Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool

[stuart]

On Tuesday, July 8, 2003, Tyler came up with this...

> Nobody wrote...

> "There is a loss of quality if you go through an analog stage.  Real and
> wannabe audiophiles will prefer the real thing, pure and undiluted by
> a reconversion phase.  These are the people who are already swallowing
> the marketing line that the CD bandwidth limit of 22KHz is too low for
> good fidelity, despite being higher than they can hear."

> characteristics of the extracting gear. But the vast majority of P2P kids
> won't care one iota that their file was analog for half a second.

But you don't need to go to analog at all.
I mean, aren't we using computers here?

Using VSound for Linux (which I have used) and Virtual Audio Cable for
Windows (which I haven't used) you can tap the signal before it even
hits the sound card. I use VSound to make usable sound files from
realaudio files. Both sites even say a sound card isn't even necessary.
I don't know, I haven't tried that.

VSound is archived at http://www.zorg.org/vsound but is no longer
maintained by the author, who is Australian and scared of Australia's
version of the DMCA, because this tool can obviously be used to
circumvent copyright protection. Then again, so can a 3-inch 1/8mm to
1/8mm cable, but audio cable manufacturers are poor targets, while
solitary programmers are much better at drawing the ire of
anti-copyright circumvention death squads.

Now, when DRM gets into windows, I'm sure Virtual Audio Cable will stop
working, RealAudio will stop making linux clients (why bother?), RIAA
will (try to) make CDs that can only be played with windows clients,
etc. Then someone will crack the formats of the audio streams and the
CDs, and round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows.

As things are now, it's easy to get the digital signal before it reaches
the DAC, you don't need to go to DAC -> ADC, you don't need to plug your
line-out to your line-in and degrade your signal.

If the RIAA get their content to only work on Windows-type boxes, and if
MS gets DRM to work in their Windows, things will become much more
difficult. But these are big ifs that can quite possibly be circumvented
even if they do come to fruition. There's always high-end sound cards
that don't even use analog.

DRM is not going to stop file sharing.
They're trying to catch smoke with nets.

-- 
stuart

Don't put your faith in gods. But you can believe in turtles.
-Terry Pratchett (Small Gods)-