Recently, news has been made about the ability to use Winamp and a particular plug-in to export copy protected WMA music as standard wave audio files. This allows users to convert music from AOL, Napster and Virgin music, including limited playback music to wave files which could easily be recorded to CD. AOL's programmers are now busy updating its Winamp software such that it will prevent stream ripping tools from working while playing any WMA audio.
According to AOL while this ripping technique is not new, the news spread about this loophole has made the music industry executives start rethinking and having a much closer look at the effects of music subscription based services. According to Microsoft while these stream ripping tools may capture the audio as it plays, the resulting recorded tracks have worse quality than the original and also loses the track information such as the Title, Artist, Album and so on.
For the time being, AOL has removed the offending Winamp plug-in that allows the conversion to take place and plan on making it available once they patch the plug-in such that it will no longer play protected WMA audio. AOL expects to release a new version of Winamp that will prevent stream-ripping while playing WMA audio.
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The company's Winamp software was identified by bloggers this week as part of a process that transformed copy-protected music downloads into songs that could be burned by the thousand to CD. The tool had potentially affected any subscription service that used Microsoft's media format, including Napster, Virgin Music and even America Online's own music subscription plan. AOL programmers are taking a series of steps to prevent its software from being used in this way, a representative said. "Immediately upon discovering this flaw, we worked quickly to address it and to ensure that Winamp can continue to provide secure playback of Windows Media content," spokeswoman Ann Burkart said. "A fix is being implemented today in existing players, and a new player will be posted for users to download." The technique used in the Winamp process is not a new one and is a part of many other pieces of software available online. Nevertheless, the news rippled though the record industry and online music services this week, causing renewed scrutiny of the subscription music business model by top industry executives. Read the full article here. |
It looks like while Winamp may not be getting any more
useful features for the foreseeable future, AOL seems quite happy to add
security updates including some that actually makes the user worse off just
to help the music industry. Well once this updated version comes out, this
will be the one time where the users are better off not updating their Winamp. :p
Feel free to discuss about online music services and their codec's on our Music Downloads, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) & Legal Issues Forum.
Source: C|net News - Music
