10 Years? Give me a break. You short John?
SECURE vs Pirating is the missing link to the big artists....
The company's Liquid Music System can encrypt digital music so that it cannot be copied illegally -- a key condition for securing support of artists and record companies alarmed by how easy the Internet has made piracy.
Audio is a big tent, hence Intel's 18% ownership.
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New software downloads, records and plays Internet music
By Jeffrey Adam Young
NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE
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Think you're pretty keen because you can play streaming audio and video from the Internet with your RealPlayer without having to suffer through large file downloads?
Think again. That technology is oh-so-1998.
For those keeping up with the breakneck speed of Internet evolution, the hottest new gadget is the RealJukebox. The software comes from RealNetworks, the same folks who brought you RealAudio and the RealPlayer. The RealJukebox is a multifaceted program for your personal computer that plays and records music, acquires music from the Internet and helps users organize the Net's music collections.
RealJukebox, which will eventually be available for the Macintosh, can be downloaded for free at www.real.com/products/realjukebox/index.html.
RealJukebox is still in the first, or beta, stage of development. A "plus" version will be available for sale later this summer. It will have higher bit-rate encoding for better sound and more advanced database management.
As a player, this clever little virtual gadget will pop up on your desktop when audio CDs are placed into your CD-ROM drive. Then, almost magically, RealJukebox will fetch information from the Internet identifying a disc's artist, album name, song titles and genre. If you wish, the device will automatically record the entire CD onto your hard drive in your desired format (MP3 or RealAudio).
In addition, you can listen to the CD at its normal speed while the program records it at an accelerated rate; a 60-minute album will record in about 12 minutes. You can fine-tune the quality of the recordings, trading fidelity for file size — generally, at its highest quality, one minute of music will take up a little less than one meg of hard-drive memory.
What's most impressive here is the ease with which all of these operations happen. The interface is graceful and smart, and easy to understand for anyone who has ever operated a home stereo. It's also flexible, enabling playback of MP3, RealAudio, WAV, a2b (secure music format), AU, MIDI and AIFF formatted music files. Future releases of the RealJukebox will support Liquid Audio and the IBM secure music format.
Once you've recorded some music to the RealJukebox, you can start organizing it. The individual songs will already be filed by artist, album and genre. Using simple drag-and-drop Windows maneuvers, you can create customized song lists for playback. The number of songs and categories can stretch into the thousands; it's limited only by the amount of hard-drive space you are willing to dedicate.
You can use RealJukebox to import music you actually want from the Internet. If you're a bold music-appreciation pioneer, you've probably already hopped onto the Web in search of music in MP3 (MPEG Layer 3) format. And you've probably found an overwhelming amount of underwhelming music.
At the front pages of such vaunted Internet music sites as MP3.com are nearly a hundred albums from largely unknown bands and one or two recordings from mildly popular groups. To find music from popular musicians, you must delve into the seedy, unreliable underworld of illegally recorded MP3 music, since major recording labels have yet to sell their music in digital format over the Internet. Finding MP3 music that you actually want to download is excruciatingly difficult.
But the RealJukebox stands to make things a lot easier with an easy-to-use RealGuide that features mostly high-profile, signed musical artists with legally recorded and distributed music.
RealJukebox has the ability to freely and quickly upgrade to whatever digital standard becomes popular, including the music industry's forthcoming SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative).
RealJukebox features a link to Amazon.com's music store for whatever musical type or artist you have in your collection. From there, you're just a few clicks away from researching and buying a CD that will be sent to your doorstep.
If you're one of the few who bought a Diamond Rio or other portable MP3 player, you'll be pleased to know that RealJukebox will soon feature seamless integration with portable devices. Supported devices will include the Rio and the forthcoming Nomad and Lyra hand-held players. The Lyra, from RCA, will play back RealAudio encoded files and import song, album and artist names from RealJukebox.
RealJukebox will introduce a "gold" version in late fall that will still be free. The price of the "plus" version has not been announced. |
