5.1 Sound Card Delivers 3 Streams of iTunes 259
An anonymous reader writes "How do you distribute simultaneous streams of DRM-protected iTunes from a single computer to multiple rooms of the house? Autonomic Controls demonstrated a unique solution at the recent Electronic House Expo (EHX). The company's Media Control Server EX software turns a PC with a 5.1 sound card into a three-zone music distribution server. (Add a second card for six outputs). At EHX, the solution was demonstrated with a multiroom audio system from NuVo, whose keypads could be used to browse and select songs, playlists, genres, artists, etc. The Autonomic software merges WMA and iTunes files into a single library for easy access." I have mixed feelings about this: on one hand, this is a really clever idea and a cool hack. On the other hand, the fact that DRM makes something like this necessary is truly infuriating.
Re:Tech just isn't here yet... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Tech just isn't here yet... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Simple (Score:3, Informative)
This has nothing to do with DRM ... (Score:5, Informative)
BTW, it is *not* helpful to keep blaming DRM for everything and anything. It only dilutes the argument against DRM when your claims are false, giving ammunition to its defenders.
Re:Tech just isn't here yet... (Score:3, Informative)
I've been doing it for 4 years now (give or take) and love it. Had it come out a year earlier I could have saved a lot of dough on a high end CD player.
Re:Something wrong here? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Doesn't everyone have a whole-house audio syste (Score:2, Informative)
What the hell are you talking about? I don't know where you shop, but last I checked you could get about 700,000 feet of suitable analog wiring (be it RCA, speaker wire or 3.5mm jacks) -- enough to wire my entire house, anyway -- for well under $100 at Walmart. And, you know, I'm talking wire of suitable quality as to not be any worse than the DSPs on this soundcard.
Got an attic? Basement?
Re:Simple (Score:3, Informative)
That's unlikely, they have way more titles [usatoday.com]:
Re:Simple (Score:2, Informative)
FairPlay-encrypted audio tracks allow the following:
* The track may be copied to any number of iPod portable music players.[1]
* The track may be played on up to five (originally three) authorized computers simultaneously.[1]
* A particular playlist within iTunes containing a FairPlay-encrypted track can be copied to a CD only up to seven times (originally ten times) before the playlist must be changed.[2]
* The track may be copied to a standard Audio CD any number of times.[2]
o The resulting CD has no DRM and may be ripped, encoded and played back like any other CD. However, CDs created by users do not attain first sale rights and cannot be legally leased, lent, sold or distributed to others by the creator.
o The CD audio still bears the artifacts of compression, so converting it back into a lossy format such as MP3 may aggravate the sound artifacts of encoding (see transcoding). When re-ripping such a CD one could use a lossless audio codec such as AIFF, Apple Lossless, FLAC or WAV however such files take up significantly more space than the original
At this time, it appears that the restrictions mentioned above are hard-coded into QuickTime and the iTunes application, and not configurable in the protected files themselves.
An artifact of Fairplay is that it prevents iTunes customers from using the purchased music directly on any portable digital music player other than the Apple iPod, Motorola ROKR E1, Motorola SLVR, Motorola RAZR V3i,or iPhone.
Re:Simple (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Tech just isn't here yet... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Simple (Score:3, Informative)
Re:non-Americans - where do you get your music? (Score:3, Informative)