Vista and Commercially produced MP3 Libraries and performance

Dear MS MVP,

I have concerns about Vista DRM and it's impact on my job. Please answer a
couple of simple questions.

I am employed as a professional Audio and Commercial production director for
Radio, TV and Internet. I produce many commercials promoting local concerts
for major recording/singing groups. In spot production I typically rip the
CD audio onto my hard drive in high quality MP3 format. I then import
selected audio tracks into my digital audio workstation program. The
operation, as described, allows me to work quickly.

Will I be able to work this way with Windows Vista? With what software? Will
Vista be open to third party MP3 rippers (such as AudioGrabber or CDEX)?

Lastly, what about my current (vast) collection of MP3s? This collection is
my entire library of commercial production music. Will Vista allow me to use
these files; unhindered, without dropping to some DRM impaired standard of
playback?

I look forward to your answers.

JG

 

Sadly, Vista DRM is hugely misunderstood. Just because Vista has implemented
DRM in some levels does not mean that you are forbiden to play your old MP3
library. If they did that most people would decry Vista and go back to XP.
In fact Media Player even still allows you to rip MP3s instead of using the
WMA file format with a registry hack or through a third party vendor. The
support of the Applications which you use is up to the vendor itself however
and most are updating their applications for use with Vista. The strength of
windows is its' developers so you will always see the ability to do things
on Windows that are not in the OS itself.

To sum it up, don't fear Vista taking your vast collection and DRMing them.
This is what some people want you to fear, DRM is nothing more than
protecting content such as Digital TV on your hard drive. Hopefully this
helps, my 30 gig mp3 library is running better than ever under media player
11. Thanks MS.

 

There's a lot still up in the air with Vista and DRM. There have been many
stories of media, including MP3 files, that worked great with XP and WMP 10
that suddenly do not work with WMP 11. On Vista, there are a lot of
unresolved issues with playback quality, skips, stuttering, and other
quality problems.

For the most part, I think the expectation is that the Vista issues will
turn out to be drivers but the issues with permissions, including some with
MP3 files, in WMP 11 remain unanswered.

The point being, don't upgrade a production PC to Vista. Test on a test bed
first. And test with backup copies of your media.

Dale