Jazz Odyssey

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Blogs and news sites are all abuzz over the "workaround" to the Napster-To-Go DRM that allows you to "bypass" the copy protection and burn "hundreds of thousands" of songs to CD. I’m not exactly sure why this is shocking or even mildly surprising. The tools for directing audio output to .wav files using plugins or virtual sound cards have been around for years. But this should be viewed in the context of the relative complexity in setting up your computer to do this….not that it’s overly complex but most folks are intimidated by instructions involving plugins and moving .dll files around, so we’ll have to see how widespread this "hack" actually gets. Stay tuned–I’m sure stats on the repercussions are forthcoming.

In the meantime the technological arms race will continue, with established businesses pushing the improvement of DRM to protect their content while people with lots of time and technical know-how will create workarounds.

The bottom line is that if you can hear it, you can record it.