June 19, 2007
DRM Free and iTunes U
I've been seriously lagging in blogging about a few things but I'll catch up soon. First there is the issue of DRM free music on iTunes. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management and up until this point all the music sold on the iTunes store could only be played on up to 5 machines where iTunes was installed and you were logged in, and only on iPods. Now they are starting to sell some DRM free music (and watching the results closely) which means that you can put it on as many computers and/or other devices as you want. They also say that the audio quality is better. In my experience the file size is roughly double and the sampling rate is also double. I'm not a trained musician so I can't describe how much better it sounds, but I can say that I do notice a difference. Is it worth the extra $0.30 a track? I don't know... If you like to use other MP3 players instead of the iPod then it may be worth the extra money. iTunes U seems like a cool but super ambitous project to bring educational content (free) to iTunes. There have been schools like Stanford and Berkeley who, for years, have made free podcasts of some classes available via iTunes. iTunes U formalizes and expands that. Say you are interested in learning about algorithms (I was) and you go to iTunes to search for a CS class that teaches algorithms. If you search for it you will find several class podcasts that match but the best match I found was an MIT class titled "Introduction to Algorithms, Fall 2005". You can then easily subscribe to the podcast and listen to your heart's content. I think this is a great tool for flattening education and making it available to more people. When you do that generally good things happen.