As the Rolling Stones began their tour while welching on the more than quarter of a million dollar deal they made with my Friend, I started this e-Blogazine journal to document some of my experience of the fallout, and to create a forum for discussion and resources to reform the Music Industry. May Artists, Musicians, and Free People everywhere find it useful.
Got Something to say? Are You a Musician, Artist, or Person with an opinion about the Music industry, music downloads, contracts or royalties? Are You concerned about the RIAA and other industries' assault on our cyber-Freedoms? Copyright and Intellectual Property law? Well?
This site is our Music, played on a virtual sidewalk. This button is our hat in front of us. If You dig the Vibe, toss in a few coins so we live. Thanks.
IPOD impressario Steve Jobs said of the music industry recently, "If they want to raise the prices, it means that they are getting greedy...".
This item shows significant disagreement among industry heads about whether to raise prices for downloaded music now, or later.
Either way, it won't matter. We'll be using Shareaza, the best most incredible GPL Spyware-free P2P idea sharing software ever created.
More on this in the next post. In the meantime, I strongly recommend You click on the link to the left and download this puppy. Truly what file - no... what *idea* sharing should be. -dcm
According to this item from Slashdot, Sony shipped Switchfoot's new CD "Nothing is Sound" with copy protection, enraging thousands of IPod Users. The Band offers these instructions for getting around this and ripping their CD onto PC's.
Here's what Tim Foreman said:
Hello friends, my heart is heavy with this whole copy-protection thing. Many PC users have posted problems that they have had importing the new songs (regular disc only, not the dual disc) into programs such as Itunes. Let me first say that as a musician AND as a music fan, I agree with the frustration that has been expressed. We were horrified when we first heard about the new copy-protection policy that is being implemented by most major labels, including Sony (ours), and immediately looked into all of our options for removing this from our new album. Unfortunately, this is the new policy for all new major releases from these record companies. It is heartbreaking to see our blood, sweat, and tears over the past 2 years blurred by the confusion and frustration surrounding this new technology. It is also unfortunate when bands such as ourselves, Foo Fighters, Coldplay, etc... (just a few of the new releases with copy protection) are the target of this criticism, when there is no possible way to avoid this new industry policy.
For mac users these songs should import seamlessly. We are told that itunes is coming out with a new version for PC users in early November that will be compatible with all of these new CD's but in the meantime it's frustrating for all of us. That said, there are a number of solutions (as is always the case with these types of things) for importing the CD into your itunes and ipod. We have compiled some of the easier ways below. I feel like as a band and as listeners, we've all been through a lot together over the past ten years, and we refuse to allow corporate policy to taint the family we've developed together. We deeply regret that there exists the need for any of our listeners to spend more than 30 seconds importing our music, but we're asking as friends and partners in this journey together to spend the extra 10 minutes that it takes to import these songs, which we think you'll agree to be our finest collection of songs yet. As a band, we've always been known for having the best fans in the world and I know that will continue for years to come. A month from now, I hope to be singing these songs together at a show, and the extra time spent importing the music will perhaps be forgotten, or at least forgiven. Thank you for your understanding and the continued kindness that you have always shown for five dreamers from San Diego, we love you guys,
-tim foreman
A) If you're a mac user, or you have access to a mac, or you purchased the dual disc, you should have no problems... simply import the songs the same way as you always do.
B) If you're a PC user, and you haven't yet tried to import the the disk yet, download and install a free program called CDEX from http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/downloads.php. Now hold down the shift button while inserting the switchfoot CD (this disables the auto-run feature on the CD). Make sure that you hold it down until you are sure that nothing has run (maybe 60 seconds). Once the CD is loaded without auto-running it's software, open the CDEX program, and select tracks 1-12 (Lonely Nation-Daisy), excluding data tracks 13 and 14. THen select the top icon on the right side of the program "Extract CD tracks to WAV files". THis will extract them to your mymusic folder. Open iTunes and drag the .wav files you created into your itunes library, and you're done, and free to convert the songs into mp3, or whatever format you wish. (If you've already tried to import another copy protected CD like Foo Fighters, etc..., you may already have the protection software installed on your computer, and should go to plan C.
C) If you're a PC user, and you've already tried to import the the disk and accepted the auto-run installation, or don't mind accepting the auto-run installation, place the CD into your computer and allow the Sony BM audio player on the CD to automatically start. If the player software does not automatically start, open your Windows Explorer. Locate and select the drive letter for your CD drive. On the disc you will find either a file named LaunchCD.exe or Autorun.exe. Double-click this file to manually start the player.
Once the Sony BMG player application has been launched and the End User License Agreement has been accepted, you can click the Copy Songs button on the top menu.
Follow the instructions to copy the secure Windows Media Files (WMA) to your PC. Make a note of where you are copying the songs to, you will need to get to these secure Windows Media Files in the next steps.
Once the WMA files are on your PC you can open and listen to the songs with Windows Media Player 9.0 or higher (or another fully compatible player that can playback secure WMA files, such as MusicMatch, RealPlayer, and Winamp by dragging them from wherever you saved them into Windows media player. Once they are in the Windows media player playlist you can burn the songs to a standard Audio CD by right clicking on the songs and selecting "add songs to burn list." You can then burn the songs to a standard Audio CD. (Please note that in order to burn the files, you will need to upgrade to, or already have, Windows Media Player 9 or 10, which can be downloaded for free at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/default.aspx )
Once the standard Audio CD has been created, place this copied CD back into your computer and open iTunes. iTunes can now rip the songs as you would any normal audio CD.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: Tim Foreman, 16 September 2005 11:07 PM
That's cool. It would be even better if Sony had not placed the obstacle of copy protection in the way of People at all.
