Up until two days ago, I would have been exactly like the vocal anti-PlaysForSure people in this discussion. DRM is super-irritating and it means that you don't really own what you own, I'd've said. Anyone who buys music from the iTunes store or whatever else is doing a foolish thing by buying encumbered low-fi music, I'd've said.
And I'd still pretty much say that, but PlaysForSure now has a killer app that makes sense in a lot of ways: The subscription services. The way that these work (I've used the Yahoo one -- for $5 a month, why not? -- but I'm sure that Napster and Rhapsody On The Go work the same way) is that once you've paid the minimal entry fee (that $60 for a year of Yahoo is about the same as four CDs) you can browse through a reasonably large catalog of songs, and download whatever you like for free, legally. This wouldn't be especially interesting if you were limited to only playing in one client, but you're not. The music you've downloaded is standard WMA that will play on any PlaysForSure device. If you have a new-ish MP3 player that's from one of the big non-Apple companies (iRiver, Dell, Creative), you can put the tracks on there and listen to them whenever you want. If you have a network media player that supports PlaysForSure and WMC (Roku, D-Link, and others have these available now), you can play the tracks on your main audio system just like any of your other music. The Xbox 360 will let you listen to the tracks, too, when it becomes available. So will Media Center Extenders. And newer Windows Mobile cellphones. In other words, PlaysForSure is a license-able standard that allows protected content to be seamlessly played just about anywhere. And while protected content is fundamentally uninteresting for purchases, it's entirely understandable for subscription services. (Making a subscription service without DRM is totally unworkable, as everyone would subscribe for a month, download everything, and then quit.) If a subscription service doesn't interest you, well, fine (though I'd recommend trying it before coming to that conclusion), but railing about how users of subscription services don't own the music is beside the point -- I don't own the DVDs I get from Netflix, either, but it doesn't bother me. If I want to buy a DVD or a CD (which I often do, even with Netflix and Yahoo Unlimited), I know where Amazon is. To bring this back on topic, where does this leave the Squeezebox? Well, I've said before that there are three main media ecosystems out there -- Apple, Microsoft, and "other" -- and that's becoming more and more obviously true. The Squeezebox will never be a first-class member of the Apple ecosystem, because only devices that have an Apple logo are allowed to do that. The Squeezebox could become a first-class member of the Microsoft ecosystem by supporting Windows Media Connect and PlaysForSure (Roku was able to turn their Squeezebox-knockoff SoundBridge into a real WMC/PlaysForSure device, so I'm sure Slim could do the same), but that requires them to make a real commitment to those Microsoft standards. If not, that'll leave Slim firmly in the "other" category, where it really excels -- there's no other player whose open-source, Unix-based capabilities are nearly as developed or polished; from its Perl code base to native FLAC support, the Squeezebox 2 is an ideal product for Linux users. But, boy, that's really a small-ish niche... -- mkozlows _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
