I was just reading this excerpt on Joystiq about the XBox 360's music capabilities, and it made my head hurt. This is just one point of four:
- Support for unprotected music from your iPod in AAC format with free download (Silver or Gold Account) from Xbox Live Marketplace (requires an Xbox 360 Hard Drive or Memory Unit). Note: Does not support music that was downloaded from the iTunes music store because it is copy protected [That's a big catch!]
Copy protected? Who's COPYING at this point, surely we're just trying to play the tunes here? If this doesn't illustrate how crap DRM is already, I don't know what does. Go read the rest, it's infuriating (and from what I can tell at this stage, not actually Microsoft's fault, but Apple's).
I don't like music any more.
Apple's DRM scheme restricts you to having your purchased files playable on five devices. In order for XBox 360 to play *.m4p (protected AAC) files, it would have to connect to Apple servers and have itself activated as one of the devices. Without hammering some sort of a really special deal with Apple, Microsoft can't build in the capability of playing iTunes Music Store tracks.
Making XBox 360 be able to play *.m4a (manually ripped AAC) files is a good gesture on their part, as they have historically not been willing to play nice with it.
BTW, JHymn is a third party utility that can remove DRM from iTunes Music Store stuff. Thanks to it, I can play the stuff I bought in Winamp.:) Unfortunately, it has not caught up with the changes in iTunes 6 yet.
Posted by: Leons Petrazickis | October 19, 2005 at 01:53
You tell 'em, Alice! BTW, Jhymn doesn't work (yet) with iTunes 6.
Posted by: Cory Doctorow | October 19, 2005 at 05:34