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Old 2013.11.12, 09:46 AM   #10
Glathannus
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It's never too late to reply to a Product topic.

Usually when it's premeditated that something is available for a limited time, it's for less than a year. All of the Shiina Ringo tracks we could buy from e-Onkyo were (as far as I saw) available for at least three years, with no indication that they were ever going to become unavailable.

What the situation looks like to me, is that e-Onkyo went through some kind of an overhaul of their whole website, and a lot of old releases disappeared (not just the HF Instrumentals). The HF non-instrumentals were also available (without the cross-fading you get on the DVD), and every track you can find on the Senkou Shoujo DVD. Those tracks are all missing from e-Onkyo now, too.

I wouldn't even speculate that the disappearances are specific to Shiina Ringo, or that EMI requested any takedown. This looks like e-Onkyo neglecting to maintain their catalog. So maybe if we begged them and/or EMI, the tracks could become available again.

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On another note, even if you could buy the tracks today, you'd still have the problems we had 6 years ago: the tracks were DRM'd to Windows Media Player.

Sure, there are always techniques to play music in one application (such as Windows Media Player) while it's being recorded in some other application, but this is a 1x technique (it takes 60 real minutes to harvest 60 minutes of audio). More things can go wrong with 1x techniques, like the recorded files are a different volume level or quality than the originals, or your computer makes other sounds (despite your best intentions) which end up being saved into the recording. When I broke the DRM back in 2007, it took only 5 minutes to unlock the whole album, and the audio was immaculate. But I had to meet a few conditions, which nobody would meet today as purely a matter of chance. Unfortunately, I lost most of my data in March, so I only have the instrumentals in MP3 now. But I used to have them in 96kHz/24bit lossless, because that's how they were sold.

The whole set of HF instrumentals was priced like a tangible Japanese album, so I have to question the sanity of anyone who would pay that without being optimally prepared.

*edit*

Wow, I forgot that the starting post of this topic had direct links to the files, and as it turns out... the links still work!
The files are encrypted, but as computers become increasingly powerful for the money we pay, we'll someday be able to crack these files with brute force.

It's weird that e-Onkyo's revamped website doesn't have a listing to those files, even though the files still exist.
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