Re: off: Audio CD's and Microsoft

On 9/16/07, Rick <[email protected]> wrote:
> Good for you, but not for allot of us, anything add to the encoded audio
> recording...in is IN its "signal path", will degrade the audio quality.
> (DRM) for example.
[...]

You realize that you are writing about this on the mailing list for a
perceptual audio codec which, in its common use case, throws out
9/10ths of the raw audio data? ...

I think we've gone off-topic.

But while we're here, I do want to say that I don't have too much
sympathy for the anti-watermarking crowd. The loud argument I see over
and over again is "OMG QUALITY!" without any objective data to back
those arguments up...  To uniquely identify a listener with a
comfortable amount of redundancy, what do they need 64bits? 96bits?
... and the goal is to robustly smuggle that into many megabytes of
compressed audio?  That sounds 'easy enough' that I think the burden
of proof should be on the people who claim that it hurts quality.

If your real concern is quality, why the hell don't I see you flooding
recording forums bitching about the constant overcompression of modern
recordings? ... and why are you even bothering to complain about
watermarking on online music stores, when virtually none of them offer
very-high bitrate or lossless audio?

The rest of the opposition to the use of watermarking to mark
commercial audio downloads really seem to reduce to "Oh shit, if I
break the law I might get caught" ... Or in other words, your real
problem is with copyright law and not with the watermarking.

People demanded freedom from DRM which turned their own devices
against them. Fine. So the industry starts using watermarking. You
should be happy, oppressive DRM is gone.  It seems to me that people
are not happy about this turn of events because they never really
cared about avoiding devices which were defective by design, never
much cared about their freedom to do legal things... but were really
only worried about their ability to get away with making illicit
copies.