6 posts tagged “they might be giants”
Next in the ongoing saga of iTunes DRM is the fact that iTunes 7 DRM has been re-cracked... sort of. There have been several tools that script QuickTime to play the encrypted file to a raw audio stream, then recompress the audio to an mp3. That slightly degrades the audio quality, which is already bad enough with mass market downloads.
Now, though, there's a new version of QTFairUse that grabs the unencrypted AAC stream and saves it. The process (as I understand it) reuses the AAC data with no recompression, so it's exactly the same audio as the encrypted file. It certainly seems to work: I decrypted the songs I bought from iTunes Store Japan yesterday (I gave them a special exception to my no-iTunes rule, so QTFairUse being available was serendipitous) and have perfectly playable AAC files. I can't actually tell if it's the same AAC data, though, so I have to trust that the claim it's lossless is factual.
If QTFairUse does in fact work as advertised, will I buy songs from iTunes now? Given that I'm still finding plenty of good music on Emusic, I probably won't bother. Speaking of principles, though, it's a matter of voting with dollars. I'd almost like to make an exception for the new They Might Be Giants album while it's an iTunes exclusive, but if I make an exception, it says that I don't actually care about DRM. With it currently the #11 top selling album on iTunes, they don't need my help to say it's a popular buy.
Even though I could continue to buy iTunes Store music and unlock it myself with a fairly clear conscience, I'd rather wait at least until the EMI content is available, and buy some of that, to help show I care about DRM.
I read about this in their email newsletter and it made me so sad: the new They Might Be Giants album is going to be only available on iTunes for a whole two months before you can even buy it on CD (as reported by Jeff Smykil for Ars Technica's Infinite Loop). This wouldn't bother me so much if The Spine weren't such a return to form after the moderately disappointing Mink Car, and if it hadn't been for digital sale directly from their own web site.
Why couldn't they have the decency not to raise my expectations first?
Stolen from Google Video for your convenience, the second round (remember the first?) of Dunkin' Donuts commercials featuring They Might Be Giants.
I had already seen Alarm Clock Catastrophe and Human Interest Story, but not Lefty Loosey, which I think is my favorite of these. Of course I really mention it because there are already more...
With all the talk about TMBG lately, I'm relistening to their podcast archives. Maybe I totally missed 5B, 'cause I don't remember much of it, including this song from Michael Leviton who opened for them on tour:
Shy people may be quiet, but there's a lot going on in their heads. When they encounter a frightening or unfamiliar situation--meeting someone new, for example--a brain region responsible for negative emotions goes into overdrive. But new research indicates that shy people may be more sensitive to all sorts of stimuli, not just frightening ones.
For some reason this song always made me cry in the car, which made me feel dumb at the last lines of the chorus:
Don't, don't be shy
Don't be terrified
When you take yourself for granted
Feel rejected and unwanted
Know you're never just a hat
You're never only just a hat
As a long time They Might Be Giants fan, I like these new Dunkin' Donuts ads for their music. Read Seth Stevenson talk about them in Slate.
They also have a monthly podcast and some unrelated ringtones on their site, like this topical one:
