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January 07, 2004
Because It's Worth It
I just discovered a very cool piece of software called Alcohol 120%. It sells for 50 bucks and appears to be able to master just about every laser disk scheme and recording format on the planet. That includes CD CD-R, CD-RW DVD, etc etc. It's an impressive work. It got me thinking about the ability to show movies on my new flat panel monitor from the DVD drive on my laptop. I haven't done this in years.
But it also got me thinking that I might finally be able to burn a CD that my XBOX would recognize as a redbook CD so that I could put some of my MP3s over onto it. I have never been able to take my own burned CDs and rip them onto the XBox's WMA so that I could use them as the soundtrack for games. It's also fairly annoying to me that the XBox, while it reads commercial CDs, doesn't use Gracenote and so I have to enter the names of the songs with my controller. That's a nightmare. At any rate, there's a good chance that I'm going to get this sucker. The best reason is because it manages CD images.
If you have growing kids and disposable income, chances are that you have a bunch of old Broderbund or Knowledge Adventure CD-ROM games around the house. We have at least 40. The old ones are all scratched up and about ready to go kaput, and that's not only because they use QuickTime version 2. It's because kids handle them. Over the years that costs a lot of money and I don't want to throw away these CDs, especially because I have a burner. But I've never been able to make copies of these CDs that work. Alcohol promises to solve all that, and I've seen enough software marketing to know when people know what they're talking about. It's the standard here at the test lab which employs me for the moment so I trust I'm not in for any surprises.
Thinking about the possibilities, I wondered if I might do the same with my XBox games, which are generally more costly than the PC games. There doesn't seem to be anywhere, at a casual glance, that I can find anything on the subject. However I did find out that a certain site called ISONews talked a little too freely about this subject. Well, the speech was free, but the mod chips to defeat certain security elements of the XBox scheme were on sale. The US took over the site and tossed its owner into the clink. I read through the story about this which was presented with some alarm from civil libertarian front. But this time, unlike with the RIAA, I didn't find this character's plight particularly sympathetic.
I've been one to download everything all the time. I'm a shareware, freeware, whatever warez mack daddy. If it solves a problem, I want it. Nothing has slowed me down but the RIAA lawsuits, and I have changed my behavior accordingly. But the reason I don't feel particularly drawn to the case of the ISONews pirates is because I think XBox games are generally worth the 50 bucks you pay for them. Whereas I think DVDs and music CDs are generally not worth what they go for in the 'marketplace'. I think Wal-Mart's price of 88 cents per downloadable single is good although I'm not comfortable with non-MP3 formats just yet.
I don't want anything encrypted that I don't encrypt myself. An appliance & bulletproof system, I could live with. If I were strictly Apple, for example, I probably wouldn't care about using proprietary encrypted music so long as the integration is seamless and completely portable with the iPod/iTunes thing seems to be.
This is also the case for XBox. I see unique value, there's nothing it does that I want done anyplace else, and I get real value for my dollars spent. So much so that I have alternate ways of feeding it proprietary encrypted games. I don't feel the need to work around the system, because I agree with the price. In fact, I am so untroubled by this matter, that I am considering buying a second totally incompatible system, the Gamecube.
The democratization of production and distribution tools for music has changed the value of it. The marketing of it has not changed nor has the pricing. This, and the failure of music companies to understand and respect the nature of the computer business has put their business practices into the realm of public debate. But it is most fundamentally a problem of pricing. Wal-Mart will prove it.
Posted by mbowen at January 7, 2004 12:28 AM
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Comments
I couldn't agree more with your conclusion. The whole world is changing around the music industry and their response is do their best to hamper change as opposed to adapting to it. How can this be a successful strategy in either a practical sense or in the eyes of the consumer, who has been left feeling browbeaten by the RIAA. Alienate the consumer, and you won't get much sympathy from him/her. However, the idea of value is important too, and one which I hadn't focused on until I read your blog. Well put.
Posted by: Zachariah at January 7, 2004 03:34 PM