P2P-Zone - View Single Post - I think maybe it's time to invest in Napster

JackSpratts · 11-02-05, 09:27 PM

math alone suggests a 50 plus year advantage to napster, assuming you're comparing 2 10,000 song players ($10,000 divided by the $191.88 napster charges for a years subscription) but the players aren't getting smaller, on the contrary there is no technical reason not to expect 1 terrabyte models in the next few years (i spoke by phone recently with seagate and they can make them in the 3.5 size right now, they just want to wait untill they recover their tooling costs for the present models). but even with the 100 gig units on the immediate horizon you'd need to own your itunes for nearly 140 years before you beat napster's model! renting is usually more expensive – a lot more – but not here. napster is so cheap you’d almost have to be a sucker to buy - which brings up an interesting point: will it lead to price reductions for “sold” media? i predict it will have to if users flock to rental models and i don’t see why they won’t, since sold media also comes loaded with drm restrictions as well as these hugely higher up-front costs.

transferring to cd? advantage itunes. i'm just not sure that's much of a benefit these days since we increasingly seem to be migrating our media off of discs and onto hard drives.

when people rediscover how simple it is for a nakamichi deck (or something similar) to strip the drm off the file in analog and convert the signal back to a crisp digital one they can do whatever they want with, napster just might become subversive all over again. you’ll need two things: a sound card with a very pure analog out and a digital audio deck or the equivalent in a hard drive recorder, both of which are easily acquirable in any decent music store. in my area it’s the east coast music mall, with it’s wall-to-wall axes, gigantic mixing consoles, mics, amps and a slew of digital recording gear. i’m sure there’s something like it near you. the guy who handles my dj equipment says he can set me up for $500. you have to run it in real-time and that’s a pita for those who’ve gotten used to 15 second rips, but it’s not as bad as it might seem. real time means about 350 songs a day, so that 100 gig drive will rip in less than 3 months (and that’s faster than file-sharing) and it wouldn’t surprise me to see lots of programs circulating that help automate the process, especially the databasing. then once you’re done ripping you own it, payments or not they’re yours to keep.

added benefit? save the analog conversions and you've just removed a lot of punch from that big dmca fist.

- js.

11-02-05, 09:27 PM	#2
JackSpratts Join Date: May 2001 Location: New England Posts: 10,018	math alone suggests a 50 plus year advantage to napster, assuming you're comparing 2 10,000 song players ($10,000 divided by the $191.88 napster charges for a years subscription) but the players aren't getting smaller, on the contrary there is no technical reason not to expect 1 terrabyte models in the next few years (i spoke by phone recently with seagate and they can make them in the 3.5 size right now, they just want to wait untill they recover their tooling costs for the present models). but even with the 100 gig units on the immediate horizon you'd need to own your itunes for nearly 140 years before you beat napster's model! renting is usually more expensive – a lot more – but not here. napster is so cheap you’d almost have to be a sucker to buy - which brings up an interesting point: will it lead to price reductions for “sold” media? i predict it will have to if users flock to rental models and i don’t see why they won’t, since sold media also comes loaded with drm restrictions as well as these hugely higher up-front costs. transferring to cd? advantage itunes. i'm just not sure that's much of a benefit these days since we increasingly seem to be migrating our media off of discs and onto hard drives. when people rediscover how simple it is for a nakamichi deck (or something similar) to strip the drm off the file in analog and convert the signal back to a crisp digital one they can do whatever they want with, napster just might become subversive all over again. you’ll need two things: a sound card with a very pure analog out and a digital audio deck or the equivalent in a hard drive recorder, both of which are easily acquirable in any decent music store. in my area it’s the east coast music mall, with it’s wall-to-wall axes, gigantic mixing consoles, mics, amps and a slew of digital recording gear. i’m sure there’s something like it near you. the guy who handles my dj equipment says he can set me up for $500. you have to run it in real-time and that’s a pita for those who’ve gotten used to 15 second rips, but it’s not as bad as it might seem. real time means about 350 songs a day, so that 100 gig drive will rip in less than 3 months (and that’s faster than file-sharing) and it wouldn’t surprise me to see lots of programs circulating that help automate the process, especially the databasing. then once you’re done ripping you own it, payments or not they’re yours to keep. added benefit? save the analog conversions and you've just removed a lot of punch from that big dmca fist. - js.