03 | April | 2007 | Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog

Well its official that Apple will offer a DRM free solution; BUT at a fairly hefty premium of 20p (~$0.39) per track. You could argue you’re being asked to pay more for less!

Ok, so the quality is meant to be higher – although it does leave question begging – does that mean that normal DRM’d tracks are substandard, and that buying CDs and ripping them is still the better option? Oh, and the interoperability issue – well, the files are Apple’s AAC – so to be seriously portable, you’ll need to know how to transcode to MP3 (or Ogg Vorbis or FLAC to avoid quality loss), and how many high street punters know how to do that?

Given the finger pointing and sabre rattling coming from the European Commission and governments, are Apple likely to be out of the woods? According to the Financial Times today (Brussels to target Apple’s iTunes site) probably not as it would appear that Apple are the subject of an investigation for violating EU regulations on cross border purchasing with regards to country restrictions on purchases. Something I find kind of ironic given the successful BPI attack against CD-Wow (see recent posts) for its sourcing of CDs.

del.icio.us tags: BPI, CD-Wow, Apple, DRM, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, EU, Financial Times

As webmaster for the Basingstoke Tappers I get an excuse to play with the web in a more serious manner. Recently I was asked to create a promotional video for them. Fortunately the last couple of years the summer shows have been recorded professionally and made available on DVD – which meant with the use of Video ReDo I could easily extract clips and audio that I could use. Although deciding what would make a good clip was a lot harder.

Having gathered the images and clips I wanted to use I pieced it together with MPEG Wizard (from Womble.com), which once you’ve got a feel for the application is brilliant – sequencing and setting up some very smooth transitions, overlayed audio etc etc. for a $100 application it is very impressive. My only critism of MPEG wizard was that the codecs I tried to use didn’t seem to encode in a way that I expected(one of a fair range of output codecs) – I certainly had playback problems when I put the produced AVI on another machine. So I simply used Auto Gordian Knot to transcode to a format that I knew to be playable on anything (and tweak the compression ratio etc) .

The final step – zap it up to Google Video to host and add a link into the CMS that we use to run the site. The facility to configure the video settings for Google meant the video looks like it is actually embedded straight into the site (the only give away is the little Google logo). You can see the result at www.BasingstokeTappers.co.uk/video.