A Different Perspective

DRM shortens iPod battery life:

“Cory Doctorow:
Playing DRM-crippled music will shorten the battery life of your music-player. Listening to DRMed iTunes songs on an iPod shortens the battery life by eight percent; playing back WMA-crippled files on a device from Creative Labs can knock 25 percent off the life of your device’s battery. The extra battery-drain is attributed to the computation necessary to decrypt the files and verify their licenses.

We found similar discrepancies with other PlaysForSure players. The Archos Gmini 402 Camcorder maxed out at 11 hours, but with DRM tracks, it played for less than 9 hours. The iRiver U10, with an astounding life of about 32 hours, came in at about 27 hours playing subscription tracks. Even the iPod, playing back only FairPlay AAC tracks, underperformed MP3s by about 8 percent. What I’m saying is that while battery life may not be a critical issue today, as it was when one of the original hard drive players–the Creative Nomad Jukebox–lasted a pathetic 4 hours running on four AA nickel-metal-hydride rechargeables (and much worse on alkalines), the industry needs to include battery specs for DRM audio tracks or the tracks we’re buying or subscribing. Yet, here’s another reason why we should still be ripping our music in MP3: better battery life, the most obvious reason being universal device compatibility.

Link

(Thanks, Matt!)

“

(Via Boing Boing.)

And yesterday I experienced something very strange and troubling. ALL OF MY DRM’d music purchased rightfully from iTunes quit playing on my iPod. I just checked to make sure it still works on my computer, and it does. I’ll try to update my iPod again and see if that helps. It was VERY annoying, as I actually have made it a habit over the past couple years to start buying music I really want on iTunes.

Okay, curiosity got the best of me, so I updated right now. Everything’s working again. I updated with USB yesterday before getting on metrolink and spending most of the day in Los Angeles (with only music I had ripped from CD or downloaded as mp3s available to play), but today I used the firewire cable. I don’t know if that made the difference or what caused the DRM issue, but until now I’d been pretty ambivalent about DRM. I think it’s a bad idea generally, but I understand what they’re trying to do. But once it starts getting in the way of the only function music serves… to be listened to… I have issues.

I’m thinking about burning all of my DRM’d music to CDs and ripping them back as mp3s so I know this will never happen again.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 17th, 2006 at 11:38 am and is filed under Life, Music, Pop Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.