Everything, Everything

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DRM Free
Monday 2nd April, 2007 14:27 Comments: 0
According to BBC News, Apple's iTunes store will start selling the EMI tracks in the "premium" format in May. EMI said every song in its catalogue will be available in the "premium" format. It said the tracks without locks will cost more and be of higher quality than those it offers now. The higher price will apply only to single tracks that customers download. On iTunes EMI tracks free of digital rights management (DRM) software will cost $1.29 (99p).

I'm pretty sure the exchange rate hasn't changed suddenly in the last few days, so I presume the price in brackets is the price we'll pay in the UK. Nearly twice as much. I suppose the good news is that at 99p for a DRM free track it makes it cheaper than the 320kbps MP3s I've been purchasing from www.djdownloads.com (I've lost track of how much I've spent there this year, it must be over £50 by now). I'm not entirely sure what "higher quality" means, or what format the music will be in (presumably AAC, but will it still use the proprietary .m4p container file? The advantages of AAC are not entirely conclusive, and the MP3 specification, while outdated, has proven surprisingly robust. AAC and HE-AAC are better than MP3 at low bit-rates; but at medium to higher bit-rates, the two formats are more comparable in most fields, and MP3 obviously has better support. I wonder if the DRM free AAC files will play okay on Microsoft's Zune? Apparently the K800 will support AAC, which may be a good excuse to finally upgrade from my wonderful K750i. Or do I hold out for the new K810 that's recently been announced and looks quite nice? Or do I go for the W810, which has a much better colour scheme than the old W800, and can be used purely as a music player. It's a shame all the new phones use M2 external memory, as I won't be able to use my current 2GB memory stick with them.
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