Apple deletes RealNetworks
p2pnet.net Virus News:- If you’re one of the relative few who buys at the RealNetworks’ site, your money could be even further down the drain.
“Apple Computer has quietly updated its iPod software so that songs purchased from RealNetworks’ online music store will no longer play on some of the Mac maker’s popular MP3 players,” says CNET News, going on:
“The move could render tunes purchased by many iPod owners unplayable on their music players. For the last four months, RealNetworks has marketed its music store as the only Apple rival compatible with the iPod, following the company’s discovery of a way to let its customers play their downloaded tunes on Apple’s MP3 player.”
Apple’s Steve Jobs and Real’s Rob Glaser have been metaphorically duking it out for quite some time.
And it all boils down to the fact that Apple doesn’t want music from the RealPlayer store to be playable on iPods. So Real came up with Harmony which lets people buy Real tracks and hear them on any player, Jobs’ desires notwithstanding.
But as CNET says, “The high-tech feud may be as grounded in public relations as it is in genuine technology development, but it highlights what remains a serious issue in the digital music business. Unlike CDs, songs sold by competing online stores are often not directly compatible with different brands of MP3 players.
“Songs purchased from Apple’s iTunes store can only be played directly on an Apple iPod, while songs purchased from Napster or MSN Music can only be played directly on a device that supports Microsoft’s audio format, for example.”
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See:-
unplayable - Apple fights RealNetworks’ ‘hacker tactics’, CNET News, December 14, 2004
duking it out – Glaser vs Jobs, p2pnet, August 18, 2004
December 15th, 2004 at 1:22 pm
We are not really talking about “MP3 players” at all, but players that are using files encoded in brand-specific Digital Rights Management (DRM). All DRM brand-dependent by definition. While there may eventually be standards-based file formats, the keys will always be brand specific as that is the whole point of DRM : to ensure that players obey their agreements with the DRM vendors, or risk no longer being marketable as content is not encoded to their player-keys.
Russell McOrmond – http://www.flora.ca/
December 15th, 2004 at 5:41 pm
I was going to buy an iPod, but this move by Apple has talked me out of it. Congratulations, Steve.
December 15th, 2004 at 9:23 pm
My question is, how long before the media cabal rams laws down our throats that force hardware manufacturers to build media playback devices that will not play back content that DOES NOT have DRM? Sure, your old MP3 player will work. What happens when it breaks?
P.S. Don’t be fooled into thinking you are “purchasing” songs from iTunes, Napster II, etc… You are paying for temporary rights to listen to a file. As far as that music goes, you don’t own ANYTHING.
December 15th, 2004 at 11:25 pm
You can’t be serious. Not supporting Real’s download store is enough to turn you off Apple? Apple is a questionable choice, I admit, but Real is a million times worse.
The last RealPlayer I installed was worse than any virus. It ate up system resources, rewrote registry keys, reset file associations, over and over and over, without asking once. It was like a demon in my computer; I almost had to call a priest to perform an exorcism.
Real stopped mattering in the world of digital media back in, what, 1998? They are dead; just no one has bothered to tell them yet.
Anyone who still uses Real to stream stuff (Amazon, I’m looking at you) sucks.