Save iTunes | Hacker News Reader

Save iTunes

eff.org

27 pointsDiabloD310 comments

This is poorly written and has little to nothing to do with iTunes. That means the reader spends a lot of wasted time trying to figure out what’s going on.

A better title would have been "Save the Next iTunes"

An even better—or at least more informative, if less 'hooky'—title might be "We don't like EME" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encrypted_Media_Extensions), or, slightly less snarkily, "EME will prevent the next iTunes".

The EFF has done a couple of articles like this (Save Netflex, Save Comcast, etc...)

Promote Songbird, maybe. It's the closest thing to a cross platform iTunes replacement.

http://getsongbird.net/

Is it cross platform? I just clicked on the link on my Mac, and while the screenshots look very much like a Mac, I'm only offered a PC download link and Windows system requirements.

[In case it was a problem with my ad-blocker, I disabled it, but then I got a huge ad with an embedded Download Now button (directly above the Songbird "Free For PC" button) that links to MacKeeper instead.]

It is cross-platform—indeed, one of its pleasant selling points used to be that (on Macs only, I think) it could play FairPlay-DRM'd files just by piggybacking on the libraries that iTunes used to do the same. However, as ahstilde (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11680232) points out, it is officially discontinued as of 2013. The Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_%28software%29 has a nice summary, including a link http://sourceforge.net/projects/songbird.mirror to the Sourceforge page, and to a "community-supported fork" http://sourceforge.net/projects/ngale (which I have never tried).

That hasn't been updated in years, had it?

DRM, bleh.

It's sad that open source browsers and open web standards folks are doing the bidding of corporate interests. At this rate, we won't be able to own a permanent, portable "license" to a work, only rent a license locked to a particular device on a certain platform.

You might. There is a blockchain-based technology called "colored coins", and a few startups working to use it for DRM/digital ownership. It will be platform-independent.

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