31-08-2023, 08:33 PM
Yes, as I said, no DRM with MD apart from SCMS, which was used for all consumer recoding products with an S/PDIF interface and definitely not unique to MD.
SCMS is not really DRM at all. Remember - DRM is to provide a mechanism for a license to be associated with the content. SCMS does not provide that mechanism. It's too simplistic to count as true DRM.
DRM only came about with products using SonicStage. By that time, the writing was on the wall for MD, and they sold in tiny numbers to people who must have been in denial about the future of MD. I've never seen anything NetMD in the flesh - as I say, it was just too late, plus the fact you couldn't play the discs on earlier machines was a bad mistake given the ratio of original ATRAC to ATRAC3 machines out there. As for data drives, they sold in absolutely tiny numbers. Something else I've never seen in the flesh. What was the point when you had Zip discs, followed by solid state flash? As for reading the audio off an MD, you'd need a software ATRAC decoder, which Sony chose not to provide. As with SCMS, that's not DRM.
If you recorded an MD via analogue, you could then make a copy of that via S/PDIF. I think the copyright flag was set, so you couldn't make subsequent copies. I don't think all SCMS-enabled machines did that - without access to a digital stream, how could the recorder know if it was a commercial recording or something you'd made yourself, so why assume it was copyrighted? So that was a bit naughty. I don't know if all MD machines did that. To be honest, there was no real advantage to digital over analogue - it's still a real-time transfer, and as I said, the quality of the converters was more than good enough by the mid/late '90s.
Ultimately, it's no wonder Sony were cautious about all this given that they sell content. They've definitely made mistakes over the years, but most of those were in a whole different league compared to the minor operational limitations of MD.
I didn't say that CD-R was portable. But then portable MD recorders weren't brilliant either - it was far too easy to knock the laser off when writing. Journos were forever losing material. MD was best suited as a cassette deck replacement in a home hi-fi setup, and playback only for portable or car use.
Yes, I have a Zoom too. The H5.
Yes, CD-R might've come about at the end of the '80s, but it wasn't until the mid 90s that the price fell below $1000, and perhaps the early 2000s that they were a reliable proposition. I ignored CD-R during the late '90s while all my friends made at least 1 coaster with literally every attempt to write a disc (and then battle to get the drive replaced under warranty because the lasers failed within months). These were people who knew what they were doing, not random non-technical types. CD-R needed PCs to reach a certain level (plus other factors in the drives themselves) before the dreaded "buffer under-runs" were banished to history. Even when drives were cheap, I only rarely bothered to burn discs - USB memory sticks were now bigger than CD-R so apart from piracy, there was no need to use them. I have no affinity or affection for CD-R. I just got on with making MDs with 100% success.
But talk about CD-R and Zooms is getting away from the point about DRM on MD, and to be honest, that's so far away from the thread topic that I wish I hadn't posted it. But it's simply not accurate to say "MD was crippled by DRM". I did refresh my memory about MD - although that wasn't hard, as I was a big fan of it back in the day and still use it today - before posting.
SCMS is not really DRM at all. Remember - DRM is to provide a mechanism for a license to be associated with the content. SCMS does not provide that mechanism. It's too simplistic to count as true DRM.
DRM only came about with products using SonicStage. By that time, the writing was on the wall for MD, and they sold in tiny numbers to people who must have been in denial about the future of MD. I've never seen anything NetMD in the flesh - as I say, it was just too late, plus the fact you couldn't play the discs on earlier machines was a bad mistake given the ratio of original ATRAC to ATRAC3 machines out there. As for data drives, they sold in absolutely tiny numbers. Something else I've never seen in the flesh. What was the point when you had Zip discs, followed by solid state flash? As for reading the audio off an MD, you'd need a software ATRAC decoder, which Sony chose not to provide. As with SCMS, that's not DRM.
If you recorded an MD via analogue, you could then make a copy of that via S/PDIF. I think the copyright flag was set, so you couldn't make subsequent copies. I don't think all SCMS-enabled machines did that - without access to a digital stream, how could the recorder know if it was a commercial recording or something you'd made yourself, so why assume it was copyrighted? So that was a bit naughty. I don't know if all MD machines did that. To be honest, there was no real advantage to digital over analogue - it's still a real-time transfer, and as I said, the quality of the converters was more than good enough by the mid/late '90s.
Ultimately, it's no wonder Sony were cautious about all this given that they sell content. They've definitely made mistakes over the years, but most of those were in a whole different league compared to the minor operational limitations of MD.
I didn't say that CD-R was portable. But then portable MD recorders weren't brilliant either - it was far too easy to knock the laser off when writing. Journos were forever losing material. MD was best suited as a cassette deck replacement in a home hi-fi setup, and playback only for portable or car use.
Yes, I have a Zoom too. The H5.
Yes, CD-R might've come about at the end of the '80s, but it wasn't until the mid 90s that the price fell below $1000, and perhaps the early 2000s that they were a reliable proposition. I ignored CD-R during the late '90s while all my friends made at least 1 coaster with literally every attempt to write a disc (and then battle to get the drive replaced under warranty because the lasers failed within months). These were people who knew what they were doing, not random non-technical types. CD-R needed PCs to reach a certain level (plus other factors in the drives themselves) before the dreaded "buffer under-runs" were banished to history. Even when drives were cheap, I only rarely bothered to burn discs - USB memory sticks were now bigger than CD-R so apart from piracy, there was no need to use them. I have no affinity or affection for CD-R. I just got on with making MDs with 100% success.
But talk about CD-R and Zooms is getting away from the point about DRM on MD, and to be honest, that's so far away from the thread topic that I wish I hadn't posted it. But it's simply not accurate to say "MD was crippled by DRM". I did refresh my memory about MD - although that wasn't hard, as I was a big fan of it back in the day and still use it today - before posting.
