Sony DRM Bullshit, and related matters

There was once a time (in the glory days of Napster and Kazaa) when I used to have plenty of music on my computer.  Since then, I have gotten rid of all of it (I got bored of most of it anyway) and am trying out various (legal) music stores.

First was E-music – I have to say it is really nice – the site is quick, easy to use, and the best part – all the downloadable files are in regular old mp3.  Why is this great?  Well, you can play them in the player of your choice; you can move them between computers (I have two and need to be able to do this); and it just doesnt get in your way.  My only issue with Emusic is that its meant only for indie artists, etc.  Most of the stuff I want to listen to are more mainstream so although the service itself is great, the content doesnt fit my taste.

Ok, now on to Sony CONNECT.  The content is definitely mainstream.  Initially, the experience is pretty nice too (albeit with a few issues):

First, the only way to get the music from the store is to install their SonicStage software.  Fair enough.  I go ahead and install it on my desktop computer.  It installs the OpenMG Secure Module, which is Sony's DRM piece.  Ok, after a mandatory restart (for a damn music program?), I start up SonicStage.  Let me take this opportunity to point out how big and clunky the SonicStage program is – the interface is a drab white with some crappy blue gradients that don't fit well.  It uses the default UI font on this highly customized form which makes it look just plain ugly.  The thing takes up the whole screen, and the reduced size version is still huge. 

I download some files from the store.  Ok, that was pretty quick and easy.  I play the files in SonicStage… Ok, so I can play them fine in the ugly player.  But no way I'm going to use this as my permanent player.  Did I mention it takes a while to load up?  Media players should pop up instantly – even 10 seconds is too long for media players to load.  Why? Although many media players have their own libraries, I find myself browsing my music collection using Explorer most often and when I double click a file in explorer, I expect the media player to start playing it instantly.  Anyway, so I didnt want to use SonicStage and so I opened up the file in Windows Media Player, expecting it to fail.  But, hey! it works!  Awesome.  So I began downloading songs (around 18 so far) and was enjoying the new music.

Now, let me say at this point that Toshiba finally got me the new AC adaptor (see previous post) so my laptop was again functional.  Of course, I wanted to enjoy my new music on the go.  Now, here the problems start, and the bullshit that is Sony DRM quickly becomes apparent.

First thing to note: Turns out that the only reason I could play the files in WMP was because I had installed SonicStage.  In fact, you MUST install the (ugly) SonicStage software to play CONNECT store music on a PC.  Ok, this may not be exactly right – they may be offering the OpenMG (read obnoxious DRM crap) module as a separate download – I didn't check that.  However, you still have to install something from Sony to be able to play their files.

Ok, while this frustrated me, I decided to go ahead and install SonicStage on the laptop. The process for getting your music onto a second computer was this: You install SonicStage, and then you re-download your music from the store.  So, having installed SonicStage on the laptop, I proceeded to re-download the music.  Here was the problem: the god-damned thing wouldn't download any of the music!  It would reach near 100% and then fail.  Repeatedly.  For any track.  No matter how many tries I tried.  Great.  It won't download my music to my second computer.

Pretty peeved, I tried uninstalling Sony's entire bullshit software and reinstalling it.  Now, when I logged in to my account a second time, SonicStage registered the same laptop as a new computer with my CONNECT account.  So, instead of 2 computers, I had 2 computers on my account.  Ah, thats lovely.  You can tell great quality software when it pulls that crap.  I thought – ok, this will all be worth it if I can just download the music to my laptop.  Deep down though I knew it wouldn't work.  And what do you know?  It didnt.  It still failed after downloading nearly 100%. 

Now, I was mad.  Its my music, and I ought to be able to move it to another of my computers.  So I went back to my desktop and tried to figure out a way to (legally) copy the already downloaded music to my laptop.  I opened up SonicStage and looked for a way to transfer the music.  The only options were to burn to an Audio CD or to an ATRAC CD.  WTF??  I should be able to just move the stuff I already downloaded between my own two computers!   Determined to do so, I tried moving the .oma (turns out these are OpenMG encrypted ATRAC files) to the laptop anyway.  They moved over fine but couldnt be played on the laptop.  The damn DRM bullshit bases its encryption on the originating computer.  Ok, so now I'm stuck at this point till I can buy some CD-Rs or CD-RWs.  But, come on?  I have to buy CDs so I can move my music between computers?  And I'm not even sure the CD thing will work – will I be able to play the ATRAC files on my laptop??  I doubt it.  And ripping Audio CDs just sounds absurd.

I know there's this HI-MD renderer thing that will convert the oma files into wavs but I don't know the legality of doing this.

I'm not going to use this as a reason to go back to P2P file sharing and illegal downloading madness.  But, I will say that the alternatives really get in the way of just being able to play your music wherever and whenever you want.  I really do think DRM is here to stay but there needs to be a universal standard that makes it so that the consumer does not even realize that the DRM is in place.  The DRM should be completely transparent as long as the consumer is just using his own music that he/she purchased.