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Old 2009.11.16, 08:04 PM   #1
Entry№1
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Default Japan and Music Downloads

So we all know iTunes has a Japan store, and I think Napster does as well. But what is the deal with DRM-less music downloads? iTunes America has supposedly migrated entirely into DRM-free territory after the iTunes+ thing, but this does not appear to be the case with the Japan store. For instance, I don't think "Murasaki." is available for higher-quality, DRM-free purchase. Does anyone know of any other stores, or (preferably) if AmazonMP3 is going to expand into foreign territory?
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Old 2009.11.16, 08:35 PM   #2
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Unfortunately you are more right than you know, about DRM being the norm in Japan. e-Onkyo (where you get the HF Instrumentals from) are a completely DRMed music store. Also, I've noticed that even for the music which wasn't DRMed to begin with, elite portable music players on the Japanese market are more serious about turning your music transfers into a one-way street - where music moved to the player is useful, but not any music moved from the player.

Fortunately a lot of DRM can be defeated (by more substantial means than "record the music while it plays LOL"), and I've made some DRM purchases from Japan under the pretense that it could be broken. You mainly need to be a legitimate licenseholder of the content so that you'll have decryption keys stashed somewhere locally, while a piece of 'hacking' software simply grabs those keys, bypasses the player, and extracts a decrypted version of the same file in the same quality without any filesize changes or transcoding. It also helps when you don't constantly update your WMP/iTunes/etc., because the updates tend to close the holes for how the keys could potentially be tapped into.

If you're an audiophile, I would hunt for the CDs ('rare' as they may be), because even if you can break some DRM, most of what's sold digitally is lossy.
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Old 2009.11.16, 09:03 PM   #3
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iTunes Japan is the only iTunes store that still uses DRM encoding. Only part of its library is such, so the DRM-free files are referred to as iTunes Plus files and you can tell cuz they have a little grey box with a + sign in them next to them. All of Ringo's solo and jihen catalogue is drm-free and half of tomosaka rie's is (shojo robot single and toridori). murasaki, sadly, is not. DRM free files are 256 AAC, whereas itunes protected files are 128 and protected.
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Old 2009.11.17, 12:50 AM   #4
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I've never bought anything off iTunes before... but seriously, people pay for 128 + DRM?
I wouldn't even pay for AAC, no matter how high the bitrate is. AAC does something that changes the colour of the music, it may enhance it in some instances, but I don't trust anything that doesn't stay true to its origins.
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Old 2009.11.17, 01:24 AM   #5
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it is a shame because dislike for apple bleeds over onto AAC, which is in no ways better than any other encoding process, but I don't buy into the "coloring" argument simply because ALL lossy formats are going to selectively choose what information to keep and what to discard, thereby "coloring" the final product. Even playing a cd, the audio will be "colored" depending on what equipment you are using, and it goes on and on. at the end of the day its just another penis contest, more or less. but going back to apple, apple does not own nor did they create AAC to my knowledge, but they did jump on the bandwagon and adapt it for all their products since 2003, although their AAC is slightly modified and may not work on other formats which support AAC, due to some extra coding they add to digitally purchased files (such as album artwork and a receipt of purchase). still, it is a shame, because AAC has been shown in blind tests to acheive greater sound quality and transparency than mp3 at any given and tested bitrate. It also meets ITUs requirements for transparency at 128 for stereo and 320 for 5.1. the way it does this is by discarding information that is deemed perceptually irrelevant and redundant. therefore you can have higher quality files with lower file size. people don't like this because it looks like more information loss, but where your really loosing information is in middle tones, which basically means the timbre or tone that you probably can't differentiate by ear. the only time this would ever manifest in practical usage would be classical music, hearing the tone or timbre of a given section, I'd say, but personally, I've never encountered any problems encoding AAC at 320 versus cd quality (both with etymotic headphones)

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