Category: Music
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101 freeware and shareware programs
Software programs to do anything you want with your PC if you are a bit more geeky than most but do not want to pay much. Freeware & shareware.
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DRM kills business
It’s all over the place today: German MusicLoad revealed that 75% of its customer support calls were about complaining around the problems created by the inclusion of Digital Rigths Management (DRM) in the MP3 files they sell. Coming from a company that is living from the sale of legal MP3s, it has a lot of…
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Waiting for Crysis, Ballad of the Black Mesa
For all of you lovers of the FPS games, here is a musical hommage to Half Life 2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTbL5elVXrU
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CD-DA life duration
In the context of the interest I have in evaluating the reliability of optical discs (more specifically CD-R and DVD-R whose use for archival purposes fully justify special attention), I found an interesting document published by the Electronic Library team of the French National Library (BNF). The BNF is the recipient of the legal deposit…
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Azureus configuration
In the world of P2P, Bittorrent is clearly the protocol of choice for big file transfers. This is true for videos (pirated or not), for GNU/Linux dsitribution CD-ROMs, for collections of photographic images, etc. Among the Bittorrent-compatible P2P software applications, Azureus is clearly the one that receives the favors of the greatest public. It is…
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DRM: EMI says No, Warner says Yes
The music industry is a large ship that moves slowly. But when they saw the arrival of the Internet, most of this industry decided to jump onto technical measures to close and protect the music they produce in order to protect their rights: Hence the Digital Rights Management (DRM). Today, things did not really change,…
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Download free punk music
The youngest of our readers may not know what this title is all about, but some of the dinosaurs here won’t need a music encyclopaedia to remember Sex Pistols’ “Never mind the bollocks” (1977) and their alternative music (well before they coined the word in for this context). Today, the punk wave largely left the…
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HDMI and content protection
For those of you who want to know where technology-based content protection is naturally leading: Thanks to XKCD.
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Sony PS3 and HDCP: It’s a mess
We already talked about it here at length: Devices willing to handle High Definition (HD) video have to (or will have to) be all HDCP-compatible in order to be able to display anything. Recent Christmas holiday season sales will probably soon appear as somewhat lacking in this section (most of the HD-Ready TV sets don’t…