Twenty years without a stereo seemed like long enough. With the empty nest, we needed something other than barking to listen to, so I set us up with a new sound system. Pretty much all the music we have has been ripped from CD's onto the computer so we can listen using an iPod. Since we have a wireless network set up in the house, I got a wireless device that lets us play all that music from a real set of speakers. It also plays Internet radio, and we can play Pandora stations on it as well. Since we didn't have a stereo, I had to get an amplifier and a set of speakers. A few years back when we last got struck with stereo envy, we came very close to buying one of those players that holds hundreds of CD's. Today that would be like having a dinosaur in your living room. Amazing how that has all changed.
As long as I'm on the subject, let me expound on the evil of Digital Rights Management (DRM). Remember your VCR and the movie industry's efforts to keep people from being able to record movies? Ah, those were the good old days, when the entertainment industry actually was forced by the courts and established copyright law to allow personal use copying. Now we have the wonders of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that makes it a crime to make copies of online works. I'm as big a fan of paying for music as the next guy, and we have paid for hundreds of CD's at music stores and hundreds of 99-cent songs off of iTunes. Still, Apple embeds DRM protections into each song as part of the Recording Industry Association of America's attempt to prevent people from stealing things and circumventing their stranglehold on who-becomes-big in the music world. As a result, since I didn't buy my new little wireless box from Apple, I can't listen to any of the damned songs I bought and paid for on iTunes. For a while there, it looked like the French were going to force Apple's hand on this stupidity, but then they backed down. Now I will wait for hackers to defeat the encryption so I can use what I bought. Moral of the story: DRM and the DMCA are evil, and the RIAA should wake up and embrace the new world's way of music distribution.
2 comments:
Is it RIAA or Apple? I've never owned an Apple Computer, nor an iPod (I use an off-brand mp3 player), but I've bought songs off of iTunes, and they always played fine on my eclectic set of devices. Maybe if you buy on iTunes for iPod, you get locked into their "rights" system at that point ... have you talked to Apple about it? Shouldn't they be able to supply you with an encryption release key?
I can't get a car key made at the harware store that'll run my car anymore nowadays, but the mfr can send me one....
It is both. I'm sure Apple would not have the distribution rights they have without bowing to the RIAA's desires. In any case, the behavior of Apple to not cooperate with competitors in this space and using the DRM as a competitive tool is rather well documented and a subject of heated reaction from a lot of places.
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