Emi & Apple Offering Better Quality Files That You Can Trasnfer To Any Device...

So the time has arrived, and I knew it would. Some see this as 'earth shattering' news, and I guess to some degree it is. So whats all the fuss about?

Apple and EMI have now announced that they will be offering downloadable music without the DRM encoding. What's DRM? It stands for Digital Rights Management. And this short video below (which was created few days ago, *before* this announcement) will give you a light hearted version of what DRM is all about.

Give it a watch...(don't skim, watch all of it, it's very short).



So now that you're an expert on DRM you can see how utterly annoying it can be. From today though, things have changed. Most of the songs which you download from the world famous iTunes browser will now be 'easily transferable' to other music devices. This means you don't have to rip the darn thing to your PC first to ransfer it to another device.

Not only that, but they have also announced that the 'new music files' will be better quality -- at 256kbps. I'll be honest with you, most people won't notice the change in sound. It's only those who 'care enough' about the sound, that will actually significantly *hear* the difference.

They are also asking us to pay for these privileges -- songs will be $1.29 a pop, as oppose to the usual $0.79.

I for one have never really been an Apple fan -- and I may be in the minority here. The thought of being totally restricted to the Ipod really does my head in. It's silly when you think about it... why pay for music that you can ONLY listen to on your Ipod? Makes no sense. Of course, things are different now. Who knows, I might consider the Ipod now that they've finally woken up.

The main thing that bugs me is that Apple work by an audio format AAC. And although some non-Ipod players can handle non-protected AAC, it's hardly in the same league as an mp3 file -- which ten times more universally accepted.

What do you think about all this? Are you a ipod user? Are you happier that this change has been embraced by EMI? What about all the file sharing that's going on right now.... is it only a matter of time before music doesn't have a value anyway? Are we headed that way? I would love to know your thoughts.....

Post a comment here on the blog

Shamir

[formally Calvin]