Ahead Software’s developer Ivan Dimkovic executed a comparison using different low bitrate settings with the Nero Digital codec. The purpose of the test was to evaluate the improvement of compression efficiency gained by utilizing parametric stereo encoding.
Parametric stereo a special technology designed to code stereo information as spatial cues and reconstruct the whole stereo image out of downmixed signal in the decoder, with the help of extra side data collected in the encoder.
The results show an improvement of roughly 30%, using very low encoding bitrates. The graph illustrates the quality of various settings using the Nero Digital encoder. The numbers refer to bitrate and the letters are to be interpreted as: PS - Parametric Stereo, HE - High Efficiency (a.k.a. AAC+ or SBR), DSP – Downsampled Parametric Stereo and LC - Low Complexity.
A study made by researchers Harvard University and the University of North Carolina has shown that illegal music downloading doesn't translate to reduced CD sales. The study tracked music downloads over a period of 17 weeks in 2002, and even high levels of swapping appeared to have noeffect on album sales.
"We find that file sharing has only had a limited effect on record sales," the study's authors wrote. "While downloads occur on a vast scale, most users are likely individuals who would not have bought the album even in the absence of file sharing."
The study is the first ever to combine statistical data from a P2P network and actual record sales figures. Harvard Business School associate professor Felix Oberholzer and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill associate professor Koleman Strumpf used statistics logs from two OpenNap servers in late 2002. The logs included about 1.75 million downloads over the 17 week period.
The music industry has been persistant in accusing P2P file sharing for the declining CD sales, while the fact remains that people are spending more money on, for instance, games and DVD-movies, as well as other types of entertainment.
Against all expectations, Sony has released a statement forecasting a 10-year product life cycle for the PS2. It would be a remarkable achievement in the constantly accelerating market, but on the other hand they were able to do the same with the Playstation and PSOne. The news is quite surprising as next generations consoles were expected be just around the corner by all the major vendors, but according to Sony they are not about to schedule their releases just to match the competitors.
In a keynote address at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, California, Andrew House, executive vice president of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, said the success of the original PlayStation, nearing its 10th anniversary, had convinced the company that two-thirds of its potential PS2 sales were yet to come.
Sony has had a busy week, as they also announced the first game title for the PSP, the PlayStation Portable. According to the announcement, there are already 81 game developers that support the PSP platform
Chris Charla, the game's producer, played a video for the crowd before stating that "polygon for polygon, PSP has more power than PS2," before reinforcing how easy it is to develop for the new handheld console.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has filed lawsuits against 532 suspected pirates. Among those sued are, for example, 89 students from more than 20 different universities.
"There is an exciting array of legal music services where fans can get high-quality online music," said Cary Sherman, president of RIAA. "Lawsuits are an important part of the larger strategy to educate file sharers about the law, protect the rights of copyright owners and encourage music fans to turn to these legitimate services."
College students are generally considered to be the most active users of peer-to-peer networks. That's why it's not too surprising to see RIAA make a major move against them. Several universities have already signed deals with for instance Napster to allow their students access to legal music services at a reasonable price.
The rest of the sued individuals were users of commercial ISPs. Lawsuits were brought against them in California, Colorado, Missouri, Texas and Virginia.
Electronics and entertainment giant Sony and fast-food chain McDonald's are working out a deal to promote Sony's upcoming Sony Connect download music service.
The promotion would bring free downloads to McDonald's customers with the purchase of specified menu items. According to the Los Angeles Times, McDonald's will be commiting about $30 million in advertising to the partnership. In return Sony will offer McDonald's discount to license the songs for promotion.
It was reported earlier that McDonald's had made a deal with Apple to give away iTunes songs, but apparently the plans have changed. Both Sony and McDonald's have declined to comment on the rumors.
It seems that there's a trend of bundling food with music going on. We're all familiar with the Pepsi-iTunes -deal, and Starbucks and Hewlett-Packardannounced a service that allows Starbucks customers to burn custom CDs while waiting for their order.
The Sony Connect service is expected to be launched this spring, and will be offering about half a million songs at 99 cents per tune.
Memorex is the first media brand to release smaller DVD-R media. The capacity is reduced to 1.4GB, which still equals to two CD-R discs.
"We believe our new line of Mini DVDs proves once again that Memorex offers the most comprehensive and affordable optical media solution available at retail today," said Brad Yeager, senior product marketing manager for digital media. "With Memorex Mini DVDs, consumers can capture life's important moments with their DV camcorders, and easily share them with family and friends."
The DVD Forum has chosen the AAC format to be used on the DVD-ROM sessions of DVD-Audio discs. The inclusion of a lossy compressed format improves the usability and portability of the format, for example to computers of portable audio players.
Another positive factor was that AAC is perceived favourably by the music industry because of its associated copyright protection measures and a history of use by legitimate, paid download organisations such as Apple. Conversely, content providers shudder at the very mention of MP3, it is seen as being the root of all evils where piracy activities are concerned. But as reader Mitchell Burt pointed out to us, AAC itself does not provide any rights management functions; the Apple iTunes implementation via their on-line store uses a proprietary DRM package named FairPlay.
Vodafone Germany has announced its new Vodafone live! Music download service. The service is based on MPEG-4 aacPlus audio codec created by Coding Technologies.
Vodafone uses Musicwave's Music On Demand Service (MODS), which allows full length, DRM protected downloads to mobile devices. The catalogue of available songs can be browsed using a mobile handset, and the selected items can be purchased using a one-click billing system. The streaming playback will begin after about 30 seconds of playback, and after playback the song will be stored in the device's memory for later use.
In addition to playing the purchased songs on the mobile device, consumers can also retrieve the songs on their PC. Vice versa songs purchased on PC can be sent to a mobile device. In essence the MODS system makes it easier to do impulse purchases on mobile devices, as the purchased song will also be available for storage on PC.
Sony has unveiled its first dual layer DVD recorders, the 700 series. The new drives will feature a 2.4x dual layer DVD+R DL recording in addition to the more common single layer 8x DVD-R and DVD+R recording and 4x DVD-RW/DVD+RW recording.
The internal drive, called Sony DRU-700A is expected to cost $230 and should be available, according to Sony, in second quarter of this year. Meanwhile various major media manufacturers have also announced the availability of dual layer DVD+R DL discs.
Dual layer recording makes the process of backing up DVD movies much easier as the most common DVD disc format nowadays, the DVD-9, will fit on one disc directly without any re-encoding or removing extra features from the disc. So far the only option has been to re-encode DVD-9 discs to fit onto single layer DVD-5 -sized recordable discs.
Sony also announced that once DVD Forum finalizes the dual layer DVD-R specs that Pioneer submitted to the Forum back in October 2003, company will add support for that one as well (assuming that such support doesn't require any hardware modifications but can be done by upgrading the firmware instead).
According to a study conducted by Nielsen NRG on behalf of the MPAA, 40 percent of American parents whose kids use the Net don't know that swapping of copyrighted material is illegal (although its still unknown whether downloading -- not uploading -- such material in States is illegal as AFAIK there are no court cases about that yet).
Study also found that 55 percent of the parents knew that their kids didn't pay for the content they got from the Net and 15 percent didn't know whether their kids paid for the content or not.
Probably the most interesting finding in the study was the fact that one third of the parents who themselves downloaded copyrighted material from the Net learned how to do so from their own kids.
So, MPAA's solution? "Once parents take the time to get the facts and have the increasingly important 'download discussion', they are taking yet one more step in keeping their family safe and raising good 'digital citizens'", MPAA's vice president of public affairs said in the statement.
Romanian programmer Fabian Toader has sued Sharman Networks, the owner of popular file-sharing software Kazaa, over alleged copyright violations. The case doesn't relate to P2P network and files that are shared in it, but relates to the period back in year 2000 when Toader wrote parts of the Kazaa software for Kazaa BV(the original Dutch owner of the Kazaa software that later sold the software to Sharman).
Mr. Toader claims that he worked as a freelancer for Kazaa BV and helped to write the Kazaa Media Desktop software, but didn't sign any contract that would have automatically transferred the copyrights to Kazaa BV.
The fight between Toader and Sharman has been going on for quite a while now, even though it hasn't managed to get into headlines. Back in summer of 2003, Sharman sued Toader alleging him to blackmail the company. The recent lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles by Mr. Toader, is a second one filed by him against Sharman. Mr. Toader currently lives in the States and works for Microsoft. He wants Sharman to pay for his work that has been downloaded, including only the latest version, for over 335 million times according to Sharman Networks.
The audio/video codec package Nero Digital has been significantly tuned for higher compression efficiency as Ahead software is about implement AVC/H264 video coding and Parametric Audio Coding to the package. This should provide significant improvements in quality when using low bitrate streams.
Nero Digital Video will also be significantly enhanced with the addition of AVC/H264. In recent proven tests by the MPEG Organisation, MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding significantly outperformed the coding efficiency of previous standards including MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 Simple and Advanced Profile. Achieving bit rates of up to 4 times greater in terms of equivalent perceptual video quality is seen as a major step towards AVC becoming the next generation video standard.
Parametric Audio Coding contains a highly efficient tool to code the stereo image enabling Parametric Stereo AAC to be combined in a backwards compatible fashion with High Efficiency AAC for usage in the low bit-rate range. This can offer an increase of up to 33% in coding gain over HE-AAC permitting very high quality audio compression at the lowest bit rates.
Well-known P2P site ShareReactor has been apparently shut down by the Swiss authorities. According to news sources, Swiss Judical Inquiry Department of Thurgau has shut down the site due copyright infringements. The site was probably the world's largest site that listed direct links to pirated material in P2P networks, using so-called ed2k links that work with eDonkey2000-compatible clients (such as eMule).
The press release by the Swiss Judical Inquiry Department of Thurgau, translated by an individual third party:
Internet-Site taken offline
FRAUENFELD (kapo) Due to the suspicion of breach of copyright and trademark laws the cantonal judicial Inquiry department of Thurgau has taken down an Internet-Site that served as a link platform for filesharing offerings. A process concerning these matters against the 25 year old owner from Frauenfeld is underway.
The Internet-Site located in Frauenfeld was online for about 30 months and last had over 220.000 hits per day bevor it was taken offline by the Thurgau officials. The in search engines toprated site worked as a anchorpoint for links to downloads of copyright and trademark protectet games and movies that were offered on the filesharing network.
Fraunhofer IIS and Agere Systems have developed a multi-channel MP3 format that produces 5.1 sound at bitrates comparable to those used today to encode stereo sound in MP3 format. In addition to offering multi-channel sound at low bitrates, the MP3 Surround -format is also fully backwards compatible with all existing MP3 players.
MP3 Surround technology encodes multichannel sound by transmitting a stereo audio signal that carries a compatible stereo down mix of the multi-channel material. The multi-channel sound image is created by additional side information, that characterizes the spatial distribution and attributes of the sound. Since the channel information is not discrete, the format cannot be compared to, for instance, Dolby Digital multi-channel audio.
"Enjoying personal multi-channel audio has been on the wish list of the MP3 user community for quite some time. This is exactly what MP3 Surround has to offer -- and it does so at astoundingly low bit rates", says Jürgen Herre, Chief Executive Scientist of the Audio & Multimedia departments of Fraunhofer IIS, Erlangen.
The most obvious solution for multi-channel, low-bitrate MP3 audio is in network distributed movies. First software implementations are expected to be available by mid 2004. Until then we can only guess how well MP3 Surround can perform.
Despite pretty massive consumer criticism, Disney has announced that it will expand its disposable DVD trials to several new locations in the United States.
The discs, that aim to replace regular rental DVDs, are called EZ-D and made by a company called Flexplay. They come packed in a airtight packaging and once the wrap is opened, the disc's surface will slowly change, making the disc totally unreadable after 48 hours.
The new trials will begin in Florida and other major markets in U.S. Southwest, followed by trials due to start in September in various other major metropolitan areas, including Kansas City and Austin. Disney also plans to drop the price of the discs from the current $6.99 to $5.99 a disc.
"We are extremely happy with the test, which proved that there is a consumer desire to have an alternative to traditional video rental," said Buena Vista marketing manager Lori MacPherson. "That's why we are more than doubling our retail test markets and adding additional titles."
Apple originally had set a goal to sell more than 100 million songs via its online music store, iTunes, by April this year, but it today announced that it has so far managed to sell just above 50 million songs. Still a whopping success, but well behind the goals.
The figure, however, excludes the Pepsi promotion sales that itself account -- at least theoretically -- to 100M songs. Apple set the target of 100 million songs back in October, 2003 when it launched its Windows version of iTunes. However, Apple stated that it is now selling more than 2.5 million songs per week, which accounts to total of 130M songs per year if the pace stays at the current level.
Sony has confirmed that the multi purpose gaming console PSX will be released for the European market during the 2004. Sony should be demonstrating the unit at the CeBIT expo. However, it has not been confirmed that the displayed unit is the European version, or possibly the already released Japanese version of the product.
While the on-the-record comments shied away from full commitment, insiders privately confirmed that PSX will definitely release in Europe before 2005.
A press release is expected on the matter of release date for the machine in the next 24 hours, specifically to coincide with PSX's European showing at the monster German tech fair, running from March 18-24. It's still unclear whether or not SCEE will confirm the 2004 date this week or at E3 in May.
Coffee giant Starbucks is planning to enter the music business very soon. Apparently the company has teamed up with HP to offer its customers a change to make their own customized CDs while drinking their latte.
Company will offer a music catalog of 250,000 songs that customers can choose tracks from using HP's tablet PCs and when they've made their selection, the CD burning process will be done behind the service desk and the ready-made CD with custom covers will be given to the customer. Tracks will cost $6.99 for five songs and $12.95 for full album.
The first "music-enhanced" Starbucks will be launched in Santa Monica, California and the company plans to roll out the service to its 2,500 stores across the world within next two years.
In other words, Sharman still considers that the original raid permission granted by an Australian court was done on illegal basis and therefor all the evidence found in the raids should be considered invalid in Sharman's upcoming legal fight against the music industry in Australia.
The search order granted to music industry watchdog MIPI was based on so-called Anton Pillar legislation that allows such raids by copyright owners if there's a risk that the other party is about to destroy evidence related to copyright infringements. Now, Sharman has stated that as it is already under legal proceedings in the United States, the American legislation makes it already illegal to destroy any evidence and therefor the MIPI shouldn't have been granted the Anton Pillar order at all.
In the previous ruling, the judge stated that it was also necessary to gain "snapshots" of what is happening on Sharman Networks network at any one time. Sharman argues that such activity can be considered as an improper use of an Anton Pillar order.
Hewlett-Packard is about to introduce a convenient way to label your recordable discs. Their new LightScribe technology uses the laser of a recordable drive to burn an image to the label side of the disc. All the user needs to do is flip the disc, but the technology also requires a special coating on the label side of the media.
"There are no consumables like ink or ink jet cartridges; the only consumable is the disc itself," says Daryl Anderson, project manager and HP engineer responsible for inventing the technology as part of a joint effort between HP's Imaging and Printing Group and its Personal Systems Group.
According to an article in Rolling Stone magazine, the P2P-turned-to-legal-music-store, Napster, might be in serious trouble in various fronts. At least four of its executives have left the company since its launch four months ago and the parent company Roxio has lost 60 percent of its stock market value during that period as well.
However, company denies alleged problems and is quickly to point out that they've managed to sell over 5 million songs since the launch and have received an additional $22.5M from investors to fund the operations. But company has suffered couple of major defeats, most notably the HP's decision to abandon the already-agreed deal to bundle Napster into its new computers and instead opted to utilize Apple's iTunes service.
Apple has been sued in France by the French record industry association Sacem for not paying the French blank media levy to the organization. In France, just like in Canada and various other countries, the personal copying of copyrighted material is apparently legal, but music publishers and artists are compensated for this right by having a levy -- or "tax" if you like -- on blank media products. In France these products that carry levy include blank optical media (CDR discs, DVDR disc), tapes, HDDs are other devices that can be used to store copyrighted music by an individual consumer.
Apple has refused to pay the levy for its iPod, which for 20GB model would add up to 20 euros ($24.63) on top of the retail price of the device. Sacem estimates that Apple sold more than 20,000 iPods in France last year with the HDDs between 10 and 40 gigabytes.
Now, the organization says that it "will have no other option than to go immediately to court to make sure that the rights of artists, composers and producers are respected."
The district court in New York issued a temporary stay of the premilimany injunction on Friday for 321 Studios in their legal case against movie studios Paramount and Fox.
321 Studios asked for immediate temporary stay after the district court ruling in New York in last week's Wednesday and the Judge Richard Owen granted that to them on Friday. Stay means that the New York court order to stop selling "ripper-equipped" versions of 321 Studios' DVD X Copy products is postponed and from New York court's point of view 321 Studios can continue to sell their products equipped with the part that allows circumventing the copy protection found on DVD-Video discs.
Unfortunately the decision doesn't really change anything, since the other district court decision in San Fransisco still restricts 321 Studios from selling their products equipped with the ripper. San Fransisco court also rejected 321 Studios' earlier request for temporary stay of the preliminary injunction.
Despite the San Fransisco's status, 321 Studios has stated that they will apply for a permanent stay in New York on March 15th.
European Parliament today voted to approve the proposed Directive on Intellectual Property Enforcement that gives copyright holders wide powers to attack against people who violate intellectual property rights of copyright holders. Some of the directive's wording was amended after huge pressure from consumer groups, but the main point that consumer groups demanded -- the clear distinction between large scale commercial piracy and copying/sharing for personal use -- wasn't made very clear in the approved directive.
"Under this Directive [that now has been approved], a person who unwittingly infringes copyright - even if it has no effect on the market - could potentially have her assets seized, bank accounts frozen, and home invaded," said EFF staff attorney Gwen Hinze.
Some late amendments were done and now the directive states that action shouldn't be taken against individuals who download music "in good faith" for their own use. But it is left solely on multi-million dollar lawyers of record labels and movie studios to decide what can be considered as "good faith" in music downloading.
Now the EU ministers will most likely approve the directive by the end of this week and eventually it will become a law within European Union. The directive was originally introduced by a MEP (member of European Parliament) Janelly Fourtou, who is the wife of Jean-Rene Fourtou, boss of media giant Vivendi Universal(that owns world's largest record label Universal Music and also various movie studios).
From the author of DVD2One, he well known DVD to DVD-R transcoder, comes a new tool for creating DVD video compliant audio discs. The trick is to convert the audio to a format supported by a DVD video player. One can choose from a lower quality MPEG-2 compressed streams to a high quality 96kHz/24bit stream.
The software uses a browser based user interface, which seems slightly crippled method of configuring the process. This initial release version also seems to have some technical quirks and oddities.
Also, only 44kHz / 16bit WAV files are accepted as input material in this first version. On the company website there is a lot of hype of audio quality improvements, but these are unlikely to happen as the quality of the source material ultimately defines the reached quality, even in cases when the target format has higher quality specifications.
Still, this concept might have some market demand for people that use a DVD player as the primary audio source. The software is available as a limited trial version at Eximius.nl
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been exploring ways of limiting illegal P2P traffic, and has discovered a company called Audible Magic. Audible Magic has developed a software, that analyzes the content being transferred and is capable of blocking the transfer, if illegal content is detected.
According to Audible Magic the software works either on external network devices that monitor traffic, or it can be embedded in any P2P software.
P2P companies have always argued that illegal content cannot be blocked without blocking legal material, too, and invading their users' privacy. RIAA is not looking for a legal ruling to force P2P companies to adopt Audible Magic's (or similar) technology, but would like to see the technology added voluntarily.
Of course it is quite obvious that P2P companies are not willing to add any such component. First of all it would seriously hamper their position on the P2P market, and the lisence fees for the software would probably be a problem as well. RIAA is most likely just looking for another excuse to claim that P2P companies are not doing their best in blocking out illegal traffic from their networks.
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has released an update on the proceedings in the legal fight regarding the mass lawsuit against individuals accused of file sharing. EFF, Public Citizen, and the American Civil Liberties Union argue that an individual, detailed lawsuit must be filed against each defendant instead of joining all the "John Does" in a single lawsuit.
The following is the complete, unedited press release from EFF.
Here is a brief update on some of the cases in which Public Citizen, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the American Civil Liberties Union and its local affiliates have filed amicus briefs arguing that persons accused of file sharing should be accorded minimal due process rights before subpoenas are authorized to identify them. We have just received rulings in two of the cases, one which accepts our argument that the record companies should have to file separate lawsuits against the individual filesharers rather than lump them all into a single case as they have done, and the other which found our arguments helpful, but premature.
In the case filed in Philadelphia against 203 Doe defendants whose Internet Service Provider is Comcast (BMG Music v Does 1-203), Judge Clarence Newcomer agreed with at least part of the legal arguments we raised. He agreed that it was improper to join all 203 defendants in a single lawsuit, and ordered the music companies to file separate complaints against each of the Doe defendants, paying a full filing fee for each case, for a total of about $30,000, and making individualized allegations against each defendant. Judge Newcomer retained the case against Doe #1, one of the three defendants about whom the music companies had provided detailed evidence (more than a hundred pages, each listing many songs made available for download), and authorized the issuance of a subpoena for that individual's identity only.
Multi-industry household brand Virgin and its owner Richard Branson have plans to enter into the legal online music market later this year. A new subsdiary of Virgin Group, called Virgin Digital, plans to launch its digital "jukebox" application and online music store in August, utilizing the music catalog and delivery mechanism of MusicNet.
Virgin's plans include, apart from the now-already-traditional online music downloading ability bundled with CD-burning rights, more features aimed at consumer electronics. Virgin's plans are that the service would seamlessly integrate into mobile phones, handheld devices, etc. Obviously this makes sense in many ways, not least because of Virgin Mobile arm of the group.
Company also hinted that it might start a new price war in the market that has now settled to $0.99 per song pricing model. "We're not releasing the (pricing) information but it'll be hyper competitive," Virgin Digital's president, Zack Zalon, said in an interview.
Recently there has been an unexpected boost in the development pace of LAME MP3 encoder. Recently Gabriel Bouvigne, one of the main developers, introduced a new 3.96 beta version for testing. According to him, there are several bug fixes and a stable version might be available at the end of March.
Experimental beta build is available at Rarewares.org and some discussion about the build can be found at Hydrogenaudio.org.
One of the most popular new (well, new-ish..) P2P applications, BitTorrent, has been updated to a version 3.4. The changelog is rather limited, but here it is:
Client no longer complains of connection to tracker problems when transfers are still working
Lots of bandwidth savings
Lots of bug fixes
And as always with the software updates, you can download the latest version of BitTorrent from our site:
321 Studios lost its second court ruling within 13 days today. Company previously lost the first round of its Californian lawsuit on 20th of February when court ordered company to stop selling products that contained a code that allowed circumventing the copy protection found on DVD-Video discs, called CSS.
Today, the New York federal judge Richard Owen decided that 321 Studios' products violate the DMCA legislation by allowing circumvention of CSS copy protection mechanism. The decision was basically identical to the one that San Fransisco court ordered on 20th -- company has pulled out all the ripper-equipped versions of its DVD X Copy software and replaced them with similar tools that only lack the "ripper" part.
321 Studios has already announced that it disagrees with the New York ruling (as well as the previous San Fransisco ruling) and will appeal both cases. 321 Studios bases their court process on the fact that American copyright legislation allows consumers to back up material that they own -- but by copy protecting that material and making it illegal to distribute tools that allow circumventing the copy protection, that right has been effectively removed even that it is still stated in copyright legislation as the "fair use" right.
Raids were allowed originally by federal Judge Murray Wilcox, who issued so-called Anton Pillar order that allows copyright holders to raid companies if they suspect that the company is violating their copyrights and there's a threat that evidence related to these actions will be destroyed shortly.
Sharman Networks claimed in the court that MIPI, the recording industry organization who made the raid, withheld facts from the judge when they applied for Anton Pillar order. Despite ruling that the evidence is legal, court did state that MIPI and Sharman should work out a mutually agreeable way for MIPI to access the evidence found in raids.
In addition to the ruling about raid's legality, court also ruled against Sharman's request to postpone its court case in Australia until the similar case has finished in the United States against it. Court case in Australia continues on 23rd of March.
Software vulnerabilities are one of the hottest topics of the moment. Now it has been reported that the Apple QuickTime player has a glitch that could permit code execution, and there for is a potential security risk. This is a significant discovery as QuickTime is one of the most popular video player software and Internet video formats. The flaw has not been documented yet, which suggests that it has not yet been exploited.
According to the source, Apple has been notified on the 18th of February, but there still is no patch or update available.
Napster, the P2P-turned-into-legal-musicstore, announced today that it is preparing to launch its online music service in the United Kingdom by the end of this summer.
The schedule would likely fall behind Apple's schedule for its iTunes service, as Apple has officially announced already that it plans to roll out its music service in Europe in second quarter of this year.
Also, Napster might have hard time conquering further markets in Europe if iTunes is launched, as planned, in most of the Western European countries while Napster -- already couple of months late even with this one -- is launching its service only in the UK.
Nokia has used some clever advertising tactics in promoting the multi player abilities of the N-Gage console, but now someone thinks that they are too offensive. To me, this just sounds ridiculous, but we have seen cases like this before.
One of the ads showed a photograph of an alleyway at night. The text in the middle of the advertisement stated: "This is where I took on three guys...and made them cry like babies."
Those who complained said the ad was "offensive and distressing in its depiction of violence and crime, especially to those who saw it in areas where they faced an increased possibility of assault". The ASA agreed saying the ad was "likely to cause serious or widespread offence or distress to readers".
The last version of the Nero 5.5 generation was supposed to be the .54, but now a .56 has surfaced on an Ahead Software server. As usual, Ahead provides no changelog for this update.
The Australian Federal court will give a ruling on whether or not the recent raids made at the office of Sharman Networks, the owner of Kazaa peer-to-peer application, were made based on valid reasons. Music Industry Piracy Investigations, the anti-piracy faction of Australian music industry raided the offices of Kazaa, and others in February.
Soon after the raid Kazaa questioned the raid, and said the judge who granted the search warrant was not presented with all the facts regarding the case.
Thomson, the French company who sells MP3 technology licenses on behalf of German Fraunhofer(who developed the format in 1993), is planning to use the format's widely-recognized name in order to create a copy protected audio format that would carry the same name as the original format, MP3.
The DRM-equipped MP3 format is Thomson's try to gather a chunk of the rapidly-growing legal music download business. But as great as the idea of "legal MP3 store" might sound, the reality is rather different. The new format, despite the same name, wouldn't work with existing MP3 players -- whether they are car stereos, portable audio players or software players.
Its not even clear whether the format actually uses the same compression method as the original MP3 does -- it is actually highly unlikely, as the competing formats, such as AAC(that Apple uses in its iTunes and iPod) and WMA(Microsoft's audio format that virtually all -- apart from iTunes -- legal music stores use), achieve better compression rates than MP3 does (after all, the format is over 10 years old).
European Union is about to vote for a bill entitled "European Union Directive for the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights", which would ultimately create a intellectual property legislation that makes American DMCA look like a schoolboy.
The legislation would allow copyright owners, such as record labels, to raid P2P users' homes if they suspect the user for sharing copyrighted material via P2P networks. It would also allow copyright owners to seize users' assets and get their bank accounts frozen whether they had any financial -- or any other -- gain from file sharing or not.
EFF and various European liberty organizations have launched campaigns against the proposed directive. We urge all of our users, specially European users, to submit your thoughts to your MEPs immediately, before the 8th of March when the directive goes to European Parliament's review.
Apple iTunes graps another victory in public listening comparison, featuring MPEG-4 AAC codecs at 128kbps bitrate. The Nero AAC codec is statistically considered to be equally good, even though there is a clear difference in the diagram. Real, FAAC and Compaact! come after the winning couple. The biggest surprise in the results might be the decent rating of the open-source encoder FAAC, which has improved a lot in terms of quality.
GWR, the owner of Classic FM radio, has figured out a new combination traditional and Internet music delivery. According to the source, their concept allows users to buy songs from the web as they hear them on the radio.
The service is called "Hear it Buy it Burn it" and allows listeners of its Mix network of 34 local radio stations, as well as digital station Core, to instantly download songs over the internet. Listeners who hear a piece of music that they like will be able to see in real-time on the radio station's website the name of the artist and the title of the song. They can then click on the buy button to download a legal, CD-quality copy of the song to their PC, which they can then listen to or burn to CD. It has been launched by GWR's programming division Creation with content provided by digital music distribution company OD2.
Ahead Software’s developer Ivan Dimkovic executed a comparison using different low bitrate settings with the Nero Digital codec. The purpose of the test was to evaluate the improvement of compression efficiency gained by utilizing parametric stereo encoding.
A study made by researchers Harvard University and the University of North Carolina has shown that illegal music downloading doesn't translate to reduced CD sales. The study tracked music downloads over a period of 17 weeks in 2002, and even high levels of swapping appeared to have noeffect on album sales.
Against all expectations, Sony has released a statement forecasting a 10-year product life cycle for the PS2. It would be a remarkable achievement in the constantly accelerating market, but on the other hand they were able to do the same with the Playstation and PSOne. The news is quite surprising as next generations consoles were expected be just around the corner by all the major vendors, but according to Sony they are not about to schedule their releases just to match the competitors.
