Carousel corner.(THE MUSIC)(Chaos and Creation in the Backyard)(Sound recording review)

One interesting development to this month's rock'n'roll gaggle was my attempt to play Kasabian (see below) on my PC. I always listen to review discs on the big rig, but I write at the PC and often play them there while writing. First, it attempted to install dedicated playback software, called MediaMax, prompting me to agree to the standard "violate this and burn in hell" EULA. Then the screen went black and Windows (XP Pro) dumped the program. Hmm. Not to be outdone, I opened Windows Media Player and reinserted the disc, and it started playing. Well, sort of. What came out was a tangle of digital stutter steps occasionally punctuated by recognizable music. But this time when the MediaMax installation appeared and I accepted the EULA, the "software" installed--lord knows what it put on my machine besides the licensing and decryption algorithms--and Kasabian was spinning away. It turns out- check your task bar-that Kasabian only plays on a PC via a web portal, but it still uses the Windows Media Player, complete with whatever graphic oscilloscope you've chosen. Weird.

When the RIAA pulled its legalized heist of the iron industry at the dawn of CD recorders, it got a tariff for each CD recorder and recordable CD sold. What they didn't get-because they didn't understand at that point: they thought the big enemy was CD recorders like cassette recorders were thought to have been a generation before--was a bounty on PCs. PCs account for the lion's share of illegal and quasi-legal ripping, and the encryption on this disc was designed to prevent PC cloning while allowing simple playback on a CD or DVD player. The MediaMax software has a copy feature, but both radioparadise.com and the net are replete with complaints that the copied files have issues, rarely play correctly, and forget ripping them to a CD. Undaunted, I copied the files to my hard drive, using the MediaMax "copy" utility, and then ripped them to a CD-R using Roxio's Easy CD Creator 5. The WMA files created on the hard drive played without a hitch. The disc would not play on the Parasound C/DP 1000 in the big rig, but played flawlessly on the Onkyo DV$555 DVD player in the newly finished A/V room. So much for copy protection.

Turns out that my overnight/every night spyware and adware scan courtesy of the Microsoft AntiSpyware Beta II utility, revealed that MediaMax had not downloaded anything pernicious on to my computer. Turns out also that "copy protection," and I'm a rank amateur when it comes to ripping CDs and such, wasn't that hard to get around. The ancient Parasound will not play anything but ordinary, garden-variety CDs. However, the Onkyo, like most of today's DVD players, is configured to play MP3s and any number of digital formats, even the uncompressed WMA files created by the copy utility. So I ended up with a virtual clone. RCA may have vanquished the CD player, but only audiophile diehards even bother with dedicated CD players these days. Even the cheapest multiple format DVD players are configured similarly to the Onkyo.

Copy-protected CDs have become a hit-or-miss proposition. Sony BMG's discs utilize an allegedly vile algorithm called XCP, which--again allegedly, but Sony BMG recalled some 2.1 million so protected discs in November after a flood of complaints--installs "rootware" that compromises a Windows-based PC's security. There have been similar complaints about MediaMax, but so far my experience has not indicated any issues. Then again, I have both redundant firewalls and redundant anti-spyware and adware security on my machine. Digital piracy is a real issue. However, attacking the consuming public hardly seems a very bright was of addressing it. Moreover, the recording industry has a long and dreary track record of exhibiting utter disdain for its clientele, reasoning--and somewhat rightly--that so long as they control the product, the consumer has little choice. At some point a manageable methodology for distributing music directly from the artist to the consumer, which precludes the necessity for compressing the audio product--something inevitably solved by bandwidth, will emerge and moot both the issue and the ubiquitous middlemen. Until then it appears that this sad state of affairs will persist. The lone ray of good ...