Thursday, October 18, 2007

DRM or How itunes Fucked my Life





I just bought Serato Scratch Live for my turntables. It’s a hardware/software device that allows you to take digital music or any digital sound (including your own voice!) and be able to use it on special vinyl on a turntable. It’s kind of hard to explain but they give you these LP’s that have digital timecode on them and the turntables needles read the timecode and tell your computer when you are scratching, stopping the record etc.

Plus, the program makes it a ton easier to beat match records together with a wave-form display and the ability to organize virtual ‘crates’ with your playlists all lined up.

To the layman, what does that mean? It’s freaking awesome, that’s what it means.

But much to my dismay, after purchasing the program and importing my itunes folder into Serato’s easy interface I realized I was missing a ton of songs.

What the fuck?

Apparently, Serato doesn’t recognize the default setting for itunes files, which is easily fixed by saving the files as MP3’s. It’s time consuming but it’s worth it.

I was in the process of doing this when I clicked onto a file that I purchased off the itunes website and it said that it was unable to process because this file was DRM protected.

Again, what the fuck?

I understand the principle behind DRM, (which stands for ‘Dick Rammed in Myass”). Apple wants to make sure that you can’t pirate their shit right? That’s fine, but does Apple also want it so that I can’t play my fucking songs on my dj equipment? That’s not cool!

I bought a bunch of songs from the itunes, thinking that I would be scratching them soon on my Serato enhanced turntables. Now, I’m stuck figuring out a way to crack this DRM shit just so I can play these songs at this party I’m DJaying next week! I already downloaded one program that was supposed to help but all I think it did was give me spyware. Lame.

I guess I can burn every song onto a CD, put it back into my computer and then have to name it. Fucking time wasting piece of cat shit.

I hate you Apple. I hate you itunes. I hate you Steve Jobs.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah Itunes has to ruin all the fun for everyone else.. I was looking at getting one of those digital turntable converter things myself.. Let me know how well it responds to your scratching. Are there any delays or does it feel like you are working with real vinyl! Damn I wish I was in LA so I could just come over and fuck with it!

The Fire Starter said...

Jay-

Its sick, there are no delays, it feels like real vinyl. The coolest feature is the mic input that allows you to sample your voice on the fly and scratch it. so sick.

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