How I Sold Out to The Man
My Creative Zen Touch had developed a problem with the headphone jack nearly a year ago. The left channel solder joint broke and I couldn’t find a small enough soldering iron to get in there and fix it. Not all is lost, as it has a nice 1.8″ 20GB hard drive which I will surely find useful.
I started researching mp3 players about a month ago to find a suitable replacement. Creative has the Vision M, but I’ve had enough of Creative after my Zen Touch’s headphone issue as well as the huge headache of switching to Vista with my Audigy 4 Pro. Creative hasn’t come up with a suitable driver that works well in Vista with low latency. Vista’s sound system has changed and Creative failed to adapt. EAX no longer works due to the changes to Vista’s sound stack, and Creative actually has the stones to charge for the wrapper they’ve developed to allow for EAX in Vista. Yeah, thanks.
There are some interesting options from companies such as iRiver and Sony, but one brand stood out – The Apple iPod. Now, I disagree with Apple’s reputation as a ‘good’ company whose interests lie in what’s good for the consumer. Just like Microsoft or Intel or any other corporation, their interest is in money and money alone. Steve Jobs has come to the realization that there is money to be had in pretending to have consumer interests in mind. For this reason, I try to avoid Apple products as they are for the most part overpriced for what they are. Sure they’re decent products, better in many respects than some consumer-level products from other companies, but they’re not the epitome of computing perfection carved from pure awesome and running software coded in awesome++ like the Apple fanboys would have you believe. They’re just decent with a less-than-decent price tag.
Anyway, as much as I dislike Apple, they had a pretty solid product. The 5.5g (fifth and a half generation, the September 2006 update to the fifth gen) plays mp3s, which covers my current music library, as well as AAC files. As I imagine many people do, I at first thought one of the A’s in AAC stood for Apple, and thought ‘why would I want to play an Apple proprietary format?’ Turns out AAC stands for ‘Advanced Audio Coding’ and is a standardized lossy compression format set to replace mp3. It just so happens that Apple is one of the few companies using it at the moment, and music from the iTunes Music Store happens to be in AAC format.
One of the reasons I didn’t want to used iTunes was the fact that ITMS purchased music uses Apple’s FairPlay DRM, and as everyone should know, DRM is inherently bad. I don’t support copyright infringement and understand that DRM was partly designed to curb illegal digital media sharing, but in reality it has done nothing to slow it down. Instead, the RIAA and many record labels are using DRM to make money by limiting when and where you can play the music that you have purchased. They are attempting to turn the purchase of music into the purchase of the rights to play a piece of music and limiting what those rights cover. By doing so, they would like to make it so that you have to purchase ‘My Humps’ rights for your mp3 player, your car, your computer, and your stereo, thus earning them 4 times the money for crappy music they don’t deserve any money for in the first place.
In the end however, my discontent with DRM and the RIAA and my strength of character in standing up for my principles took a back seat to my laziness. Am I playing DRM-encrypted music and videos on my iPod? Well, yes, but it’s not keeping me from playing anywhere I want; I only want to play them on my computer and on my iPod. Make no mistake, I will not hesitate to strip the DRM from the files should I want to play them elsewhere. iTunes isn’t keeping me very happy, especially with it’s horrible performance in Vista. For now though the DRM is in tact and the RIAA is happy.
I had already made some purchases off of iTunes. I had purchased a few episodes of The Office that I had missed, and I bought the ‘My Musical’ episode of Scrubs. I now have a working TV tuner card for my computer and don’t miss shows thanks to Vista’s Media Center (more DRM silliness). As soon as I get around to it, I will be converting some of my recorded shows to mpeg4 for use on my iPod. Does this make the media companies cry? Sure does, but I don’t care. I recorded it, so I’m going to watch it where and when I want. I won’t distribute it, because that’s wrong and I understand that. I don’t need Microsoft or Apple to hold my hand on that point.
So here I sit, listening to Carmina Burana on my evil corporate mind control device. Do I feel dirty paying for an Apple product? Well, perhaps I do on occasion, late at night, when I’m contemplating the state of open source software and net neutrality and everything that is free (as in speech) in this world, but normally my laziness is in charge and I don’t give a crap. I can’t take down corporate America and thus The Man by not buying one iPod. Hell, I’m not even a dirty hippie that wants to see corporate America fail. Steve Jobs can have a beer on me because I want just want to listen to some music.
