Music – Page 49 – Digital-Lifestyles

Music Label Sells DRM-Free Music

Warp records have been a major force in electronic music for fifteen years (Band such as Aphex Twin, Autechre and Squarepusher) and are equally know for their Internet advances, being early converts to the Web when it was just beginning. The UK company today they launched a service called Bleep that sells all of their musical back catalog online – but the product their customer recieves is substancially different from the myriad of MeToo music services, it is a unprotected, high quality MP3. Going against the tide of the major record companies, Warp, through Bleep, have decided to not use Digital Right Management (DRM), in their words

“Bleep music has no DRM or copy protection built in. We believe that most people like to be treated as customers and not potential criminals.”

Pricing is slightly higher than the now-standard 99c. With individual tracks at 99 UK pence (~$1.80, ~€1.40) and albums at £6.99 (~$12.70, ~€10) or less. Payment can be made using PayPal, credit cards or, for UK users, premium rate SMS. Refreshingly reasonably after the bandwidth charges and Bleep running costs are subtracted, the artist gets half of the album or track price.

The tracks have been encoded at a slightly higher bitrate than Apple’s offering, averaging 205k vs 192k and are expected to be excellent through the use of the LAME (LAME Ain’t an MP3 Encoder), the open source and highly-rated encoding software taking advantage of the Variable Bit Rate (VBR).

We are impressed with the thinking and technology behind Bleep and will be writing a review of it on Friday.

Bleep, by Warp records

LAME

Apple Launch iPod Mini

The rumours of the mini-iPod have been proven as true with Steve Jobs announcing a small version of the iPod, the iPod mini at Macworld yesterday.

The smaller-than-current-iPod device will have an anodised aluminium body available in five colours; silver, gold, pink, blue or green and be capable of holding 1,000 128-Kbps AAC encoding, CD-quality songs on its tiny hard drive. It will also only weigh 3.6 ounces (102 mg).

The iPod mini runs the same software as current iPods, so no functionality is lost, despite its slight smaller backlight LCD screen (1.67 inch vs 2-inch and 138-by-110-pixel resolution, 0.22-mm dot pitch vs 160-by-128-pixel resolution, 0.24-mm dot pitch). In a further refinement to the design, the four buttons have been integrated into the touch wheel – Apple labels it Click Wheel.

Recharging times will be the same as the current model, but the mini will be able to pull its power from either the FireWire or USB 2.0 cable.

It will be available in the US in February and worldwide in April with a suggested selling price of $249 in the US and a UK price of £199 (inc VAT).

Apple also announced they have sold two million iPods and by way of a celebration they also announced that they will be upgrading the smallest capacity from 10Gb to 15Gb without increasing the price.

Apple iPod & iPod mini specs

PSX Spec Downgraded but Still Sells Out

Following the recent launch of Sony’s PSX, which combines the functions of a PlayStation 2, PVR and DVD burner (full details), there have been a number of dissenting voices over the reduced specification of the released product. Despite this, the first shipment to shops is reported to have nearly sold out on launch day, with long queues on the day of its release. The size of the initial shipment has not been disclosed. A spokesperson for Sony added that they plan to ship one million PSX systems by the end of 2004.

Quite a number of what would appear to be vital functions and features of the PSX have been downgraded or removed, which Sony say is to time pressures in hitting an xmas released date. The most surprising omission is of a functioning Ethernet port, clearly vital for accessing online content and sharing content between rooms in a household.

A number of formats will not initially be supported. MP3 playback will be missing, but Sony’s copy-protected ATRAC will be and TIFF and GIF graphics formats, although JPEG will continue to be supported. Two disk formats, CD-R and DVD+RW have also been dropped. The speed of the DVD recording has been halved from x24 to x12 which should have too much of an impact.

Financial analysts have been damning in their views of the changes with Kazumasa Kubota of Okasan Securities has described the PSX as a “publicity stunt”, while Kazuya Yamamoto of UFJ Tsubasa has claimed that “lowering the specifications of the PSX hurt Sony’s image”.

We feel the removals have been more about anti-piracy than a need to “rush” the release and are probably victims of the long-running struggle between Sony’s content and CE division.

Sony PSX site

Apple Hits 25m Song Downloads

Further success for Apple have been announced as they declare they have now sold 25 million downloaded song through their iTunes music store, which is currently only operating in America. At this rate they are selling at an average of 1.5 million downloads a month.

Appropriately for this time of year the 25th million track was “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” by Frank Sinatra.

One of the new features introduced into iTunes 2.0 was the ability to purchase online gift certificates for others and to give download allowances for children, who do not have their own credit cards. Over $1 million dollars (~€812,420, ~£572,600) worth of these, vary between $20-$200, have been sold since October.

This announcement comes on the heals of US Time magazine naming iTunes Music Store as the Invention of 2003.

Apple iTunes

Time – Invention of 2003

Canada OK’s P2P Music Downloads

The Copyright Board of Canada has decided that the downloading of music for personal user from peer-to-peer networks is legal, but uploading files to them is not. Canada’s copyright law allow making a copy for personal use and does not address the source of that copy or whether the original has to be an authorised or non-infringing version.

Clearly the recording industry does not like or agree with the opinion. Richard Pfohl, general counsel for the Canadian Recording Industry Association said, “This is the opinion of the Copyright Board, but Canadian courts will decide this issue.”

Currently Canadians, and a number of other countries, pay a levy on recordable media; audio tapes (29¢C, ~$0.22, ~€0.18, ~£0.13), MiniDisc (77¢C, ~$0.59, ~€0.48, ~£0.34) and blank data (21¢C, ~$0.16, ~€0.13, ~£0.09) and audio CDs (77¢C, ~$0.59, ~€0.48, ~£0.34). Non-removable memory permanently embedded in MP3 players have now been added to this list, with C$2 (~$1.52, ~€1.24, ~£0.87) up to 1Gb of data, C$15 (~$11.41, ~€9.27, ~£6.54) for between 1Gb – 10Gb and C$25 (~$19.02, ~€15.45, ~£10.89) above 10Gb.

Interestingly, Digital Audio Tape (DAT), micro-cassettes, rewritable DVDs, removable memory cards (such as SmartMedia, CompactFlash and Secure Digital Memory cards) and removable micro hard drives are not currently covered.

The levies will be collected from the manufacturers and distributed to music companies and rights holders via the Canadian Private Copying Collective, a non-profit agency. It is expected that the levies will be passed on to the consumer.

Canadian Private Copying Collective

Coke To Sell Music Online in the UK

Soft Drinks company, Coca Cola, will be launching a pay-for legal music download service in the UK in January 2004. They are teaming up with OD2, who provide the technology, and will be offering more than a quarter of a million of tracks.

It is thought that this will be a major boost to the profile of downloadable music given their recent controversial deal to sponsor the BBC’s Top Of The Pops TV pop show and the BBC Radio 1’s weekly top 40 countdown show. Given the target of these shows it is strange that the system will only be usable by people over 18, as a credit card is needed to purchase tracks.

A spokesperson for HMV, high street music sellers, was clearly deluded in their comments, “From a retailer’s point of view, we feel confident that people will stick to established retailers that have a lot of experience in the area. They can offer expertise and depth of knowledge and we feel the vast majority of record buyers would want to continue buying from these sources,” but they would say that wouldn’t they.

MyCokeMusic.com

Mobile Phone Ringtones Reach Realism

News reaches us that Oki Electric Industry have launched a new range of chips for mobile phones that plays 64 polyphonies simultaneously with eight octaves. If you are slightly lost with this, let us translate; a mobile phone equipped with one of these will be able to have a ringtone capable of playing music with up to 64 musical notes sounding at once, from a range of notes far greater than the human voice (as high as five octave is rare).

This is the third generation of Oki’s Swing’nRinger sound generators and doubles the number of notes that can play simultaneously. As with previous generations ships they will be programmable using MIDI files. Samples will be shipping from December this year and volume shipping will start in March 2004

It is interesting that the technology appears to be catching up with the views of the industry. In our discussions with people taking music in to the digital world, they have been muttering about the next stage in ringtones being complete music track singles being used as ringtones. This technology will bring the rendition of the music to a more familiar sound.

Oki Swing’nRinger Press release

Thomson Announce Portable Multimedia Player

Giant media group, Thomson, has announced the launch of a portable multimedia player that has 20Gb of hard drive storage and a built in colour screen which plays videos, show photographs and plays music. Sold in two guises, Europe (THOMSON LYRA Audio/Video Jukebox PDP 2860 – €749, ~£520) and USA (RCA RD2780 – $499.99), it will play back both MPEG-1 & MPEG-4 video and mp3, Windows Media Audio. It can also be upgraded to mp3PRO.

Depending on the compression used, Thomson claim the unit can hold up to eighty hours of video, which can either be played on its own screen (3.5-inch Thin Film Transistor (TFT) LCD ) or displayed on a television set using analog composite leads. Alternatively the unit can either be used as portable computer storage, store up to 5,000 music tracks or 100,000 JPEG images. Images can be organized into slideshows to accompany the playback of music.

The content can either loaded via a computer (PC or Mac), using a USB 2.0 connection, or the unit can either record video; using it built in MPEG-4 encoder, and audio directly. When the unit encodes video content, forty hours of content can be stored.

Battery life is reported to last up to twelve hours when playing music but only four when playing back video.

The unit is pretty compact (5.31″ x 3.15″ x 1.06″, 13.5cm x 8.00cm x 2.70cm) and light (10.5 ounces, under 300g) and we suspect will seduce many enough to add it to their xmas list.

RCA RD2780

First European “Over the Air” Music Download Service Launched

mm02, UK cellular provider, have launched the first European “over the air” music download service.

To use the service, prospective customers must buy a separate music player, the “O2 Digital Music Player” (O2 DMP), which connects to the online service through their mobile phone, either via an Infra-red port or a short cable. Once connected via GPRS, they are able to browse the selection of music, preview tracks and then purchase them. Previews are not charged for and take around 20 seconds to start to play, but when a track is bought, it is downloaded to the device, which takes around 3.5 minutes, the customer will be charged £1.50 (~$2.55, ~€2.15). While it does not look like good value when compared with what is the current industry standard of 99c, mm02’s Kent Thexton claimed the price “fantastic value for money, for less than the cost of most ring-tones customers can purchase and own an entire chart track”.

Siemens designed the DMP on behalf of mm02 and will also run the DRM-protected content aggregation and platform hosting.

The music is encoded using a CODEC called aacPlus, a combination of MPEG AAC and Coding Technologies’ SBR (Spectral Band Replication) technology developed by the German company, Coding Technologies. They claim the compression can reduce the size of audio files by up to half. Given the limited bandwidth available on cellular networks, it is important that the files are as small as possible.

A wide range of handsets are compatible with the service, meaning that at launch, more than 1.2 million O2 customers can access this service.

The music content is being supplied by BMG, Universal, AIM and Warner Music and it is hoped that up to 100,000 tracks will become available.

Once downloaded, the music is stored on a 64MB SD Memory Card that slots into the device. Tracks can be played back on the O2 DMP or transferred to a PC using the Memory Card but will remain locked with their DRM. The DMP can also play back MP3’s

mm02 are hoping for a good take up as in a previous trial of 300 UK and German customers, an average of five tracks per user per week were downloaded.

mm02

Coding Technologies – aacPlus

BT to Sell Content Through Street-located Kiosks

BT have joined up with a partner, Ringtones Online, to offer ringtones, graphics and games for mobile phones. Potential customers will be able to freely browse a dedicated website on the street using the BT Internet Kiosks, then select, preview and purchase their choices. Payment can either be by inserting cash directly into the machine or electronically using credit card, text or by calling a premium rate phone number. Customer will pay £2 for the content, expect for games, which will be £4.50. By offering them from the street they are hoping to encourage the impulse purchasing.

BT has been spending lots of money installing these electronic kiosks in to high street around the UK. Providing a small-form colour screen, trackball and a keyboard, the blue-coloured phoneboxes, which are unusual in the UK, have so far reached over 1,400, with over 90% of them having broadband access.

They see them as a way to offering Internet-based services and products to people who don’t have Internet access at home or at work.

We think this is an interesting distribution point that has been gradually adding services, both physical, such DVD rental via lastminute.com and electronic, such as photo & video services, enabling friends to send more animated messages.

BT Internet kiosk