Category: Content

Content

Find Legal Free Music Easily

Funnily enough, just last week I was looking for some free music just for the hell of it – and I soon discovered that locating gratis tunes that are also legal tunes, is really not that easy.

Using the the popular search engines will provide you with plenty of links – but very little music, and a lot of undesirable stuff too. Enter CNET’s new service: music.download.com.

The site is incredibly easy to use – registration is not required, so you can simply browse to the music you think you might fancy and download it straight away. Within seconds I had downloaded and installed to my iPod some dreadful bit of ambient noodling that was obviously recorded by a bunch of deaf chimps after they’d be smashed in the face with hammers. The quality of many of the offerings is extremely good.

The site has an option for music creators to upload and comment on their tunes and thus should create a community around free content – a feedback function to artists is currently missing, but CNET hope to add more functionality, and get the recommendation engine going, soon. It is expected the archive to grow quickly, but is already quite expansive considering they’ve only been acquiring tracks for a couple of months.

Scott Arpajian, senior vice president of CNET Download.com said “While commercial music services have proliferated, we are the first large-scale provider to offer free music downloads in a discovery-focused environment, saving music fans valuable time in finding tunes that match their tastes. Our goal is to provide music fans free digital fuel for their devices, and exposure to original artists and songs that can become their new favourites.”

The new CNET site is another thorn in the side of the major labels – for the time being anyway, until they come up with a way of either competing with it or crippling it.

CNET bought the MP3.com domain name last year, but sadly the archive of tracks hosted by the site was destroyed as Vivendi Universal claimed it did not fit with any of their business initiatives.

On a related note, the charity Warchild have a music site, linked below, that allows subscribers to download music whilst donating to the organisation.

CNET Music Download.com

All-new MP3.com

Warchild Music

Disney License Soundtracks to iTunes

Disney have licensed popular soundtracks to Apple’s iTunes service – but they’ll only be exclusively available there until the end of September. Short licensing deals are a popular tactic with online music retailers: they allow flexibility in an evolving market, allow labels to pick and chose the most popular download service and permit licensors to distribute music from their own stores once the agreement has expired.

Amongst the music that will be available will be the soundtracks from Disney classics such as The Lion King, Snow White and the Little Mermaid. More recent films will also feature with music from hits like Toy Story and Finding Nemo.

Apart from this compelling content being licensed to a download service for the first time, the deal is interesting because of Apple’s connection with Disney: Steve Jobs runs iTunes and Pixar, and Pixar recently broke off their deal with Disney.

Jobs said in a statement “Now iTunes users can add these timeless Disney songs to their music libraries and enjoy them wherever they go with their iPods.”

Apple on the news

Picsel – Better Web Browsing on Mobile Phones

Browsing the web on a mobile phone is still a less than satisfying experience – and that’s without taking connection speeds into account. Mobile phone browsers have always been simpler, less featured affairs due to memory and processor limitations. Consequently phone users are missing out on a lot of the internet: many site architects don’t bother testing with mobile browsers, or can’t be bothered writing for them. We can’t blame them either – often the browsers themselves are inconsistent, or writing for them is unimaginably painful. We wrote a WAP application a couple of years ago and we’re sure it’s responsible for some of the bad dreams we have still.

Picsel Technologies have a browser that uses their ePAGE multi-media content engine to give phone users a better experience on the web, without site providers having to write special portals for phones.

Instead of staring at tiny text on a page, the Picsel browser allows users to zoom in on any content and pan it about with Live Pan and Zoom. LPZ is compatible with a range of input methods, so you’ll be able to use it with a stylus or phone joystick.

The browser will also resize content to fit the width of the screen, avoiding all that tedious back and forth scrolling, just because someone doesn’t know how to properly set table widths in Dreamweaver. File filters for Microsoft Word and Adobe’s PDF are welcome additions, and should ensure that you can read the majority of things you get sent at the last minute for reading on the train to your meetings.

The first phone to feature the browser is Motorola’s A768 smartphone. The A768 is based on Linux, but Picsel will also be providing their browser for Motorola’s MPX smartphone which is based on Microsoft Windows Mobile.

How the browser works Picsel’s information sheet

Stream Ripping Gains Popularity

We never did it of course, but many people remember sitting by their cassette radio as a child, waiting to tape favourite songs off the charts to a fresh C90. Stream ripping is basically a 2004 remix of that old Sunday evening tradition, and it’s providing music sharers with a “new” way to acquire content – and it’s untraceable.

Stream ripping applications allow users to capture multiple streams all day, amounting to several thousand songs. In fact, one program, StationRipper will record 300 streams simultaneously and make a separate MP3 for every song played. It will even skip broadcast tracks that you’ve already recorded.

We tried StationRipper this morning as a bit of reaseach and found it almost unbelievably easy to use. It works best with Shoutcast, but you can access any radio station stream you have a URL for.

One feature that particularly impressed us was the ability to buy whatever music was being played in a stream – simply click on the station and then the buy button: StreamRipper takes the track details to Amazon and presents you with the album featuring the track, if it’s found.

Greg Ratajik wrote StationRipper after he saw the limitations in other programs like StreamRipper32, and estimates that the program has been downloaded over 350,000 times.

Whilst not quite as user friendly as many P2P packages, and with many of the problems associated with recording traditional radio stations (lower broadcast quality, DJs prattling over the top of music), programs like StationRipper present a convenient way of time-shifting internet radio broadcasts.

Acquiring music from ripping radio streams is untraceable, unlike logging onto P2P networks and downloading tracks. The radio station will have a listener’s IP number, but since users aren’t required to log into most stations, it’s extremely difficulty to ID them. Besides, they have no way of telling if someone is listening to a stream or archiving it.

But is it legal? Stream ripping software has lots of non-infringing uses, so it looks like the programs have nothing to fear … yet. It’s really up to what the user then does with the music – if they are using it as a way to acquire music without paying, or then go onto to share streams or tracks that they have ripped, then that’s illegal.

Stream ripping applications go to further demonstrate that if labels insist on crippling music with restrictive and untrusting DRM, then inventive consumers will find ways to defeat it until they get a fairer system.

StationRipper

Shoutcast

Police Seize 200 Computers in Anti-Piracy Raid

Law enforcement agencies in 11 countries have seized 200 computers in raids on piracy networks around the world. No arrests have been made yet, but charges are expected to be brought.

The 120 synchronised raids were targeted at illegal operations in 27 US states and also in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden and the UK. The raided groups are suspected of distributing games and films as “warez”. The US Customs Department estimated (and we suspect this is a real finger in the air guess) that the 100 participants identified were responsible for 95% of all pirated material online. We think that is highly unlikely.

The raids, part of Operation Fastlink, were described by US Attorney General John Ashcroft as “the most far-reaching and aggressive enforcement action ever” against online piracy. Amongst the equipment seized were 30 file servers. Looks like someone won’t be downloading that copy of Half Life 2 they were hoping to.

John Malcolm, chief of antipiracy operations for the Motion Picture Association told the Associated Press: “Today is a good day for creative artists. Without copyright protection and enforcement, piracy will dramatically and deleteriously impact the future of the American film industry.”

ZDNet on the story

Napster Hits Problems as European iTunes Launch Confirmed

Napster has run into licensing problems as it prepares its UK launch – with only four months to go. It would appear that the fragmented nature of Europe’s music labels, licensing bodies and royalty collection services are causing headaches for the new music services.

Negotiations are apparently heading back on track in the UK, but are only in preliminary stages in Europe.

Former Napster investors Bertelsmann AG will be in court in San Francisco next week where music labels are accusing the media giant of keeping the download service operational because of its investment in 2000.

Bertelsmann invested US$90 million (€76 million) in Napster in 2000, hoping to turn the service into the legal music site it is now. Now Universal Music and the EMI Group are claiming the $90 million investment cost them approximately $17 billion (€14.3 billion) in lost revenue because of illegal downloads.

Not a bad return on an investment, really.

Reuters

Napster – still Coming Soon

CyWorld – A Virtual World with 6 Million Inhabitants

Six million virtual inhabitants? No, it’s not Everquest, it’s not Star Wars Galaxies and sadly it’s not EVE – Cyworld is a Korean virtual community, and the fastest growing site in the country.The site has proven so popular that Park Geun-hee, the daughter of former president Park Chung-hee caused a stir last month by creating her own Cyworld site with pictures of her hobbies and video of her playing the piano. “I wanted to find a way to show young people, especially young girls, who I really am”, she later explained to the press.

Cyworld was founded in 2001 and toodled along for a few years with a number of keen fans, but its popularity exploded when SK Telecom bought it. SKT put marketing Won behind it and it now has 13% of Korea’s 47.6 million inhabitants as members. Korea has long been a key part of the connected world – nearly 80% of Koreans subscribe to broadband internet services, spending an average of 13.5 hours per week.

Subscribers to Cyworld, meet, decorate their homes, wander about a bit, listen to music, accessorise and invite friends over for parties – just what young trendy avatars like to do. Graphics are stylish, but simple and colourful isometric drawings – none of the 3D polygon look that has blighted many attempts at virtual worlds in the past. Think eBoy meets meets MacPaint.

So, apart from subscription costs, what’s the revenue stream? Cyworld’s currency is the Acorn – Acorns are used to buy music for your virtual gatherings, furniture and accessories to keep you at the height of avatar fashion. Here’s another incredible fact: about 100 million Won worth (€72,000, US$85,000) are sold to subscribers every day. That’s about €26.3 million (USD$31 million) worth of play money sold every year.

With 30,000 new members signing up every day, there’s obviously a lot of money to be made in virtual worlds. Could a site like Cyworld be this popular in the West? And who would design it?

One hundred million Won worth of Acorns sold every day.

Cyworld’s home page (Korean)

RIAA Drops “Clean Slate”

The Recording Industry of America has dropped their Clean Slate programme, it emerged after a California man challenged the initiative in court.

“As public awareness about the illegality of unauthorized copying and distribution of music files over peer-to-peer computing has dramatically increased since the inception of the program, the RIAA has concluded that the programme is no longer necessary or appropriate, and has voluntarily withdrawn it,” stated the RIAA attorney.

Clean Slate was an initiative which encouraged people who had uploaded and shared music files to sign up and acknowledge in writing that they had broken the law. Individuals then promised that they had removed all illegal music files from their computers, and in exchange the RIAA pledged not to sue them when it started taking legal action against file swappers.

Only 1,108 people have signed up for the programme since in was launched in September 2003, most of them in the first few weeks.

Eric Parke challenged the Clean Slate programme in court, and accused the RIAA of fraudulent business practices. Clean Slate was criticised from its début as offering limited protection: it never promised any sort of guarantee if a body other than the RIAA, say for example a record label, decided to prosecute someone on its handy list of offenders.

When Parke took the RIAA to court over the programme, they requested that the case be dismissed, as Clean Slate had been quietly dropped. Nice of them to tell everyone.

The terms of Clean Slate

Nintendo: Cartoons for the GBA

For US$20 (€) you’ll soon be able to buy a GBA cartridge containing up to 45 minutes of high-quality (well, for a 240 x160 pixel screen anyway) video and animation. Nintendo are addressing an issue that they’ve long had with their games consoles: kids keep switching them off and watching television. Admittedly, they tend to watch Nintendo cartoons, but then that might expose them to adverts for other companies’ products.

So, Nintendo have brought the cartoons to their GameBoy Advance in the form of cartridges containing between two and four episodes of popular cartoons. First up will be a selection of episodes from the Pokémon franchise, followed by other titles from other series: SpongeBob SquarePants, The Fairly Oddparents, Dora the Explorer and Codename: Kids Next Door, and Sonic X.

“Even by the remarkable standards of product evolution that have characterized the Game Boy franchise, this is a landmark event,” says George Harrison, Nintendo of America’s senior vice president of marketing and corporate communications, said in a statement. “Pokémon is part of the first step in revolutionizing the nature of portable video entertainment, with eventual reach targeting all demographics.”

This is a remarkably similar idea to the ZVue player we talked about a few months ago – though since Nintendo has sold more than 20 million GBA players in the USA alone, the Zvue’s prospects look somewhat diminished.

Nintendo

Print Your Own Games

Nintendo’s eReader, an optical card reader developed by Olympus using their “Dot Code” technology, is a small add-on for GBA users. Players can scan (hideously overpriced) trading cards into their GBA to play games and unlock extras. Each card has a dot code printed on it that stores a couple of kilobytes of code – that code can be an emulation of an early Game and Watch title, or it can even be a smart new umbrella for your Animal Crossing character.

Cards are the same shape and size as standard playing cards (though without the naked ladies on the back) and are available in packs of five or so based on popular Nintendo franchises: Animal Crossing and Pokémon unlock or upload new aspects to the games, or you can even upload the classic Donkey Kong 3 to your GameBoy Advance.

The dot codes use Reed Solomon error correction and now that the scheme has been worked out, homebrew coders can finally write their own games for easy distribution to GBA owners. Tim Schuerewegen cracked the code and is hosting an original game – BombSweeper. Coders interested in writing for the GBA can even use GNU GCC to compile code – plus the API for the GameBoy Advance is very well documented.

The eReader has been modestly successful, but never set the world alight. In fact, support for it seems to have been quietly dropped. Try plugging one into your GBA SP and you’ll see what I mean – it no longer fits. The link port on a SP is now on the opposite side of the console, so the eReader can’t slide fully into the cartridge slot.

Tim Schuerewegen’s page on the GBA

The eReader file format

Official eReader home page