). However, when I finally started ripping music for my PPC, I ended up using 64kbps WMA's....why? Mainly because the file size meant that I could fit more on an SD card (I've maxed out my 512MB, and looking for a cheap 1GB card), and between the audio system on my iPaq and the earbuds that I got, that music quality is fine for my ears. I'll admit that it isn't so nice on my PC with sound card and qualtiy speaker system, but I'm too lazy to rip at two different rates for two different systems........now, if there was a PPC with a 4GB microdrive built in....... :twisted:
Anyway, I personally refuse to burn-and-rip -- the quality degradation is too much for my ears
Interesting....you can hear the difference?
Well, I guess not if I rip at a substantially higher bitrate, but then I'm losing out spacewise, and the hassle factor is still there.
In any case, my ears are particularly sensitive to degraded cymbal and string instrument sounds. They bother me a bit even with "clean" rips at 128kbps WMA/Ogg/AAC/MP3. (Of the four, I'd guess Ogg sounds best, and MP3 CBR the worst.) I rip everything in 160kbps AAC/Ogg or 192kbps MP3 VBR to avoid that. I wonder if it's from my history of listening to classical music extensively?
In fact, that's another reason I won't buy much from the iTMS... the 128kbps AAC is decent, but not great. I'll primarily buy a few singles and albums I can't get here for a decent price.
However, when I finally started ripping music for my PPC, I ended up using 64kbps WMA's....why? Mainly because the file size meant that I could fit more on an SD card (I've maxed out my 512MB, and looking for a cheap 1GB card), and between the audio system on my iPaq and the earbuds that I got, that music quality is fine for my ears.
I tried this in two ways -- ripping straight to 64kbps WMA and transcoding through WMP -- and I couldn't take the poor quality. Cymbals degrade to shiny tinkly-sounding things. WMA is a pretty good codec, but 64kbps ain't CD-quality no matter what MS says.
I find Janus, especially, an interesting technology to watch.
If, as I understand it Janus DRM is time locked, based on you renewing your subscription forever (and that means ALL your descendants if they want to keep your music, like you could keep your grand parents LPs), there is nothing interesting about that!!
However, when I finally started ripping music for my PPC, I ended up using 64kbps WMA's....why? Mainly because the file size meant that I could fit more on an SD card (I've maxed out my 512MB, and looking for a cheap 1GB card), and between the audio system on my iPaq and the earbuds that I got, that music quality is fine for my ears.
I tried this in two ways -- ripping straight to 64kbps WMA and transcoding through WMP -- and I couldn't take the poor quality. Cymbals degrade to shiny tinkly-sounding things. WMA is a pretty good codec, but 64kbps ain't CD-quality no matter what MS says.
--janak
I must have bad ears, or low standards. I have a heap of MP3s ripped of CD at 128 and it's fine for me. When I want to transfer something to my ppc I just use send to device and get it to reencode at 64 wma, it sounds perfectly good to my when I'm on my bike or through the caset adapter in my car. I have to ad mit that I still tend to buy CDs I have never downloaded or purchased music on line. I figure in a few years the cost of storage will be low enough that we'll encode with lossless compression (from CD) and be done.
Re: Pocket PC/Smartphones and DRM - A Completely Broken Scenario
) Fortunately, I've not been in that situation yet.
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