Steve Speak

Yes my friends, the time has come to be vigilant for low flying pigs.

Why you ask? Well listen closely… very closely.. cause I’m only going to say this once. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer said something that I actually agree with. Gasp! Ekk! Did I really just say that?

Now, in case you haven’t been following along, it is really no secret that I don’t have a lot of love for Microsoft. Not only have they laid waste to the technology industry for decades now, but they have some (P.C. mode) kinda goofy (/P.C. mode) characters heading the company up. One of these would be ‘monkey boy’ Steve Ballmer. Think I’m being too harsh? You be the judge:

http://www.ntk.net/media/dancemonkeyboy.mpg

Anyway… I’m reading the tech headlines, as I typically do, and I run across this article that frankly, I can’t disagree with to any great extent.

http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/72412

What is going on here. First the the iPod packaging experiment leaks out of M$. Then, Steve Ballmer is saying things that actually make some sense? Things are getting scary in Redmond.

He recognizes that the keyboard and mouse aren’t going to go away, though other input methods will advance. I have to give him a lot of credit for admitting this, especially after the fuss that was made over Origami. (see my previous blog)

He also talks about Google’s key not being the search engine, but the business model. Who can argue with that? You have to make a decision between good and evil at some point. I’m glad he recognizes this. (See my friend Mark’s great article on this topic.)

But, what really caught my attention, is what he said about the future of the iPod. It’s no secret that Ballmer is more than just a bit jealous of the success of the iPod. In a March 29, 2006 article in Fortune magazine, when asked if he used an iPod, he said, “No, I do not. Nor do my children. My children–in many dimensions they’re as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I’ve got my kids brainwashed: You don’t use Google, and you don’t use an iPod.”

The key in the current article, however, is that he sees something that Apple might want to wake up to REAL quick. Ballmer said, “Portable music is not limited to iPods.” So far, Apple’s strategy seems to be in keeping the music limited to the hardware. I, along with Ballmer, think this trend isn’t going to last all that much longer. The problem isn’t really the iPod itself, but how the music is locked to it.

For example, other than using up some gift certificates I was given at the iTunes Music Store, I won’t buy more music there. I love the experience. I love the convenience. I love technology in general. I love the iPod! But sooner or later people will wake up to the reality of what they are being sold. Unlike the normal CD in the store, you get a lower quality version that is locked to the hardware Apple (or the music industry) will allow you to play it on.

I put a nice car stereo in my Miata. It can play MP3 and AAC tracks. Can it play what I buy from the iTunes Music Store? Nope… not without a bunch of quality loss. Up until a few months back, I was able to use a great program called JHymn to free my purchases to play on my car stereo. But, with iTunes v6 the party is over. What I buy is once again locked to my computer. Sorry, but that is not good enough for me… especially at the 99 cents per track price. If it were 25 to 50 cents… I might be interested in a lower quality version. But at full price, I’ll just buy the CDs.

But, I can’t just blame Apple here. It really is the fault of the music industry, as well as a society seriously lacking morals. These two forces are locked in an opposing battle, and it is us honest consumers who get burned. Some want to steal and distribute the music while the music industry doesn’t have the ability (or wherewithal) to catch the real offenders. So, we end up with the sad world of DRM. And, if you think any of this is bad… I think you ain’t seen nothing yet. Wait a couple years when DRM invades just about every facet of your interaction with TV, movies, music, and phone. It might be enough to make us just want to ‘pull the technology plug’, so to speak.

AP writer Liz Austin reports on Thursday that Sony is being sued by the Texas Attorney General and a California-based digital rights group over their latest botch of an attempt at DRM (Digital Rights Management). I’m laughing by butt off on this one, but it is not because I’m some music stealing kid going, “Score another win for the pirates DUDE!” There is a much more important consequence to this battle…. if I have your curiosity peaked… read on.

You can read all about the threatened lawsuit at:
Texas Sues Sony BMG Over Anti-Piracy Software

To summarize, it is just one more desperate attempt by the media companies to control how the product is used. Sony put an auto-install program on the CD which was to limit the number of times the CD could be copied. But, it backfired for a couple of reasons. First, the system was flawed such that it allowed hackers to then hack the system it was installed on… DOH! Then, to make things even more exciting, the ‘fix’ they distributed did the same… DOH! DOH!. The groups suing Sony are using anti-’spy ware’ laws to go after them. I think it is a great and legitimate use of such a law. Go Texas!!!

So why am I laughing? I guess it is out of sheer joy at the negative publicity Sony is getting over this one. It is one thing to have to ‘make a deal with the devil’, so to speak, as Apple had to do to pioneer on-line music sales. But, it is quite another to cross that line into destroying someone’s property (even if they have done nothing illegal) in an attempt to protect your own.

While I respect the position of the DRM folks that something must be done to combat the rampant theft that is taking place, this is certainly not the way to do it. Unfortunately, the industry seems to be taking the approach of hurting their entire client base, rather than going after those who are guilty of the crime. If they keep this up, they might just lose their customers. Hopefully this one will wake the industry up a bit.

Why am I so passionate about this one? Well, for one, I LOVE music. I played in band through my school years. I started buying CDs over 20 years ago now. I haven’t really counted, but I would guess I have 500 to 600 CDs. So, at an average of $12 a pop, that’s like $6000 to $7000 (yes, there was a day kiddies when you could buy CDs for $10 to $12). You might think Sony would be interested in keeping me as a customer (not including having 2 Sony car stereos, a Sony TV, etc. over the years). I play guitar and keyboard, and have played in bands (I only wish well enough to go pro).

However, my music buying has slowed down. I’m just too busy these days to hang out at the record stores. However, Apple changed all that. I LOVE the iTunes Music Store. Yet, I have purchased under 50 songs from there so far, and there is a reason why. It’s the DRM. To put it simply…

I want to be able to use the music I buy, when and where I want!

I don’t have a pirated music track that I know of at all… zip, zero! I have no problem buying my music as all as the above might indicate. (And, yes, I spent a large percentage of my very hard earned couple dollars an hour when I was a kid buying my music… so please, no I’m a poor kid excuses). But I just have not become comfortable at this point investing money in music which I might not be able to play in a few years if technology takes a turn… or that I can’t play where and how I want.

I recently installed new Kenwood car stereo in my Miata. It has the ability to play MP3 and AAC music tracks. However, it can’t play the AAC files from iTunes Music Store, because they are protected by Apple’s DRM. This basically sucks! Sure, I can use an iPod (I have one which I’ll be selling soon), but at every turn down the road, I’ll have to watch what I do. To play them to our home stereo, I can’t buy just any receiver that can accept AAC files… I have to use an Airport Express with AirTunes. So, Apple has been doing well to be sure I can do ‘most’ of the things I want, IF I spend some serious cash buying more products from them… how convenient.

There is a ‘work-around’ sort of. You can try and strip the DRM using a tool such as JHymn. It has worked well so far in its ability to strip the DRM off my protected-AAC files, so they become just normal AAC files. I can then use them in any device that plays AAC.

http://hymn-project.org/jhymndoc/

This is a really wonderful effort to help us folks that just want to use the music we have bought. But, Apple keeps breaking this thing with new iTunes releases (6.0 broke it again, with no fix yet). I’m not sure if Apple is doing that purposely or not (or maybe under pressure from the music industry to keep their licensing ability), but either way, I don’t like it. At this point, I can’t upgrade iTunes now, and I’m thinking about not buying more music from them.

One can also burn the files to a CD, then import them back to iTunes as MP3 files. However, the AAC files have already lost quality. By converting to MP3, I lose even more off a format that is ‘just’ barely good enough in the first place. I’m just not willing to go that route.

My solution… find a legal way to really solve the problem. Auto manufacturers don’t make the car’s axle break when it goes over 55 MPH… maybe someone uses that car to legally race at SCCA events on the weekend, or they live where the speed limit is 70 MPH. Instead, a police force catches speeders from time to time and keeps the general society in check on the speed limits. Why not do the same in this case. Get the legal ability to track those distributing files illegally, and then crack down. Maybe if they could get good at tracking, they could get warrants, come to the place where the kid is sharing out a ton of tunes, and confiscate the computer equipment… donate it to an organization that gives computers to underprivileged kids. That might be the best fix… hurt those who are the actual thieves in a way that hurts most.

Bottom line, leave the rest of us who buy our music to enjoy it the way we want.

This topic, as the title states is somewhat of a rabbit track from what I was going to post. I WAS going to post the details of my stereo install this weekend in my Miata. I’m still going to do this, but it might take a while. To give you some idea how this all went, I’m debating between “Frankenstein Stereo Install” and “Stereo Install Nightmare on Steve Street”. I’m sure I’ll come up with something better when I write it, but you get the idea…

Well, as an aside, when I got my stereo, I started to browse the manual, and I made some interesting discoveries. My stereo reads v1.x ID3 tags, and my titles weren’t showing up. I soon learned that iTunes defaults to v2.2. Interesting… I didn’t even know what a ID3 tag was, let alone the differences between versions. I was about to find out.

ID3 tags are the embedded information in your MP3 files which give various information, such as the track title, artist, album, genre, etc. I knew this info was there, but not much about it. Basically, v1.x tags are put at the end of the MP3 data, and are delimited by the number of characters per field. The fields are also very limited in length, most to 30 characters (not enough for even all your track titles, let alone other information.) Also, there are a lot less fields available. The advantage to putting them at the end, is they are easy to change. The disadvantage is that you have to read in the entire file to see them.

Well, v2.x came along an fixed much of this. They are prepended to the front of the file, and are stored in 256 byte ‘frames’. Apple smartly pads this area of the MP3, so they can change information without re-writing the whole file. This kind of takes the best advantage of v1.x, but at the beginning of the file, so they are quickly accessed when browsing files.

If you want to see the tags… you can actually open an MP3 in your text editor… look at the start or end, and you should see some familiar info. You can read all the gooey details about this at:

http://www.dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/id3tags00.php

I started to wonder, sweat, and worry…. will my newly purchased stereo even be able to show the track names now? I found information out there about ID3 tag editors, so I guess I could go through thousands of songs and edit them to v1.x… ekk! Then I found that iTunes has this nice feature under Advanced – - Convert ID3 Tags…. YAY! The only problem with this is that in many of my MP3s I have a lot more information stored in them (I record a lot of Internet radio programs, and often store notes about the show content in the notes field… also a lot of my tracks have long titles.) If I converted them to v1.x, my data got chopped off, or erased.

Then I started wondering…. what happens if BOTH tags are present? Since an MP3 file seems to work equally well with the appended info, or prepended info…. why couldn’t their be both? I searched and searched… and really couldn’t find info on this. One article said something about append/prepend when talking about the specs… so I started to DL tag editors, hoping I’d find a way.

I stuck gold!!! I found two pretty nice apps, which actually do a lot more. But both can be set to go through your libraries of MP3s and convert versions of tags, as well as put BOTH! Whoo hoo!

MP3 ID3X
http://www.three-2-one.de/321apps/main/global/index1.htm

MP3 Rage
http://www.chaoticsoftware.com/ProductPages/MP3Rage.html

I picked the later one… not because of its ‘totally awesome’ skull logo (not sure what is up with that… maybe I need to read about its history or something), but because it does SO many other things too.

It seems to work quite well… it went through my entire music collection in about 10 minutes or so, and now I have v2.3 AND v1.1 ID3 tags on my MP3s.

Problem solved for now! Now back to lamenting and resting from my VERY involved stereo install process…