One of the Christmas gifts my wife received this year (from me) was a new MP3 player. No it was not the iPOD, but it was one of the newest models from the #2 supplier, Sandisk (e260). As someone who has been involved professionally in digital rights management (DRM) digital copy protection I was curious to learn how the latest products are working (or not working) together.

 

To prepare the machine, I attached it first to my main computer and loaded some of her favorite songs from my personal library. These were all open MP3 files captured from  CDs in our collection. I used MusicMatch Jukebox Plus v10, which I have been using to manage my library for sometime.  I like MM because it seems to offer the best power-tagging controls to edit and update the music metadata. It also offers great control over burning the MP3 CDs so they will work in our car – but I digress.  So far, so good – no problems with the loading of basic MP3s. The MM software discovered the e260 automatically and easily loaded the files. 

 

After all the excitement Christmas morning, I needed to load some software on her laptop to manage the music. Up to this year, she hasn’t had an MP3 player and has never used any music management software, so I was starting from scratch. Since she had no favorite, I thought the easiest thing to do would be to use what came preinstalled on her Dell laptop.  Her machine came with Dell’s own version of MusicMatch which had never been activated.

 

To make a long story short, the Dell MM was out of date and wouldn’t run without an update. I tried the Rhapsody player, but it amazingly refused to identify the e260! (Apparently to use Rhapsody, you MUST have the special e200R version of the Sansa player.)  I also tried a few more players but settled on loading Yahoo Music Jukebox (free player) on  her machine (which is very similar to MusicMatch Jukebox). It easily integrated with the Sansa player and seemed to be  easy to use, if not as powerful as the full MusicMatch software.

 

With Yahoo Music going, I was ready to dive into the world of DRM and see how it played. I first purchased a song from Yahoo using my wife’s account. The music played fine, and easily loaded onto the Sansa with no ill effects. So far, so good – as far as she could tell, the DRM was “out-of-sight and out-of-mind.”

 

Next I logged-off and logged-in to Yahoo Music with my own log-in and bought another song using my account (still on her laptop).  This song also played fine and loaded just as easily to the Sansa player. I also found that the previous song (I bought under her account) could still play when I was logged-in.    Again good news - if there was any DRM, it was completely invisible so far.

 

Next I started to push the limits. I attempted to play both of the “purchased” songs from the MusicMatch software on my machine by moving the files across the network to my machine. –  No Go.  I received errors when it attempted to play – something about unable to establish the license.  So this tells me that the purchased music (DRM) is apparently tied to the machine that was used when it was first purchased.

The next test was to burn an MP3 CD using the purchased songs. The Yahoo Music software has a cute little flaming icon to indicate the songs are “burnable”. These purchased songs were marked as burnable, same as any other song in the library. The Yahoo Music software doesn’t offer a lot of control over burning the CD, most everything seems automated or uses default settings. However the CD would NOT PLAY in the car. Nor would the CD play on another computer. It generated the same “license” errors as moving the MP3 files. In effect this burnable MP3 file is still locked to her specific laptop and wouldn’t play anywhere else. 

 

At this point I have to say the DRM has gotten in the way. These are songs that we purchased and paid the full price for. They can be loaded onto the Sansa player, but they can NOT be played as an MP3 CD in the car or by another computer in the same house.

 The next test was to see if these purchased MP3 songs could be “streamed”  over my Viiv^™ home network to a Viiv media player. The Viiv system includes a type of content protection, which is meant to protect the content while streaming across the network. The Intel Viiv product brief says this:

 

“Software Premium Content Module (SPCM) Media Server plug-in enables secure streaming of protected content from the PC to the networked devices”

Both my media server and my media player are Viiv compliant and I presume they include the ability to do this streaming content protection. I have tested the ability to play “clean” MP3 files across the network and this was my first test with DRM protected files. When I ran the test I could see the files from the media player and they showed an (x) icon next to them, but they refused to play.  Once again the DRM seems to be “getting-in-the-way.”

 

The following table summarizes the limitation of the DRM used by Yahoo Music:

 

Music Type	Plays on Laptop using Yahoo Music	Plays on Viiv Media Center PC using MusicMatch	Plays on Sansa e260 player	Plays as MP3 CD on Car or other PC	Plays as streaming file to Viiv Media Player
Self-recorded MP3 files (no DRM)	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES
MP3 files purchased by wife’s account	YES	NO	YES	NO	NO
MP3 files purchased by self-account	YES	NO	YES	NO	NO

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Last updated: Tuesday, Saturday, August 18, 2007