Subject: RE: [hackers-il] (OFFTOPIC) Listen and delete

From: Ishay Sommer <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2000 21:11:48 +0200

You have no idea how much I agree with you.
I am a musician myself who is willing to give free, his hard working
creations.
(Not that the rest of the people I work with agree)
However, my idea of creating some kind of protection for files, was only to
make money ;-)
RIAA pay you to create this new mechanizm to protect files, and as we know
all mechanizms are bound to be hacked. 2 weeks after you got all your money,
a hack is being published.. So we
are back where we started (copying music) but with a little more money in
the pocket for the developers. :-)

About the playing list, you can, let's say in winamp, create a 6000 songs
playing list, and random them, and then start hearing them one by one.
(never repeating any song.) however, if you have to reboot, or your OS
crashes, you loose the place you were on the list, and you have to start
over again... That's why I thought of the idea that each song that is being
played, will be deleted from the list.

-----Original Message-----
From: Nadav Har'El
To: [email-masked]
Sent: 11/3/2000 7:09 PM
Subject: Re: [hackers-il] (OFFTOPIC) Listen and delete

On Fri, Nov 03, 2000, Ishay Sommer wrote about "RE: [hackers-il]
(OFFTOPIC) Listen and delete":
>  After posting, I also thought about a program which will simply
delete the
> file from it's playing list... What I basically want is to take big
playing
> lists, and just listen ONCE to every song...

Oh, so that's what you wanted...
What I did is create a short (~20 line) awk script which gets a playlist
and randomizes its order (create another list in random order, where
each
file is listed just once on the new list). It works very nicely. (I
don't
have it here to send it to you, but I wrote it in under 10 minutes, so
consider it an excercise to the reader).

> About the hacking project, it can be nice to build a startup to create
> protection mechanizms over mp3's, to "hack" the player and delete the
file
> after a while ;-) I am sure many music companies will be interested in
it
> ;-)

Yeah, right... Are you sure you're in the right mailing list? ;)
In case you missed the thread about the RIAA/MPAA, most of us here hate
the idea of big companies limiting our rights on music or video we
legally
own. All these "protection" schemes appear at first glance a method to
stop pirates, but what they actually stop is honest people trying to
make
honest and fair use of the media they buy.

For example, if recording MP3s from CDs was somehow "protected", I
wouldn't
be able to listen to my legally owned music on my computer (I prefer to
listen
to it on my computer rather than on the CD player - I think it's honest
and
fair, don't you)?

Also, when I look at how I choose CDs I buy I come to the following
conclusion: a year ago I heard music I liked on the radio, or in a dance
club, or something like that, and once in a while I went ahead and
bought
a CD. This year only about half of the CDs I bought I chose this way.
The
other half of the CDs I bought after I listened to a *illegal* mp3 and
liked it. Not only that, but I ended up buying CDs that I would have no
chance of hearing on the radio (e.g., Jefferson Airplane and Vangelis)
so the artists only benefited from me listening to the illegal mp3!
Also,
I bought more CDs this year than I did last year.

I don't know if my experiences are the same as other people's
experiences,
but I do know that most of what the recording labels say is FUD, much
like
what Microsoft (and other companies) say about pirating their software.
For example, they say that some kid has $1000 worth of music on his hard
disk, for which he didn't pay anything. But then you go ahead and ask:
how much many did he spend on CDs last year? $30. How much did he spend
on
CDs this year? $60 (he wanted to "rip" some CDs to share too!). So how
much
did the label/artist loose? Nada! In fact, this is a poor kid that
wouldn't
have bought $1000 of CDs in any case, so the $1000 value is purely
hypothetical
boolshit! On the other hand, this kid will get to know a lot of music,
and
probably learn to like some artists he never heard of, and perhaps buy
their
other CDs, buy their memorabilia, go to their concerts, and all-in-all
probably spend more on the music industry than he did before.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |       Friday, Nov 3 2000, 6
Heshvan 5761
[email-masked]
|-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Cats aren't clean, they're just
covered
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |with cat spit.

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From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2000 21:51:26 +0200

> played, will be deleted from the list.

That's *exactly* the thing that bugged me. I haven't recorded 6000 songs
yet (it's a lot of tedious work), but still I recorded 600 songs (and
classical pieces) that take 40 hours to play them all, and I was annoyed that
after restarting xmms (the mp3 player I used on my Linux system) the
randomization started afresh and I got (with high probablity) songs that
I had just heard near the end of my previous listening session.

So my solution was simple: I have a long playlist (actually, automatically
generated from the listing of my mp3 directory). I then wrote a small program
(a little awk script) which takes this list, randomizes its order, and writes
it back to another file. I then tell XMMS to play this list, _without_
further randomization. Now, if I stop xmms at song 50 (in my special randomized
playlist), for example, the next time I run it I get the same playlist, and
the same song, and the order continues to be as before (if winamp doesn't
support this, you'll have to remember the number "50" yourself to know where
you left off). Only when you have heard the whole list, in its fixed random
order, does xmms stop playing songs, and you need to run the randomization
script again to define a new randomized list in a different random order.

I use this solution all the time now, and I'm very pleased with it. No need
to erase files, or anything like that. I don't have my little awk script here
with me, but I'll post it as soon as I have access to it (assuming you have
awk). It's a very simple programming excercise, so you might even want to do
it yourself (shouldn't take more than about 10-60 minutes, depending on your
experience).

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |       Friday, Nov 3 2000, 6 Heshvan 5761
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Ms Piggy's last words: "I'm pink,
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |therefore I'm ham."