Filed under: Audio, iPod Family, iTS, Peripherals
Real Squeezes Silently Back into the iPod
News.com reports that Real is once again iPod compatible, whether Apple wants them to be or not. According to
RealNetworks Chief Strategy Officer Richard Wolpert, "Harmony now supports all shipping iPods, including iPod Photo." While I still hate Real, I think this is cool.As News.com notes, "Incompatibility between the major download stores and music players has fragmented the digital market. For example, songs purchased from Apple's iTunes store can only be played directly on Apple's iPod, while songs purchased from Napster or Microsoft cannot be played on the iPod." I think this is becoming a bigger problem, as there are too many proprietary formats and too many different consumer-inconveniencing DRM variants. We need more openness in all this. I want to buy songs off the iTMS and copy them straight over to both my iPod and my PSP. Is that so wrong?
[via Engadget]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Darkside said 11:22PM on 7-14-2005
"I want to buy songs off the iTMS and copy them straight over to both my iPod and my PSP. Is that so wrong?"
According to them, yes: you're copying the song twice. Even if your PSP was for "backup", the industry still hates you.
And we hate the industry back; circle of life, man.
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C.K. Sample, III said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
But, Darkside, what really chaps my hide is that I'm not listening to the song on my iPod and the PSP at the SAME TIME.
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Matt Green said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
Thanks Real, for fighting a useless battle which wrecks things for the rest of us. Does anyone actually want to use the Real Rhapsody music store, much less take songs from it and put them on their iPod? I wonder how much Real would like it if someone figured out a way to crack their own DRM scheme to open their files, convert them to MP3 and then load them on an iPod. Something tells me they wouldn't be too happy.
The only thing Real has accomplished is to provoke Apple into tweaking the iTMS protocols again in order to break Real's new hack. This will in turn break some genuinely useful programs, like Jon Johansen's SharpMusique and FairKeys and the JHymn project.
And for C.K.: Regarding putting your iTMS files on your PSP, look into JHymn at http://hymn-project.org. It can strip the DRM from iTMS files, as well as convert them to MP3 if you need to play them on something that doesn't handle AAC files.
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