user profile | dashboard | imagewall | contact user
I work and play on the internet. Check out my written blog href="http://www.jamesdclarke.com" target="_blank" ahref="http://www.jamesdclarke.com">www.jamesdclarke.com for more about me, and Twitter for daily thoughts.
All photos posted since 22.07.08 are taken with my 5 Megapixel Nokia N95 8GB.
My Photosets:
My highlights | My top rated images | Gigs | Aston Villa | Cats | Me | Jordan | Steph | Walsall | Birmingham | London | Newquay | Edinburgh | HESFES '07 | HESFES '08 | Retro | Snow!
It really is a great service, I use it on my Nokia 770. I've yet to make use of the pay service, but only last night I was thinking how few CD's I now own, and how almost all of my music is just bits and bytes now. If my hard drive fragged, I'd be fux0red. Coupled with the fact that you can download any of your tunes wherever you are in the world as well as stream them makes it a very attrractive service. There are two questions that loiter though, one is legality, depending on where you are in the world, its certainly iffy. Secondly, what about M4P protected Music purchased through I-tunes, can you stream these files through the oboe locker service?
I've not tried it on my Nokia N80 yet, but I'd be hopeful it will work! (Although I have an iPod, so I'm not sure I'd need this functionality).
As for the legality - I'll turn an 'ignorant eye' until there's a problem!
You can't play iTunes DRM-protected songs in the locker (or via iTunes as a shared library , even if you're using the version of iTunes you purchased them from.) However you can sync and thus back them up in your locker.
I hate DRM music, but although I'm not in the habit of buying albums from iTunes, I do have quite a few b-sides and live tracks that I've purchased. What I did was to burn all my DRM music to audio CDs in iTunes, then ripped them back into iTunes, thus removing the DRM. I then synched/uploaded those tracks to my locker so I could listen to them.
Obviously if you have a lot/the majority of your music DRM-ed from iTunes or wherever, this could be a total pain in the ass...but I'm sticking with CDs for now, until all this DRM crap is sorted out!
Yeah. I dont have a huge amount of DRM'd music, similiar buying habits to you really, so it wont be a problem for me, I was raising it more as a problem for a wide mass audience use of the service.
For me, the main thing is being able to back up 88GB of music, wow. I dont know anywhere I can do that for £20 a year :D
Yes - I currently have 25GB uploaded and several more GBs on hard drives I need to try and recover!
DRM sucks - currently I have about 105Gb of music ripped from CD or bought from non- i-Tunes sites. And it works on the linux box in my car, my windows media PC, my phone, my random unix machines and my portables - with no problems at all!
When DRM matures to the state I can play MY songs on any of MY hardware, then I'll be interested. Not a moment earlier!