Apple’s latest press release states EMI Music’s entire digital catalog of music will be available for purchase DRM-free (without digital rights management) from the iTunes® Store worldwide in May.
This is exciting news and comes at a time when Defective by Design was on the verge of sending Steve Jobs a jester hat for not following up what he stated in February. Great work, Defective by Design, for all the campaigning you have done. I’m sure you guys had a part to play in this.
Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Music. ((via Jono Bacon’s post Nice one Steve)) An interesting point he brings out is that while the Big Four global recording companies require Apple to sell their music only with DRM, 90% of their music is still sold on DRM-free CDs.
Songbird is a very nice media player based on Firefox. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. MenZa has written a short review of it — go check it out.
Songbird is much faster and nicer than iTunes. I don’t know whether it has iPod or DAAP support, but both of those features I can live without. The coolest feature of it is that you can use it as a normal web browser, and if you come across a music link, you can click it and it will automagically start playing in the media player interface. It will even display an “iTunes Browser”-style list if you come across a page with lots of media links, which is really cool.
Aaargh! I can’t get over the fact that my Blogroll appears in the categories in the “Write Post” page!
Anyway, I wanted to say that today I’ve been using mt-daapd as a music library server and I am quite impressed.
daap is a protocol by Apple that was included in iTunes 4.0 to allow sharing of music libraries. It uses multicast DNS to advertise its services to other iTunes clients that are scanning for other libraries. I am surprised at how well it works.
There are a few open-source implementations of this protocol — even Rhythmbox and Banshee support it; though Avahi needs to be installed and running for it to work.
I’ve set up an mt-daapd server as a test. It’s hosting all our music and now all our iTunes clients have a “Reepy” item in the sidebar where they can stream music from.
One of the frustrations of it is that you can’t actually download music off the daapd server and save it to a local library or synchronise it with an iPod. It’s all to do with DRM, unfortunately.
This hasn’t been the post I wrote in my head before I started typing it out — I imagined it much better structured. Perhaps with more blogging experience I’ll get better. By the way, this is my 90th post if I’ve counted right.
I’m writing this after going for a Fourth Grade Theory of Music exam this morning. We’ve been studying really hard for the last couple of weeks, so it’s a big relief that it’s over now.
As far as I’m aware, I didn’t do any mistakes judging from the umpteen amount of times I checked the paper in the ridiculous amount of spare time I had in the exam. However, afterwards, Jillian told me about a stock progression and additional bi-tone in the harmony that I didn’t notice. Oh well, at least I didn’t have consecutive 8ves or 5ths.
Transposition was surprisingly easy, not even requiring the use of a double sharp. Also, the scales were not hard and on recent papers, you don’t have to write an essay on the suite movements 
.
Anyway, it’s back to schoolwork tomorrow.
Signing off for now…
Copyright © 2010 by Jeremy Visser and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License unless otherwise noted.