[mattflaschen]

"Please correct the article to point out that AAC is not a closed format, and please read: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced[uAudio[/u]Coding] to understand a little more about it."

The article doesn't need to be corrected. AAC is proprietary. It's true that Apple is not the only one who purchased the license, but the article doesn't say they are.

"However, a patent license is required for all manufacturers or developers of AAC codecs."

Right here, we see clearly that AAC is proprietary. It is illegal to independently implement the codec without paying a royalty.

[kthhrrsn]

AAC may not be proprietary, but Apple did limit the usage of the songs that were downloaded from iTunes to Apple devices. There was an article over a year ago about a hacker who was able to trick his iTunes purchases into believing they were being played on an Apple device when he was using another mp3 player. I'll see if I can find the file. Do people not realize that most iTunes purchases are not playable on non Apple devices? Maybe no one has tried it, but I certainly have!

[holmesr]

Fairplay was the DRM component. I'd rather the article corrected the fact that AAC is the problem. It's not - DRM was. Now that it's gone (the music companies were in control of this and were holding Apple to ransom for their pricing model), I see no reason to use the lower quality MP3 files from Amazon.

[tfvdw2at]

@kthhrrsn: No it is not a proprietary Apple format. There have been multiple posts to the thread that it is not. The proprietary piece is the DRM wrapper which is called, some would say ironically, "FairPlay". Again from Wikipedia, see here:

"FairPlay is a digital rights management (DRM) technology created by Apple Inc., based on technology created by the company Veridisc. FairPlay is built into the QuickTime multimedia software and used by the iPhone, iPod, iTunes, and iTunes Store and the App Store. Any protected song or other form of media purchased from the iTunes Store with iTunes is encoded with FairPlay. FairPlay digitally encrypts AAC audio files and prevents users from playing these files on unauthorized computers.

[holmesr]

I must admit, I've only ever played my own AAC encoded files (from cd) on my psp. I haven't tried purchased non-drm content.



So, we need a class action to stop Apple from doing this. Then again, they'll just say people need to convert to MP3 like the article states. That's just terrible.

[mattflaschen]

"Fairplay
was the DRM component. I'd rather the article corrected the fact that
AAC is the problem. It's not - DRM was."

They're both problems, separate but equally real.

"Now that it's gone (the music
companies were in control of this and were holding Apple to ransom for
their pricing model),

Do you really expect us to believe that a $80 billion company has no negotiating power?

"I see no reason to use the lower quality MP3
files from Amazon."

It's impossible to perceive the difference between 256 kbps MP3 vs. 256 kbps AAC on even good consumer audio equipment (let alone an iPod, which has notoriously poor earphones). MP3 has better compatability, though of course it's still proprietary which is why I use Vorbis.

[JaywalkerExtraordinaire]

{quote}? a truly open format like Ogg Vorbis ?{quote}

The reason the industry has been reluctant to embrace Vorbis is because it has not been legally tested, and there is serious doubt that Vorbis is free of patent infringement. No major player in the digital music player market wants to be the legal guinea pig. Vorbis might be a free, open standard, or it might be a very expensive standard, indeed. Since it isn't known which way a legal ruling might go, the expected cost of the standard is non-zero.

[EdwardVMalloy]

Matt you really should be taking your medicine and not trying to play with the big boys.

You could and can play mp3 files in itunes or on an ipod. Always. But why would you want to, unless the download (as from eMusic) was mp3.

AAC is an "advanced" format, designed to supplant mp3.

As to the legalese... you are mistaking what it's saying, For both mp3 and aac you need to acknowledge that you are using someone else's work. that's all.

ed

[JaywalkerExtraordinaire]

{quote}> You could always convert whatever you bought from iTunes to mp3 and play it anywhere, but it was somewhat cumbersome.

Not legally you couldn't. The old fanboy-recommended method, "Oh, it's so simple. Just export all of your music onto CDs, then reimport them as MP3s" is a violation of the DMCA. Why bother with DRM in the first place?{quote}

No, it doesn't violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. iTunes exports the files without DRM when the audio CD is burned. The user does not need to circumvent the DRM, so it is not a violation of DMCA (provided the resulting CD or any files derived from it are not illegally distributed).

[mattflaschen]

"Matt you really should be taking your medicine and not trying to play with the big boys."

Thanks. I appreciate your concern, but I don't need medicine. What I do need is for you to minimize the gibberish.

"You could and can play mp3 files in itunes or on an ipod"

I never said otherwise.

"For both mp3 and aac you need to acknowledge that you are using someone else's work. that's all."

Uh, no. http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/ doesn't talk about "acknowledgement". It talks about mandatory royalties.

[mattflaschen]

"Since it isn't known which way a legal ruling might go, the expected cost of the standard is non-zero.

"

This is standard FUD. True, there could be a submarine patent that covers Vorbis, even though patent searches have been done. But there already have been submarine patents leveled at MP3, and there are probably more to come. There's no extra unknown risk to Vorbis that there isn't also for MP3.

[JaywalkerExtraordinaire]

{quote}Until Apple made the decision to ditch DRM, they were limiting themselves by limiting consumers from using their music as they wish.{quote}

The DRM is/was required by the music labels. Apple have been pressuring them for quite some time to allow DRM free online music sales.

[JaywalkerExtraordinaire]

{quote}This is standard FUD. True, there could be a submarine patent that covers Vorbis, even though patent searches have been done. But there already have been submarine patents leveled at MP3, and there are probably more to come. There's no extra unknown risk to Vorbis that there isn't also for MP3.{quote}

To name one, Vorbis is believed to violate US patent 5,214,742. If it could be implemented without significant risk of copyright infringement, the big players on the market would do so. What motivation would they have to not include the encoders/decoders in their firmware and software?

I like FOSS as much as anyone, and more than most, but looking at the situation objectively, it's easy to understand why Apple, Creative, etc. have not embraced Vorbis. It's an unknown, legally. On paper, the cost of implementation, actual developing costs notwithstanding, is the probability of being sued for patent infringement multiplied by the sum of the expected cost of losing the suit multiplied by the probability of losing the suit plus the expected cost of winning the suit multiplied by the probability of winning the suit plus the expected cost of an out of court settlement multiplied by the probability of an out of court settlement.

[elgarak]

The function to encode in both mp3 and AAC, as well as converting DRM-free songs (such as self-produced or bought from iTunes as iTunes Plus) between both formats, has ALWAYS been part of iTunes.
The only thing that has changed is that Apple has decided to go DRM free on all songs they sell (which is not yet available for all songs), including previously bought protected songs (for a small price).

[crsgardner]

AAC isn't proprietary...

[justrick]

Sorry for the mistake, folks. I don't know where I got the idea that AAC was a proprietary format. Bad brain. Bad!

[justrick]

Remember, it has to be an iTunes Plus purchase, meaning it doesn't have the usual DRM protections. Regular iTunes tunes can't be converted directly to MP3 (unless you burn them to CD first and then rip them).

[vasic]

The amount of ignorance in this article is simply mind-boggling. Most likely, this article was fishing for the Microsoft $10,000 bounty (given to anyone publishing an article that disparages Apple and its technologies). For the author's sake, I hope he gets it, since otherwise, he put out so much embarrassing crap for nothing.

AAC (an MPEG-4 flavour) is supported by virtually EVERY portable audio device out there. Here's a very short list of top ten makers (in addition to Apple):

Creative Zen Portable
Microsoft Zune
SanDisk Sansa
Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) with firmware 2.0 or greater
Sony Walkman
SonyEricsson Walkman Phones-W series, e.g. W890i
Nintendo DSi To be released in America mid-2009
Slacker G2 Personal Radio Player

Many more no-name Chinese devices support it as well. In other words, you buy from iTunes, you get a file that can be played back on practically ANY portable device, phone, game console, as well as dozens of software players (Windows, Linux and Mac). For your money, you get an audio file that is far superior to MP3 of the same size, and that is truly portable and device- and platform-agnostic. Therefore, advising people to buy from Amazon instead of iTunes is doing people a gross disservice, since the user is paying for significantly inferior-sounding product. Also, advising them to convert their files to MP3 format is another foolish advice -- the resulting file is of NOTICEABLY poorer audio quality, with absolutely NO benefit for the consumer.

Just a bit of proper research would have also found out that Apple was a champion of DRM-free music (search for 'Steve Jobs Open Letter to RIAA). Record labels were becoming increasingly worried about Apple's decisive dominance in the digital music distribution markets, they tried to undermine Apple by offering DRM-free music to Amazon and refusing to do that for Apple. Since the market share for iTunes didn't budge during the one year since the experiment begun, the labels returned to the negotiating table to figure out how to allow Apple to sell DRM-free, without completely losing face. The result was a three-tiered pricing ($0.69 for catalogue stuff, $0.99 for most tracks, $1.29 for current most popular hits). These prices are for the files that are twice the size of original 128kbps AAC files (since they're now encoded at 256kbps).

How incredibly poorly, poorly written hit-piece.