AfterDawn: News

EMI allows DRM-free music for other retailers besides iTunes

The giant music label EMI has begun allowing more legal music downloading stores to use its catalogue, DRM-free.

PassAlong Networks, a company that provides the technology for online stores such as f.y.e and 7digital, a UK online music store, have secured licenses to use the catalogues and both plan to sell the tracks at a higher bitrate then iTunes currently uses.



iTunes encodes the EMI catalogue at 256 Kbps, but the new licenses can go even higher, as high as 320 Kpbs. The new services will also use MP3 instead of Apple's AAC format.

"We applaud EMI Music's bold decision to test the DRM-free waters," said PassAlong Networks' CEO Dave Jaworski. "Music consumers have demanded interoperability and ease of use and we hope that by offering EMI Music's DRM-free music files, we will simplify and improve their digital music experience."


Source:
Arstechnica

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 14 Jun 2007 19:50

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• 3 comments

• Jondrew

  heh this is good news, and this shouldve happened a long time ago, but they should bring on the V0 lame mp3s... gah cant have everythng you want with legal means it seems...

  14.6.2007 20:23 #1

• NWD91

  AAC at 256 kbps is still better than MP3 at 320 kbps. And it's not like AAC is Apple's format. It's an ISO/IEC 14496-3:2005 international standard. AAC has much better handling of audio frequencies above 16 kHz, more flexible joint stereo, higher efficiency and simpler filterbank. More and more hardware (and software) are adding AAC support all the time. It's a new, better codec, and there's no reason not to use it. Also, the MP4 container is much more versatile, allowing cutting, concatenation, easier tagging, etc.

  14.6.2007 20:30 #2

• borhan9

  Well done EMI I had a feeling this would not take long for companies to take this on :)

  21.6.2007 15:27 #3