Apple victorious

I've been reading the iPhone reviews. Grumpy geek iPhone fans like Coding Horror say to wait for 3G support and a few more physical buttons next year. More desperate sorts, less enamored of Microsoft's solutions, say to wait at least until this fall. Maybe then we'll have search, cut and paste, tasks, better synchronization, an external keyboard, disk mode, fewer crashes, etc.

No matter. This review, late to the game, sums it up best. It's quite possible, if AT&T can hold itself together, and if the phone crashes no more than once every few days (with no data loss), that Apple has won. They've put a serious OS, with serious multimedia and network capabilities, on a phone with serious graphics capabilities. They've established a cross-platform distribution mechanism (iTunes) for updates, software, backups, media retail, etc. They're allied with Google (for now).

Does Apple want to raise a few millions? Sell a "task" add-on for $20 a pop. Does Apple want to raise a few hundred million? Sell games.

You did notice that Apple now has a handheld gaming platform, didn't you? (With an accelerometer too.)

It's great news for Apple stakeholders and, in the near term, it's good news for AT&T. More importantly, it's fantastic news for the decaying American mobile phone industry. There will be a desperate scramble by AT&T's competitors to deliver better products faster, and the handset manufacturer will get whatever they want. And once the 3G iPhones start appearing overseas ...

Did I mention that Minneapolis is putting in metro-wide 802.11? The iPhone will work quite nicely there, including the VOIP services Jobs is promising.

Anyone who has a mobile phone number should be very grateful that Apple, it seems, has delivered.

7/2/07: Yes, victory indeed. When a US mobile phone stokes anxiety in Korean manufacturers, something radical has happened. It's bit like Brazil suddenly launching a star ship.

7/2/07: More proof. I really didn't think Apple could do it out of the gate.

Beg the BBC: Set 'In Our Time' Free!

We need to write the BBC and demand they liberate In Our Time. Let me explain why.

As I drove to work I started to compose a post in praise of an In Our Time episode on Anesthesia. I was going to connect it to a post I'd written on paleolithic suffering, the poignant prayers of 19th century futurists, and Vonnegut's Wheel of Samsara, with an oblique reference to poverty. I'd comment on how Bragg's guests connected the changing social perception of the benefits of pain and suffering to the availability of other options, and confess how whimpy I feel when reading my son stories about extraordinary survivors.

A cross-reference to my tech ravings would mention my whizzy car stereo that plays IOT MP3s and directions on how to capture the audio stream to an MP3 ...

That's when it hit me. Reality.

Only a complete geek loon like me is going to turn a useless streamed IOT program (it's not background music) into a useful MP3 file.

It's time to rebel.

The BBC has been running its experiment of "7 day downloads" for years now. The experiment must end. We need to convince BBC Radio Four to liberate its shelf-ware. Do it now! Send the BBC Radio Four some feedback. When you've sent your feedback in, pass on the feedback link or a link to this blog. Let the BBC feel your pain.

Here's what I wrote ... (edited to improve it, I admit)

I urge you to declare your MP3 download experiment a smashing success and make your archives available as MP3 files for downloading.

Put an audio ad at the beginning and end of each programme. Ask Apple to sell them for $1.00 a tune. Whatever, just do it.

Streaming simply doesn't work. I'm often blogging on excellent IOT programs, but it's a bit pointless since nobody is going to listen to them on their computer. In an era in which car stereos increasingly work with MP3/AAC CDs and iPods (mine works with any USB drive) it's the car radio where IOT will be listened to.

I beg you, stop dangling these unreachable sweets in front of your suffering public and liberate IOT.

The limits to DRM: my new car stereo

I'm not, by nature, an optimist. I tell my friends that not only do I consider the glass half-empty, I suspect the dregs are poisonous.

So it is not surprising that, for some time, I was pretty pessimistic about Digital Rights Management. The public had no reaction to the DMCA at all. Would the voting population figure out the real costs before Microsoft started selling DRMd retinal implants? I didn't think so.

I started to become a less pessimistic when I realized, a bit ahead of the curve, that it was very hard to manage any DRM solution in a world of disparate disconnected embedded computers [1]. I became slightly optimistic when I formally admitted that humanity's actions, on occasion, seem inexplicably less-than-dumb.

Recently, my new SONY car music player has tipped me into the moderately optimistic range. Ironically, and perhaps not coincidentally, this product comes from a company with a historic (truly) DRM fiasco. I wonder if Jobs was thinking of this sort of product when he wrote his "Nixon in China" essay.

So why does this car player possibly signal the doom of today's DRM? The key is that the player supports MP3/AAC [2] CD-Rs and USB mass storage devices in addition to the iPod. The iPod support is great, but the data CD-Rs are ultra-rugged, cheap, disposable, reliable and very simple to use for playlists. [3] They're also very well supported by iTunes -- as long as you don't have music from the iTunes store. The stereo doesn't support FairPlay, and it can't.

Until now I've allowed a few DRMd tunes to leak into my collection. Freebies mostly, one or two impulse buys, and some gift cert music for the kids. No more. Sure I can easily build iTunes smart lists to filter out protected music [5], but I'm a geek. Even so, it's a nuisance to have to burn my kids favorite tunes to a CD, then re-encode as non-DRMd AAC [4].

Americans live in cars these days. Large personal music collections are a natural fit and devices like this excellent Sony product will become ubiquitous. DRMd music doesn't work in this setting. We are going to hit the limits of this generation's stab at DRM for music very soon. I'll be a rampant optimist and predict complete collapse within 18 months.

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[1] Our sump pump has an embedded computer system monitoring its health. That computer crashes every few weeks and has to be rebooted. My alarm clock crashes every few weeks. My car stereo has a reset button. The Daylight Savings Time transition is going to remind everyone how many embedded, disconnected, non-updateable, computers they own; we'll be resetting our camera and video clocks four times a year until the last one dies.
[2] And Sony's irrelevant ATRAC standard.
[3] See my review for more details. Using Apple iTunes it's trivially easy to burn a half-dozen data CDs made up of both AAC and MP3 tunes, and very convenient to pop them in a play them. I find it easiest to treat each CD as a unique playlist and not bother with folders, navigation hierarchies, etc. A 700MB playlist is not bad really.
[4] Sure there are applications to do this, but we have so few that matter the CD solution is easier.
[5] Omit KIND contains "protected".

Why Apple can't license Fair Play

Sometime in the past month I mentioned in a blog posting that DRM solutions require absolute control of the hardware chain. (update: it was 9/06, when iTunes stopped supporting the ROKR -- the only non-Apple FairPlay client - seems like I wrote that only yesterday ....) Today Apple (allegedly Steve Jobs) said the same thing:

Apple - Thoughts on Music

...The most serious problem is that licensing a DRM involves disclosing some of its secrets to many people in many companies, and history tells us that inevitably these secrets will leak. The Internet has made such leaks far more damaging, since a single leak can be spread worldwide in less than a minute. Such leaks can rapidly result in software programs available as free downloads on the Internet which will disable the DRM protection so that formerly protected songs can be played on unauthorized players.

An equally serious problem is how to quickly repair the damage caused by such a leak. A successful repair will likely involve enhancing the music store software, the music jukebox software, and the software in the players with new secrets, then transferring this updated software into the tens (or hundreds) of millions of Macs, Windows PCs and players already in use. This must all be done quickly and in a very coordinated way. Such an undertaking is very difficult when just one company controls all of the pieces. It is near impossible if multiple companies control separate pieces of the puzzle, and all of them must quickly act in concert to repair the damage from a leak.

Apple has concluded that if it licenses FairPlay to others, it can no longer guarantee to protect the music it licenses from the big four music companies. Perhaps this same conclusion contributed to Microsoft’s recent decision to switch their emphasis from an “open” model of licensing their DRM to others to a “closed” model of offering a proprietary music store, proprietary jukebox software and proprietary players.

In this case, I think Apple is telling the truth. Of course they've known this all along -- though you have to wonder about the ROKR fiasco. The situation for movies is even worse. You can be sure someone is storing all the currently encrypted movies they can find, knowing that sometime in the next five years they'll be able to hack them all at once.

Apple is saying that the music owners have to give up on DRM. I'm sure they'll agree ... :-)

More on DRM. Also, see my 2005 post on how DRM wrecked my media center experiments.

Why Apple won't fix AirTunes -- is it the microwave?

I fought a hard battle with Apple's AirTunes (Apple's wireless audio streaming) a few weeks ago.

It was very frustrating. The devils of Digital Rights Management, AirTunes fundamental inadequacy, and the lack of a fast-user-switching compatible tool for remote control of iTunes finally defeated me. SlimDevices and its ilk seemed like far better solutions, and I figured this spring I'd strip out the DRM on the music I paid for and switch to a non-Apple solution. At the moment though, my wife's Nano and some good playlists suffice.

Today I decided spring was too soon. I was streaming some music using AirTunes. A rare event, but I do it on occasion. All was well, until the music vanished. I wondered what was up; then I realized the microwave was running. It's not all that old a model, but it is death to our 802.11b LAN. That's bad for routine web work, but it's fatal for streaming music -- especially the minimally compressed AirTunes stream.

Maybe streaming MP3 or AAC directly, or enabling communication robustness (microwave resistance) would help. Or maybe wireless audio streaming won't really work until we switch to entirely new forms of wireless networking (ultra wideband, etc). If so, then this may explain why Apple has left AirTunes twisting in the wind ... They may have reason to believe it's not fixable.

The flaw in iTunes: 2 users, 2 iPods - and our RetinaLock future

A revised version of an Apple Discussion Group posting of mine:

Apple - Discussions - The flaw in iTunes: 2 users, 2 iPods

There's a design flaw in iTunes, but happily there's an "easy" fix. How can we get Apple to apply the fix?

Problem: When my wife syncs her Nano to our Library, she messes up my smart playlists (and vice-versa). For example, the 'last played' value is now the last time EITHER of us listened to a tune, so that's no longer useful. Shockingly, despite being married for about 2 decades, we also don't rate tunes quite the same way.

The trouble is that OS X is a multi-user system but iTunes isn't really a multi-user solution - yet.

Here's the fix: We need to be able to treat shared Playlists and Libraries as though they were local, including being able to create derivative playlists.

I was surprised to learn that iTunes doesn't do this. One can share a Playlist readily, but one can't drag and drop items to create a local client Playlist. Note there's no DRM issue or copyright issue here, a Playlist only references a tune, it doesn't copy it. [wrong - obviously! See below.]

Here's how it should work.

1. iTunes Library runs in its own user account. It has global Playlists. The iTunes Library is shared.

2. I run a version of iTunes in my own account, Emily runs one in her own user account. We both are clients of the same shared Library, though of course we could have local tunes too. We create our own playlists and rate songs locally. We switch to our local accounts to sync our iPods. Ratings and last played dates and other metadata are local. We'd also be able sync with our own contacts and calendars!

How do we get Apple to implement this design fix? Obviously the engineers have known for years that this is the way to go, so it's management we have to persuade.

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Update 11/2/05 -- Oh, but it is the DRM

As usual it's the DRM. I'd forgotten the little detail that the music is transferred to the iPod when one syncs. That's the problem.

How best to understand this? Think of the secret and forbidden lust of the media companies -- the (patent pending 2040) RetinaLock™ (Palladium Inside!™). The RetinaLock™ prevents any access to DRMd material by control of visual inputs. BrainLock does the same for auditory, tactile, and olfactory inputs. BrainLock Enhanced™ (mandatory upgrade 2045) makes it impossible to consider any action that would circumvent the workings of the BrainLock™ (thereby ending the trickle of death sentences related to violations of the DMCA amendment of 2043).

Really, the idea of "shared property" is a legacy of ancient law related to the fading practice of marriage. The media companies abhore this idea. Each person should own their own BrainLocked™ media (ok, just biometric locked until the advantages of BrainLock™ associated enhancements become irresistible). If you and your multiple spouses and myriad children want to listen to music, you each need your own music stream. Joint access is discouraged, though it will not be effectively blocked for some time.

The bottom line is that Apple's media partners really don't want multiple users accessing a single iTunes repository. They can't do anything about multiple iPods for now (after all, a single user might have an iPod and a Nano!), but they accept that grudgingly. They won't allow anything to encourage multiple iPods with multiple users, and that means this "design problem" isn't going to get fixed -- because it's working as designed.

Hmpph. I begin to see the romantic appeal of outlaw-hood.

Update 11/2: I have a workaround.

Update 9/4/11: I have had a hard time finding this old post, because I kept looking for "RetinaLock" instead of "BrainLock". So I tweaked it to include RetinaLock. Same meaning though.

MacInTouch Reader Report: Audio Conversion - Digitizing LPs, DAT tapes, others

MacInTouch Reader Report: Audio Conversion

Macintouch reader threads are usually pretty good, but this is by far the best discussion I've ever seen on digitizing audio. It explains why this is so hard to get right, and why so many play with it a bit and then give up.

I've personally had reasonable results, given my low standards, using an iBook, iMic, and Amadeus II with OS X 10.2.6 to digitize cassette tapes. The iBook is pretty marginal -- you really want a G4. Even with a faster CPU the proces is still somewhat tedious, but to my tone deaf ears it sounds ok on my iPod.

Sometime I have to update an ancient page of mine with some photos of my setup and the particular settings I've used.