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Music Media

MP3 Firms Clash Over Copyrighted Code 144

Posted by CmdrTaco from the mine-no-mine-no-mine-no-mine dept.
Bored@Home sent us a link to a news.com article that talks about PlayMedia suing NullSoft for $20 million. PlayMedia alleges that NullSoft is violating a copyright and uses code illegally.
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MP3 Firms Clash Over Copyrighted Code More

MP3 Firms Clash Over Copyrighted Code

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  • 1) mv /dev/audio /dev/audio-bak; touch /dev/audio

    2) start your favourite proprietary audio player program (if any exist)...

    3) smile as you rip off the mafioso RIAA

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad

  • Guess what, nobody gives a flying fuck if you're not interested in a particular topic. Do you think it's your duty to inform us whenever you're faced with a subject that doesn't immediately spark your interest (assuming anything does)? "This is boring, waaaaah!"

    Shut up.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad

  • I doubt NullSoft even has $20 million. How many people actually register their shareware? It'd take a whole lot of registered shareware to make $20 million, and I don't think that they've managed to sell any corporate licenses of their ShoutCast server yet...
  • The problem is that X11amp, AFAIK, still uses the AMP engine (as Winamp used to do). The AMP engine is really bad. If you compare NullSoft's Nitrane engine to the AMP engine, Nitrane typically uses less than 1/2 of the CPU cycles that AMP does. Even with a slight gain in speed running a Linux/X setup rather than win95, Win95+Winamp still comes out faster than Linux+X+X11Amp, and Nitrane does a much better job of handling imperfect streams as well.

  • Amp (Score:1)

    by cduffy ( 652 )
    ...is made by Tomislav Uzelac. He's not the one doing this.
  • If Nullsoft paid Uzelac, they didn't have to abide by the licence he distributed it to everyone else under.

  • Oops (Score:1)

    by cduffy ( 652 )
    Very, very sorry for the previous misinformed post.
  • Posted by oliverc:

    I was just wondering something after reading the story on news.com
    On http://www.playmediasystems.com/clients.htm Mediaplay says that the below stated.

    "Computer Scientist and PlayMedia co-founder Tomislav Uzelac invented and licensed the AMP(TM) L3d 0.7 Series Engine to a 19-year-old student and audio applications hobbyist named Justin Frankel in September of 1997."

    But on http://www.playmediasystems.com/playmedia_sues_nul lsoft.htm Mediaplay stat's

    "PlayMedia's lawsuit alleges that the code for AMP was written by PlayMedia principal Tomislav Uzelac and thereafter copied to create WinAmp as a derivative work. Nullsoft attempted to obtain a license to use AMP in its software early last year, the suit alleges, but an agreement was not reached."

    Are there different terms to "licensed"? I Don't understand how one can stat something on one page of there yet another on another section? Will there be fallow up stores of this? Did anyone contact Nullsoft and ask them about the subject? I am a Registered Winamp user and don't wish to see such a great little company get hammered by legal costs.

  • Posted by Windigo The Feral (NYAR!):

    Myself, I'm somewhat less interested in the performance of Freeamp/Winamp on "lower end" machinery than I am with, say, performace of Linux MP3 decoders/players on low-end machinery. Then again, I tend to avoid Win95 stuff on general principle. :)

    Anyhoos...to be honest, I've never had the chance to muck about with playing MP3s on a Linux box. I do know that DOSamp (which is possibly the fastest DOS MP3 player in existance) will play most MP3s without skipping as long as one downmixes and downsamples 44.1KHz stereo ones (so that they play at 22KHz mono) on a 486 DX2/50. Unfortunately, DOSamp doesn't play those odd little "mp2 1/2" MP3s (MPEG-2 level 3).

    I have *heard* that Cubic Player is somewhat comparable, but docs there recommend at least a DX4/100...of note, though, is the fact that Cubic Player is now open source and a Linux port is reportedly underway [yay].

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Hmm. You mean like X11Amp? (www.x11amp.org) It's not quite at the same level of some other players, but it is moving along fast (I've been hacking on it for the past month, roughly...). Instead of talking about how you don't like what's out there, why not start coding?
  • Actually, you *can* use it, even in countries with brain-damaged views on patentability of algorithms. It's just not legal. :-) I've been happily using bladeenc for quite a while now, and Fraunhofer (sp?) hasn't come knocking at my door... The only people that they can (practically speaking, not legally) go after are the producers and distributors of the software. And if they're based in a country with a sane government, they're safe. And people can and will download and use it from other countries, even though it's illegal.
  • Actually, 'potatoe' is a perfecktly good olde englisch spelling. I'm kinda english (by birth) and an anglophyle of sorts, so I should know.
    It may be welsh. I definitely know it flew when chaucer was around. That trailing 'E' absolutely *abounds* in oldE illumated documents.

  • I've browsed the above comments, and come to a rather severe conclusion:
    RMS is right!
    When mere humans feel ownership over a basic mathematical principle, it's like sheep vs cow wars all over again. We have a terrain, built by God. Whose paradigm shall predominate?
    Forgodssake, look up the fights over MOVEABLE TYPE!
    I'm just plain fried over shit like this. My patience is at an end.
    We are a we, aren't we?

  • This is a copyright suit, not a patent one. Prior art invalidates a patent, but if you have a copyright, you have rights to the expression (roughly, the way you coded it), not to the algorithm.


  • MacAmp
    MacAmp Lite
    SoundApp
    Mpecker
    etc...
  • The RIAA needs to get over this fact that they're gonna loose, ...

    The RIAA has many legal tools at hand because it has money. They may win some key injunctions and get closer to making mp3's contraband material. They are a special interest group and they are interested in closing the market to get the cash flow. I have seen some bad laws passed and they have a chance with the effort they are pushing. If sex toys can be illegal, you can bet mp3's will be next.
  • AMP has never been liked, especially since Brian started playing bigshot in all of this. I quote, from a writeup done a year ago:
    "The AMP engine, which originally spawned the proliferation of players we see today, has fallen off the scene, as noted by the fact that the announced release of AMP 1.0 got a lukewarm response at best from the audience -- there was no substantial demo of the new player, and they made strong effort to toot their horn about having the fastest decoding engine; but with WinAMP's new Nitrane engine and the rising speed of processors out there, the contest for the fastest decoder becomes ridiculous: on my PII-233, MP3 decoding takes up ~3% of my CPU at most (that's unofficial, folks)."
    People didn't like AMP then, and hate AMP now. Nullsoft had already separated out their MP3 decoding engine, calling it Nitrane, and was preparing to resell/license it. Unless Justin is a complete moron (which I don't believe), I don't think he would have walked away from AMP discussions, lied about the rewrite, and turned around and essentially tried to resell AMP's engine as Nitrane. Justin's not stupid and more importantly, Justin is a provably competent coder (duh); Justin is capable of having made Nitrane and it seems a reasonable proposition that he did. Let the courts discover the truth.

    As for the future of AMP, do you think that anyone would ever want to work with Brian Litman? Do you think that anyone would want to license software from a company who sued its only potential customer? Would you want to license second-rate code? Clearly, if AMP had any future, it is gone now.

    Do us all a favor and die quietly.
    David E. Weekly (dew)

  • This is a joke right ?

    I think you'll find 'potatoes' were brought to the 'Old World' by Raleigh. If the word existed before then, it was a Native American word. It definitely isn't old-English or even cod-old-English.

    BTW 'anglophile' is the generally accepted spelling.

    It may be welsh. I definitely know it flew when chaucer was around.

    Nope. Nope.

    It entered English in the C16th from Spanish who got it from Taino Indians.

    -Simon
  • Yes. Didn't you guys get taught anything about the discovery of America by Europeans ?

    Columbus ? Walter Raleigh establishing the first colony in Roanoke - bringing back the potato and tobacco to Queen Elizabeth I ?

    Europe didn't have potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco or presidential sex scandals before the discovery of America.

    -Simon

  • BTW, you woudln't notice a resource difference if you're using the same mp3's. Decoding != resources. Decoding = cpu cycles. And there is a difference, just you don't know how to see it.


    I wish you would convince my sysadmin at work that CPU cycles aren't a company wide resource so I could run rc5des clients on our SGI/Crays, and Ultra Enterprise servers.

    :-)


    /dev

  • WinAMP (Score:1)

    by MrKai ( 5131 )
    You tell'em, baby!

    It's nice to see someone that at least has some experience about a thing posting a comment in a cool, calm and professional tone.

    I loved the part about mtv for Linux, BTW :)

    Now i the MacAmp (oops...might be time to rename...) could work out shoutcast/icecast support...

    -K
  • I use X11 amp. While it uses a lot of memory when playing, its quite fast and uses almost no cpu on my system. Very nice program with the source code of course. Interesting that I've not seen X11 amp discussed to any great degree here. It slices, dices and plays mp3's too.

  • Besides, you don't have to pay for it, you can use it for as long as you wish, and nothing will happen it won't criple like most mp3 players I've seen.

    it's shareware, so you technically do have to pay for it if you intend to continue using it beyond the trial period. the fact that they don't hassle you about it is just them being overly nice to all the cheap bastards...
  • oh? .. hehe,

    so what exactly are resources again? =)
  • t'is unfortunate that people with your "don't give a shit" attitude exist.. people like you should be brought out into the courtyard and raped by deformed circus midgets on estrogen... =)







  • me (Score:1)

    by aphr0 ( 7423 )
    I, for one, registered it. Just because you're not being forced or annoyed into registering something dosen't mean you shouldn't. Quality software should be supported, and winamp is definitely quality software.

  • i'm serious. if you will go around and search
    for articles that do not interest you, then
    comment on your disinterest on said article,
    people will flame your ass! it's simple logic!
    if it doesn't interest you, leave it alone, and
    keep it to yourself. speaking of which, if you
    find slashdot's pick of topics so disinteresting,
    i suggest you find a different venue of reading
    material.
  • maybe its just me, but MP3 sounds damn realistic to me.

  • great... (Score:1)

    by DMC ( 10005 )
    now we have mp3 companies fighting each other. why do i have a feeling that they are all going to miss out while they are whining in the court room?

    the whining will more than likely stunt or kill the growth of mp3's move into the masses.

    damon
  • ROTFLMAO!!!

    (Sorry, couldn't resist)

    *whips tear from eye*
  • No kidding!! I listen to some Shoutcast streams the entire time while at work. This thing racks up hundreds of minutes of playtime on a crappy 90Mhz computer with a very old and unstable Windows 95 install. Nullsoft deserves a LOT of respect for making a fast, solid product!
  • What does the RIAA have to do with this? Or is this just more geek conspiracy theory?
  • I read the article. Does the article say that RIAA has anything to do with this whatsoever?

    According to your logic:

    China is part of the UN. France is part of the UN. Ergo, France is behind all those human rights violations in East Timor.
  • You stupid little monkey.

    "Winamp deliberatly took amp's code and wrote a shell around it" HAH!. I scoff at thee, if you'd care to read the documentation included with winamp 1.x and some of the early releases of 2.x you'll see that there's full credit, and even legal licensing information aswell. Which, last time I checked, allows them to sell it. Besides, you don't have to pay for it, you can use it for as long as you wish, and nothing will happen it won't criple like most mp3 players I've seen.

    You sir (or lad) are precicely what is wrong with the online community today, uninformed and uneducated.

    BTW, you woudln't notice a resource difference if you're using the same mp3's. Decoding != resources. Decoding = cpu cycles. And there is a difference, just you don't know how to see it.
  • The type of resources I was specifically adressing was memory. As defined in many books on computer hardware, "resources" always refers to memory and NOTHING related to the cpu.
  • Actually, the mp3 format isn't necessarily to blame, you'll have far more problems with your Soundblaster making mp3s sound like crap.

    Not to beat a dead horse, but I heard the Empeg unit play some songs through its Xaudio DSP, and 128k encoded MP3s sounded crystal clear! I was shocked at how loud we could turn it up without hearing any artifacts in the songs.

    Those cheapie DSPs on your soundblaster/gus/etc cards are more of the problem than the codec or the bitrate. Just something to keep in mind, everyones mileage probably varies! :)

    -brian
  • I've seen a fair amount of improvement in WinAmp. While I can't tell if they're still using Amp, I really don't think they're that dumb to have given credit at first and then to have pulled the credit out later.
  • Yeah the amount is ludicrious.
  • Umm where did you get that idea?

    According to Play Media's web site the only company that their CEO is said to have worked at is US West.

    And the people who actually write the software don't even say who they've worked for, don't you think they'd be making a big deal if they'd worked at MCA or BMG?
  • Unless he signed something that said he couldn't write a decoder I don't see the problem.

    Just because he saw the AMP code before he wrote his doesn't mean he didn't write the code. Heck that's like saying that the Delorian is a rip off of a GM car because the guy who made it used to work for them and obviously saw car designs while he worked there.

    I guess if we want to follow what you said Linux would be theft from the BSD guys too. I won't believe you (and I hope no one else does too) if you say that Linus never saw any of the BSD source, or for that matter any of the contributors either.
  • Playing devil's advocate here, but I was wondering . . .

    Assuming that implementing a secure-music system in hardware is completely unfeasible, it might be possible to devise an audio processing scheme that would subvert the next logical step after /dev/audio redirection, i.e. MP3 compression.

    It seems plausible that a secure-music system could add certain artifacts to raw digital audio which would wreak havoc with perceptual encoding schemes. So the raw data obtained from /dev/audio would sound all right, but the finished MP3 would be hopelessly mangled. Macrovision for MPEG, if you will. (might even be doable with VQF, AAC/MP4 et. al.)

    Anyway, this is observing how some CD passages can point out annoying idiosyncracies of the L3 codec. Anyone know if such "flukes" could be engineered in this way?
  • If you use an MP3 player, which is it?

    WinAMP registered;
    WinAMP unregistered;
    Old WinAMP free;
    Sonique
    FreeAMP
    X11AMP
    etc...

    Or something like that.

    AS
  • WinAMP is better still, and well worth the 10 dollar registration. I like the options, speed, and reliability of WinAMP...

    I'm too busy to take and add to FreeAMP to suit my tastes, so I stick to WinAMP...

    AS
  • People who like portability in their music; a 3mb mp3 vs a 30mb wav, despite the loss in quality. It's akin to your asking...

    What's up with that fixation on JPEG? Who gives a damn anyway?

    Any answer you can give for one, you can give for the other, and I'm sure you'll think JPEG is useless too.

    AS
  • What, brave enough to make an insult under cover of anonymity?

    Its a legitamate trade off between quality, size, and performance. Not wanting to waste bandwidth on flames, but it's like labeling those who enjoy JPEG pictures blind, or who enjoy fast food without taste or culture. If you happen to be driving a no-compromise car, with a no-compromise engine, and no-compromise performance, its easy to label all other cars as weak, ineffectual, and pointless, except that they hit different price, performance, convenience points. I would like to hear what you use to listen and share music with if not mp3 or some other similar compressed standard.

    AS
  • Not saying its technically difficult, because it isn't, but it's laborious and time consuming and expensive as hell, which is why Fraunhoffer has a patent on the perceptual encoding used in the best MP3 encoders. It isn't the encoding itself, which is stupidly easy for MP3, but the special discard functions that cost money.

    If I'm not mistaken, here's how MP3 encoding works. This is the simple, easy, free part:
    Take a wave source; break it up into samples. Take a sample, use discrete cosine/sine transforms, and break it into a bunch of frequencies and coefficients. The compression part is the expensive part; select components that are inaudible, masked, or undetectable and discard or discount their value. Which frequencies do you want to throw out? That's what Fraunhoffer has patented. You could pick and choose until it sounds right, but that is essentially what Fraunhoffer did. The problem is that you need to experiment with many different kind of instruments, music, data types, and against very many people to ensure broadest possible reach, and not just optimization against a few people who may have odd hearing response.

    Once the proprietary part is done, you have a bunch of coefficients for cos and sin terms, which are further compressed using Huffman bitrate encoding, which is fine, though not the best. This is free too, as the algorithm is pretty well known. Morse code happens to work on a similar principle; frequent characters get the shorter combinations of dits and dahs, while the rare characters get the longer combinations.

    Decoding is left as an exercise for the reader =)


    AS
  • Well duh!

    Even a JPEG at highest quality encoding has visual artifacts visible to an eye trained to see such things, and if the source image is of poor quality, the artifacts themselves may get worse.

    So what? MP3 quality is about 'good enough', not best. A Toyota Camry is good enough, where a Corvette or Ferrari or Volvo or Mercedes is best. Not everyone can afford those high end cars, and likewise, I'm not sure we could afford in memory, hard disk space, and CPU cycles a much better standard than MP3

    AS
  • They didn't patent the software, the encryption method, or the concept.

    What they have patented is the perceptual encoding schema; the data this research institute gathered was which frequencies, amplitudes, and combinations of the two are important, with all the others either discared since they aren't perceptably audible, are represented by other data, or cannot be heard outright. Anyone can make up this data, and many fast encoders out there do that for 'good enough' quality, but they have noticible artifacts and errors in encoding. Fraunhoffer's data is exactly a statistical model and sample of audible frequencies and dominant frequencies.

    I don't know how to make an analogy; Perhaps with a loose analogy. The data Fraunhoffer holds is like a survey of a quarter of the people in the US. If you want to use their info, you can pay for it. If you don't want to pay for it, you can go out and get this info yourself, which is prohibatively expensive, or you can guess what the information is, with much larger margins of error and such. In the same way then if you buy the codec from Fraunhoffer, you can get the smallest best quality files, or you can go out and collect the data yourself, or you can guess based of your own hearing and reasonable assumptions what data is important and what isn't.

    If that analogy didn't work, think of Fraunhoffer as cataloguing all the stars visible with a telescope, and sorting the data by size, color, distance, etc. Either you can buy this data to create your star maps, you can guess(ick), or you can go get it yourself. Fraunhoffer has some useful info, and as such have every right to sell it, I think.

    AS
  • I would like to find out where these statistics are, personally.

    If you only ask professional listeners, then it is without doubt you would get a lower score than if you asked Joe Blow at home.

    Another difference is testing differences. If you play an MP3 and a high quality vinyl on a high end system, even Joe Blow has a chance at discerning the loss of quality in the MP3; but if you play both on the same system that Joe Blow uses at home(cheap mini-stereo, most likely), then I willing to say the ratings would be bumped up from indistinquishable.

    Analogy for those who are clueless; even novices can discern wine quality in the ideal setup in Napa Valley, but at home, with poor temperature control, mixed quality of foods, and inappropriate food/wine combinations, those novices wouldn't be able to tell a medium quality wine from a high quality wine, though they can still tell cheap wine is crap.

    So give us those stats, AC!

    AS
  • I made several posts about a previous thread thinking of writing a free open music compression standard... The code, the algorithms, the math behind MP3s are all free and freely available. What isn't available, and that Fraunhoffer charges to liscense for, is the statistical sampling of the populace at large. This is hard to do for the open source movement, unless there is released a self correcting self calibrating quality compensating sampling method that people can download, run a battery of tests, and upload the data back to a central agency to use the data into the new compression format.

    If that made no sense to you, some background. MP3 is composed of 2 compression methods, neither of which is proprietary. A data stream is broken into chunks, samples if you will. A sample is composed of several frequencies of different strengths added together. A fourier transform is used to break this sample into the component frequencies and their relative strenghts. Great, we just took raw data and broke it into frequencies and amplitudes. If we got rid of Fraunhoffer's contribution, you could just perform a Huffman encode on the data itself, but don't expect much compression, maybe 4:1 or 3:1 if you're lucky. I am pulling this number out of my butt. However, don't expect the 10:1 compression that MP3 routinely achieves!

    The part of MP3 compression that Fraunhoffer spent a lot of money discovering and is charging for is a special set of filters that when applied to the component frequencies and amplitudes that are returned by the Fourier transform actually throw away data that is unheard by 9x% of the populace. Data that can't be heard, that isn't noticed, that is masked by other frequences are all thrown out. Since this is the patented part, I can't actually say how much is thrown out; If we say 0.66% of the data is thrown away and still leaves a 9x% quality to the sound, then we have something workable. Now if we apply the Huffman encoding on it, we can get that 3:1 or 4:1 compression on top of the 'perceptual encoding'. A 10mb wave is now 3mb after perceptual encoding, and then 1mb if the low value of 3:1 is applied. This is pretty close to MP3, since a 1 minute 10mb wave is readily encoded into a 1 minute 1mb MP3.

    I actually agree that Fraunhoffer has every right to charge for the labor and services for the data they collected. Perhaps someone could talk to distributed.net into making some sort of data collection utility so an open source alternative to Fraunhoffer's perceptual encoding could be created. Someone has to defray the costs, effort, and initiative Fraunhoffer displayed in collecting this data.

    I may hate it if some capitalist discovers a way to collect and process SETI data 10x faster and decides to charge for it, but hey, if this is something that took years an millions to discover, it also seems appropriate that the costs must be defrayed, either through government support(taxes) or through capitalistic economics. I prefer capitalistic econmics over the blundering government most of the time.

    Counterpoint?

    AS
  • I don't actually know that they patented the data itself, which means it's theoretically possible that they could give you terabytes of information if you asked for it, and it would still be useless. Rather they have a process of variable precision and weight as well as discard functions, so while common chemical compounds, such as steel, aren't patented, there very well can be processes that produce said steel that are patented, even though the chemical composition, data, and reaction theories are all public knowledge. In this sense if Fraunhoffer does this, ie use public knowledge in a unique way that is their perceptual encoding, I think it is fair game for them to charge for it.

    If all they have is reams of data, they have the right to charge for a processing fee, esp if their funding isn't totally self sufficient.

    AS
  • I actually find I can hear distortions on my music on my PC system. I'm not sure what a flange type distortion, but bells and whistles, once shimmery and very clear, come out sounding like lots of slightly disharmonic bits of metal clanging around. They still ring, but their tone is not so pure. And I can hear very audible distortion on some extended sythnesizer notes, but I admit I'm also not using Fraunhoffer's 'amazing' compression, instead using some of the faster 'good enough' compression.

    AS
  • The AMP engine sucks anyway... the original versions of winamp that had them were buggy and inaccurate, and couldnt handle 'skips' in the stream. The new Nitrane engine is SO much better. Ive been running it on a 36 hour playlist for several days straignt with no problems. The whole lawsuit is just pure crap (With the RIAA involved no doubt...) LET Nullsoft LIVE!!!

  • Well (Score:1)

    by Otto ( 17870 )
    Sure you could probably do something to that effect, but the sound would definitely be noticable in the wav file as well. The down side about mp3 is that it actually removes a lot of the frequencies. Add a bunch of frequencies and mp3 falls flat. But, you hear those frequencies too, as mp3 only really kills off the ones you are least likely to hear.

  • If you wanna make pretty MP3s, use a SoundBlaster Live! or equivalent. Digital CD-in and an EMU10K1 DSP. extremely clear.

    Mike
    --

  • I`ve found that down at 112 and 128KBps there is a definate lack of sound quality (especially among the highs) so I tend to encode at 160KBps 48KHz or better.

    I`m using an L3enc compatible encoder (bladeenc actually) and playback with Winamp. I can`t live without either one.

    pardon the babble.



  • Tone hearing-impaired, maybe, but not tone deaf
  • How can Frauenhoffer have a patent on this?

    They are a German tax-financed research institute. Software patents are not granted in the EU and hopefully never will be. Did they patent it in the US?
  • I still don't like their selling scheme though, since it is a breach of the nice academic tradition to publish your results freely. Being a german government sponsered institute their results should be free for academic and non-commercial usage. Heck, even the 100% commercial StarDivision Inc. allows free-usage of their OfficeSuit for those purposes.
  • Everyone knows that the MP3 format was invented by Al Gore.

    Gore 1999!
    Gore 1999!
    Gore 1999!

  • Apparently the RIAA has still got their head up their ass. It's well known that they're spearheading the Secure Music initiative, I think that they probably just convinced (or threatened) PlayMedia into suing NullSoft. Once again, RIAA bullies the little guys - indirectly though it may be. The RIAA needs to get over this fact that they're gonna loose, and stop trying to push around the little guys that are actually helping the progression of modern music.
  • Is it just me, or does RIAA seem to be the Devil?

    Did RIAA get the idea in their collective head that if they killed the most popular (win32) player they'd be able to catch up with mp3?

  • it might be the first, but I'd assume that Grand Royal has a corp license (maybe a free one since they kick so much ass) but at any rate they're a big deal record label, shoutcasting 24/7 stuff from their albums.

    http://www.grandroyal.com/grRadio/index.html

    Coldcut/NinjaTune may have one as well although I think they're using RealServer right now for their live streams.

    I think a LOT of major players in the music industry are realizing the power of Mp3/Winamp/Shoutcast right now, and this is going to spark a LOT of legal battles concerning who REALLY owns the music, the record companies or the artists.
  • I dunno if I'd call mp3 worthless, but it certainly isn't top of the line, that is for sure. Not that I am abig supporter of it or anything but to name one, VQF, is better than mp3 in most respects. The sound quality is better and the size is smaller (the only downside is that decoding it is a little more work for the old processor). Now we just need one twice as good that's open source. Anyone wanna help me? hehehehe.
  • >And if the winamp guys had balls, tehy would >release it as GPL

    And you you had any balls. you wouldn't post this as an 'Anonymous Coward'. :)

  • Im sorry, but this crap im hearing now is just total BS. I mean, NullSoft has made the "best" MPEG 2, & 3 decoder I have used. If people in the computer industry wanna be total pricks, then they can goto h311 for all im concerned.

    NullSoft ROCKS.

  • Erik, your an IDIOT. WinAMP is the only good MP3 player out there. Why do you think soooooo many people use it? Not because NullSoft tells them to, or any other company for that matter. The makers of the AMP engine are just fools, I hope their whole idea of suing NullSoft goes bad on them.

    -Jarred
  • Well now that the software is out I doubt that killing the maker will have any effect on MP3s. I think it is alittle late to try to kill the MP3. I have well over 200 mp3s and even if there was NO new winamp's etc.. it wouldn't matter to me. Face it Mp3s are here. Trying to stop to use to MP3s would be like shuting down all the porn sites on the internet. It ant happin'!
  • Do you have any proof that the RIAA convinced the makers of AMP to sue or is this the usual speculation / conspiracy theory?
  • I think their heads are stuck... If they want to sue someone, sue Microsoft!
  • Doesn't the RIAA get its funding from a tax imposed on all recording media and equipment? Should this be legal?
  • I don't care how much it cost them to get the results, natural measurements are not patentable. You can't patent the speed of light, you can't patent the range of colors that human beings can see, so why should you be able to patent the range of sounds that human beings can hear? It makes no sense, it's unethical, and it should be illegal. The fact that they hold a patent on this data means that no-one can use this data even if they gather it themselves, because, provided the data is valid, anyone else doing the same thing will record the same data within a certain error rate.
    Perhaps they could use some sort of compilation copyright, although that's really, really iffy, but there is no way they should be allowed a patent on this stuff. I can't say that enough times.
    Your analogy about star maps doesn't work because, in that situation, I'm allowed to gather the same data myself. Would it be reasonable to say that I'm not allowed to make my own star maps from my own collected data just because someone else has done it first? No, of course it wouldn't be reasonable, just like Fraunhofer's patent isn't reasonable.
  • But I don't see my comment here now. Either it's a bug, or I just forgot to hit the submit button.
    Anyhow, I have two things to say about your assertion that Fraunhofer has every right to do what it does. The first is that Fraunhofer has at least partial public funding. The rest of its funds come from contract research, where most of the contracts belong to public entities. So, if the perceptual encoding research is paid by public money, why are royalties required to use the research?
    The other thing I have to point out is that under any sane system of patent laws, and in fact even under the insane ones like the US uses, natural measurements are not patentable. Patenting natural measurements is essentially what Fraunhofer has done here. You evidently agree with me on that, which is why I'm confused about the way you seem to think that an Open Source alternative can be made. The patent stops anyone, even if they do the same research all over again, or make up their own research method, from using the results that Fraunhofer got. If Fraunhofer's results are not flawed, then no-one will get different results than thos Fraunhofer got, and they will not be able to use their results. So, in my opinion, this is a patent that should never have been granted since it's a flagrant violation of patent standards. Also, even if the patent is only on use of such data in a sound compression scheme, then it's also unreasonable, since that's not "non-obvious". In fact, that's about the only obvious use of such data.
  • Well, yes. But, if you've patented the shape of this ideal chair, isn't that pretty much the same thing as patenting the data? I mean, the data is freely available, it's just that no-one can use it.
  • Well, yes, their patent may not only be on the data, that's true. But, as I understand it, and I admit I'm no audio expert, their results are basically a set of ranges and special conditions that occur in recorded sounds that most people don't even hear. I would consider those ranges to be natural measurements, and I don't really see how anyone can disagree on that point. And as you point out, their patent isn't technically on that data, because a patent has to be on a process or invention of some kind. I have not seen Fraunhofer's patent, but I imagine it boils down to: "discard these particular ranges from a sound stream". In other words, any set of data can be turned into a set of instructions as anyone who has ever taken a computer science course should know. If that's not how Fraunhofer's patent goes, and we really are open to make our own alternative, well then, I won't worry, and I agree that there's nothing wrong with rewarding them for their efforts (although I do get the feeling that they pulled a bit of a gif: i.e., they waited until a format using their technique had become widely used and many applications were available to encode it before swooping down with licensing terms). But, if that is the way that their patent goes, then what they are doing is theft from the public domain. Yes, they worked hard to steal the use of that information from all of us, but that doesn't make it right. They don't deserve it any more than a bank robber who has planned for months deserves to succeed at the first national.
    All of that aside, I don't really feel that software patents are moral anyway. Until fairly recently, they weren't even legal. As it is, it seems that the US patent office is handing the things out hand over foot without any decent quality control or regard to the damage that may be done. I, for one, do not like to be made to wait twenty years to use an idea or technique that should belong to everyone.
  • Ok, I read about this lawsuit and decided to check out the Amp site. Now I know that my web page needs some work, but why is it that the Playmedia site looks like it was last updated 5 years ago? At that it seems that they at one time provided a player. Is this true? If so why is it that they do not offer any information on it? If you offer a product (atleast one that is actually worth selling) shouldn't you advertize?
  • It is true that winamp started as just a cheap amp port with a GUI... And I do consider it very annoying that he charged for a product that wasn't even made by him. However, he paid royalties to Tomislav Uzelac throughout that time period, so at least until he stopped paying those royalties, he was covered. He probably may be in huge trouble still, though, because he didn't bother to really make it a clean operation -- he both wrote the new code /and/ saw the old code. I don't know how that works in the software application world, but at least in the world of cloning BIOS ROMs, that was a significant no-no.
  • Maby no one thaught of this so i put the players to the test... The suspects are
    Winamp 0.2b (Based On Amp)
    Winamp 1.9 (Last Version Before Nitrane)
    Winamp 2.091 (Latest Release)

    Wintop is in the ms powertoys

    I played Ace of base cruel summer (just ripped and encoded it off one of my sisters cd's..)

    The Cpu Times

    Winamp .2b 11%-13%
    Winamp 1.91 9%-11%
    Winamp 2.091 5%-6%

    All Players were running @ full quality..
    Aka, winamp 1.9 had 64bit decoding on, winamp 2.91 was running as pentium cpu and was not using mmx acceleration.

    Juggie @ efnet
  • I forgot to mention this, but after those cpu
    times i think it's "QUITE" obvious that
    1) Nitrane is MUCH faster an is compleletly rewritten
    2) Someone did a heck of alot of work on it to cut
    it's cpu use in half.

    I'll go with the first one. Another thing as well
    play media say they researched this, but they
    think nullsoft has 20Mil?? nullsoft don't have
    100,000 not alone 20 million :)

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