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Comment by shutupalready | Hacker News Reader

What joy it is to finally uninstall Flash. The last time I was this happy to uninstall crappy software was when I realized that I no longer needed RealPlayer.

For those that don't know it, RealPlayer was a very popular proprietary media player (with its own proprietary formats) circa 2000. The company's stock was worth $380 a share in 2000; it's now worth $6.

The only explanation for RealPlayer's popularity was its DRM I think; lots of commercial users wanted the DRM.

But it got more bloated with every release, and I had to go through its countless option settings every time I updated it to disable all the sneaky ways they came up with to violate user privacy. I'm relieved that we no longer need either Flash or RealPlayer.

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Unfortunately (though it's considerably more compartmentalized and constrained than prior iterations), Google is trying to replace Flash with a DRM mechanism that also requires proprietary software. So while you might think that the advent of HTML5 video means you no longer need proprietary software to interoperate with the services that use it, Google and its partners are working to ensure that that's not true.

Why would users switch to this as yet non-existent proprietary DRM mechanism when free and open source solutions already exist and are widely used?

Because there will come a day when something they want to watch desperately will require it.

That day will never come[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole

I remember the days where they talked about making video cameras that would actually stop recording if they were pointed at a piece of media with special markers in it.

Nowadays people would use some kind of HDCP-breaking digital capture device, and regulating all video cameras is basically impossible with their ubiquity, but it's crazy to think about video cameras being modified against our will to suit the needs of one industry.

Those in power will always try to take control away from us. Don't let them.

It isn't all that crazy, it has already been done to printers:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/229647/counterfeit_money_on_c...

https://www.eff.org/issues/printers

And VCRs too. The original Macrovision technique relied on the low tolerance to noise in the old record-mode AGC circuits on first generation VCRs. But when VCRs improved to the point that Macrovision was ineffective, legislation was passed so that VCR manufactures had to include a special circuit to recognize the Macrovision noise bursts, and emulate the old behavior. (Source: my memory of an old article in an electronics magazine, so the above may be somewhat inaccurate -- the article may have been only referring to proposed legislation, or possibly industry self-regulation).

I remember hooking my first DVD player (I had just received for my birthday) to the family TV via an RF modulator, because the DVD player only output RCA and the TV only had a coaxial input. I tried playing The Matrix (the only DVD I had at the time), and the video constantly faded to black and back to normal every few seconds. In retrospect, I gather that was some sort of DRM implemented in the RF modulator, but I don't know if it has anything to do with what you're talking about.

Nope, it will come aliright. You're just taking a black/white dichotomy. But they don't have to make it impossible - just inconvenient.

They can make it inconvenient to access the analog hole, but they can't make it very inconvenient to play the DRM-free copy once someone has captured it.

I think you might be confusing whether the DRM will be effective at stopping copying with whether many users will adopt DRM-restricted tools and platforms.

That's not practical for video in most cases - dedicated pirates will find a way around it, but casual consumers won't bother. Duplicating HD or better video by analog means without significant quality sacrifices is much easier said than done.

Yeah, until the video recorder on your cell phone gets a little nicer.

It would have to get a lot nicer. I work in film and shooting an image of a TV or computer monitor is often a pain, even with high-end cameras, due to interference between the frame rates of the camera and display devices, as well as light intensity. For high quality results the typical workaround is to just throw up a grid pattern on the screen in question and composite in the desired image afterwards.

Is it possible to get results this way, yes of course. Are the results any good, not really. Commercial pirates work with people in the exhibition sector, amateurs rely on known weaknesses in popular disc formats. You'd have to be pretty desperate to rely on streamed media as your 'original.'

Unless the playback hardware is DRM'd and encased in an impenetrable box, you don't need to capture photons and compression waves, just the output at the DAC, which can give you perfect fidelity to the original digital signal.

Yes, but who does that in real life outside the tiny community of extreme hardware nerds? Absolutely such things are possible, but they're increasingly impractical. It's the same reason that people promote widespread adoption of encryption; there's no encryption so strong that it couldn't be easily circumvented at the endpoints by really dedicated sppoks, but the sheer inconvenience is itself a safeguard against mass surveillance.

Only one person has to do it.

Beauty of digital.

As for the spooks, depends on what you mean by "easily".

Edit: According to a video[1] posted on Vimeo (which claims to be from a DMCA hearing) representatives of the MPAA appear to make recommendations on how to do the capture and they provide some tips that will increase the quality of the final product.

For example, hooking directly into the audio output; and, removing other light sources.

[1] http://vimeo.com/4520463

Surely you only need the pirates to find a way around it as they will be the ones who distribute the free copies.

It will be the same problem as with current DRM techniques. It works now because it's still not fragmented yet. You will have your content available with your computer with particular updates and browser versions and for some reasons, it will never work with some combination of hardware + OS + driver + browser + country (especially with phones) and the result is people are going to pirate it anyway because it just works all the time, as always.

users wont, content producers, publishers and companies will publish want DRM.

Because I want to watch Netflix or whatever else requires it, and that's a value calculation I've made?

Still seems like a false dichotomy to me. Subscribe to Netflix and pirate your content if you have a firm believe in being DRM free while rewarding the creators of content you consume.

Paying for a DRM-encumbered service is not really consistent with a "firm belief in being DRM free".

Last I checked, the most effective way to pirate content is via a protocol such as Bit Torrent which requires you to also distribute pirated content. And that has legal ramifications, which then requires non-trivial methods to obscure your activities (paid proxy servers, etc). Most of us use Netflix not for ideological reasons, but for the pure convenience of it. Compared to Bit-Torrent,with Netflix you can easily browse titles, watch a bit, switch to another one, or watch whole seasons without waiting for multi-hour or multi-day downloads.

If you are not adverse to piracy, or you believe you have a valid fair use right to access the content, but you don't want to be guilty of distribution (a much higher penalty) then Usenet is probably the best bet.

> valid fair use right

They seem to be making it tricky to rip DVDs/Blu Rays these days (dirty tricks to screw with Handbrake/VLC) so the only way to get a movie onto my media server is to dl from somewhere after I bought the disc. Ironic, no?

BitTorrent traffic can be encrypted. There is no legal attack vector when used.

Encryption just makes it difficult for your ISP to automatically throttle your torrents. Anyone can still download the torrent themselves and see that you're an uploader.

They would have to get all their pieces from you, breaking protocol. They'd also have to be doing this on a large scale. They'd also either be breaking whatever laws you might be breaking, or they are providing you an implicit license.

> They would have to get all their pieces from you

Unless you are sharing some packed and/or encrypted media, it's probably streamable and even sharing a part of it is enough to break the copyright laws.

"They would have to get all their pieces from you"

If you're suggesting that it's only copyright violation if you download a complete work from somebody, you're flat out wrong.

I'm saying that whoever was proving a violation would have to show infringing distribution of a protected work. Bit torrent pieces generally contain a small fraction of the total work, which could easily be fair use. You'd have to show that the person was actually transmitting a protected work against its license. That piece may have been a short clip in a more encompassing work. You won't know until you get more of the context (other pieces).

So, maybe "they" (person/group alleging infringement) wouldn't have to get all the pieces, but it makes their case much stronger. There can certainly be fair use arguments made for transmitting torrent piece sized copies of protected works.

Nope, still wrong (not 'arguably wrong', plain factually wrong). That's not how 'fair use' works - it's not because you send a part (what you call a 'clip') of a work, that it becomes fair use all of a sudden.

So legal question, when's the cutoff point? How many packets do you need to get before you've broken the law?

Sadly, the law is not a mechanically applicable algorithm.

The logic here would, in part, be: "we have evidence that you were taking part in distribution of data that violated copyright law; we don't have to download the entire file from you to have sufficient evidence that you would have supplied any arbitrary data on request".

As for any "fair use" claim, one of the specific pillars there is the impact on the commercial value of the work. In that regard, commentary, critique, review, parody, and similar are not the same as wholesale unmodified distribution.

I'm not sure what you're reading, but I never said that sending part of a work makes it fair use. I said that there are fair uses that involve sending parts of a work and that proving a single or small number of pieces were transmitted between parties is not ipso facto evidence of infringement.

Look man, like my nan used to say - 'when you're in a hole, stop digging'.

"There can certainly be fair use arguments made for transmitting torrent piece sized copies of protected works."

How is that not 'sending part of a work makes it fair use' ? Yes yes you're using 'argument could be made' weasel words, but that doesn't mean you're not saying it. Here's a Godwin'ing analogy for good measure: 'arguments could be made that the Holocaust was justified. Of course I'm no nazi, I'm just saying that they could be made'. Yeah sure, good luck going on the record saying that and not (justifiably!) be classified as a nazi sympathizer.

Anyway:

"I said that there are fair uses that involve sending parts of a work"

No you didn't, you made some connection between 'the bittorrent technology, which sends pieces of data, and fair use of parts of works'. A connection that is non-existent. The criteria for fair use are wholly orthogonal to the concept of 'cutting up' a work as it is done in a bittorrent transfer. No (reasonable) argument can be made otherwise. There has been litigation on copyright infringement via bittorrent for about a decade now, if this line of reasoning stood any chance, wouldn't you think it had been used by now?

"that proving a single or small number of pieces were transmitted between parties is not ipso facto evidence of infringement"

Yes it is when there is no fair use involved, and there is no fair use claim just because bittorrent sends stuff in pieces.

> Anyone can still download the torrent themselves and see that you're an uploader.

Not exactly an uploader, but a peer.

All a downloader knows about his peers, is that they have pieces of that torrent.

> is that they ^^claim to^^ have pieces of that torrent.

What do you mean by "as yet non-existent"? I believe Chrome, IE and Safari are all shipping it. It sounds like you can even use Netflix with it, as of last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8159110

I don't care about DRM as long as it's lightweight and seamless. Streaming is one use case where its use is entirely justifiable if it operates transparently.

As long as streaming is available on all the devices I wish to use it on (that used to include Linux, but nowadays it's not my "daily driver"), then I'm okay with transparent DRM for streaming or rentals, too.

If a platform has to be explicitly supported in a supposedly cross-platform standard, then the details on how to implement that must be published or the standard is no longer cross platform.

With this move, Linux is no longer "supported" on a web wholly built on it. That's completely fucked up.

DRM is fundamentally incompatible with the web. Let's not give it any reason to think it belongs here.

This all assumes you have a solid Internet connection. Some of us have to watch movies offline most of the time.

The problem is most companies wouldn't create modules that are compatible with all operating systems. Open web is supposed to be open, not platform dependent.

If you're referring to Encrypted Media Extensions it's not a DRM mechanism that requires proprietary software. It's a specification for a communication channel between a browser and Digital Rights Management agent software on the local machine. While it's not ideal, it's just some javascript functions that interact with the DRM on the computer. The DRM software itself is completely optional.

It's much better than having plugins that do the same thing (if you use firefox you're used to Flash asking for trial Norton to be installed every time a security exploit is found in Flash). In the perfect world we wouldn't need it, but it leaves no excuse for media companies not to use HTML5.

Is the DRM module itself an open specification? Or will it be a separate proprietary program that content sites will still require you to install? I can see for example Real or Flash making such modules, and still bundling with random tool bars and popups.

Or will it most likely be a specification that allows multiple (but NDA'd) implementations, such as the DRM component of dvd and bluray players? If that is the case, then it is still better than what we had before, as multiple vendors will need to compete (increasing the likelihood of a non-crappy implementation).

> Is the DRM module itself an open specification? Or will it be a separate proprietary program

It's a closed source proprietary blob. You can read about it here.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/05/14/drm-and-the-challen...

There is no single "the DRM module". Microsoft has its own in IE. Google has its own in Chrome. Apple has its own in Safari. Adobe has its own (that Firefox will be able to use).

None of these have open specs.

A company could make it necessary to install their DRM to view their videos and bundle Norton with it. This would actually be worse than the current situation because the user would have to install a different DRM thing for each different site.

Although I can see sites being reluctant to do that because it would be inconvenient for the users to have to install something specifically to watch the web videos on that site. One thing I can see happening would be one major DRM software that emerges and all websites that want DRM work together to use that.

True, it was approved by W3C and Tim Berners-Lee a while back (http://www.infoworld.com/article/2612478/html5/berners-lee-a...), and was criticized - understandably so.

For instance: If someone do research for educational or critical purposes, they have the right to use copyrighted material under "Fair Use" (US, UK and other countries have similar rules).

With DRM this would essentially block this right (if used on the material in question), which of course is not a good thing.

But it's great to see that HTML5 is now the preferred choice on YT.

"Right to use" != "right to have it provided to you in an easy-to-copy way".

> "Right to use" != "right to have it provided to you in an easy-to-copy way".

One of the big problems with DRM is that this ends up being not "right to use" but "right to use in several very narrow ways that someone else deems fit". If your use is innovative or just different — such as using a more capable media player with more features than the one provided to play the media with —, you end up being not able to do it.

So if I write a poem in a rock in the middle of the desert I'm offending your right to have access to it? You can always film the screen and use that as fair use.

I'm against DRM, but "You're offending my rights to copy with minimum effort" is not an argument against it. Nobody has to provide anything in an easy-to-copy way, which doesn't mean that you don't have the right to copy it.

I agree that HTML5 is much better than Flash in every way, so in this sense I'd just like to encourage our community to continue applying pressure at all levels and in all channels to ensure that Encrypted Media Extensions doesn't continue to be a part of HTML5 standards, UAs, or websites.

> I'd just like to encourage our community to continue applying pressure at all levels and in all channels to ensure that Encrypted Media Extensions doesn't continue to be a part of HTML5 standards

Which just means content owners will continue to use proprietary plugins or push unstandardized extensions.

Pressure should be applied to the root of the issue (copyright holders' desire for DRM), not the symptom.

Pressure should be applied in both places.

> Which just means content owners will continue to use proprietary plugins or push unstandardized extensions.

Which will provide a worse experience, making it easier for competing content owners to provide a better experience.

Sorry, but there's an important distinction between what you said and what EME is.

EME is a spec for a communication channel between script in a web page and a browser, with the idea that the browser then talks to a DRM module. It's not a spec for a communication channel between the browser and a DRM module.

This is important, because it means that you end up with DRM modules that are tied to a particular browser.

The NPAPI plugin situation is unfortunate in all sorts of ways, but the one good thing it had going for it was that there _was_ an API that multiple browsers all implemented, such that a single plugin binary woudl work in all of them (modulo the usual bugs and incompatibilities you have when there are multiple implementors of an API).

Unfortunately, 3 of the 4 main browser vendors also happen to be DRM vendors, and were rather united in their opposition to the W3C creating a specification for the communication channel between the browser and the DRM module.

Is there any current or proposed implementation that can support W3C SMIL in the browser? A decade ago, RealPlayer was able to seamlessly edit video excerpts (defined by start::stop intervals) into a single video stream. The excerpts could have originated from different servers.

Will the new DRM formats support this use case? E.g. if I'm a paying Netflix subscriber, could I view a dynamically defined (XML or JSON) mashup of Buffy and Twilight, using only a list of start/stop edit points? The HTML5 viewer would need to pre-buffer each video clip, to make the viewed stream seamless.

You could build something like that in Javascript on top of HTML <video> and MSE, probably. The EME (DRM) spec is not really related to this.

Wouldn't the DRM spec have to explicitly permit MSE buffering? If Javascript could buffer the stream and send it to any destination other than a DRM-approved output device, that would defeat the DRM.

The way EME is designed, the browser is responsible for fetching the data from the network and passing it to the DRM module. This is no different with MSE, as far as I can tell; what you buffer up is the encrypted data, then pass it on to the DRM stuff.

Thanks, I'll run a test to see if it's possible to request an encrypted stream by timecode, then buffer it for composition with another encrypted stream.

> The DRM software itself is completely optional.

Unless you want the web page to work. One could just as well describe having a web browser as "completely optional".

RealPlayer was the coolest thing I'd ever seen when it came out in the mid 90s. It was the first streaming music player, as far as I know. Of course they later became corrupted by the advertising dark side, like every other internet company. But they were cool for a time. This was also before everyone decided that the browser would be the only internet platform.

There was an early streaming video application for Windows 3.1 that predated RealPlayer. It had some radio stations playing music as well as CNBC. Can't remember the name now. Even earlier was MBone for X11 although that was never more than experimental at the time.

Yup. I remember in 97(?) when I was able to be an early adopter of @home (before the excite merger), listening to "music on the internet" with realplayer on my PowerMac 7100.

It was positively mind blowing.

Almost equivalent to seeing 240x180 video playing on a CD-ROM.

Not only was it an awesome streaming client, I found it to be pretty sweet client for ripping/burning CDs at that time. It was sad to see it fall, but once Winamp got a bit more polished I never looked back.

I remember at one point Real Player had a redesign, it was sleek, well integrated and could stream all kinds of content very appropriately.

It also supported SMIL with real-time buffering of content from independent sources. You could create a small XML file that dynamically and seamlessly streamed video excerpts from multiple servers, appearing as one stream.

Hehe, SMIL, the early days of web defined standards. Our university tried to enforce its usage but it never caught up. Multimedia streaming at that time was still an oddity. Never be too early.

I remember it being great at the time and trying to work out how to save .rm streams and being completely flummoxed by it due to lack of knowledge and skills. I also remember that they redesigned it and it was a slow mess that attempted to be the media player for all media formats on my Windows machine, which was disappointing. It could have been that I had a really really slow computer (I was poor) but I remember it being painful to use, particularly when I just wanted to listen to MP3s (Winamp 2.0 was the best for that, although I did used to encode at 128kbps yuck yuck I must have been deaf).

Oh my god I completely forgot about RealPlayer.

Luckily there was an alternative, Real Alternative, that enabled you to play the content without having to install that ghastly RealPlayer. It seems like the community always finds a way around crappy software.

What's the community using instead of iTunes?

Spotify?

What's crappy about iTunes?

It's extremely bloated.

Not that I've ever noticed (my work computer runs linux, and I've found the music players there are, at best, barely useable in terms of what I want) (banshee's the best, but it's RNG is total garbage)

I don't think iTunes is bloated, per se. I'm actually on an older version because they're removed useful features in 11 and 12 and there's no way to extend the program.

The bloat is probably integration with the store. That should be split into a separate program and iTunes should just be a music library manager. Of course, that won't happen since not many people care about having a persistent music library any more.

You could also move iOS device sync out of iTunes. It doesn't even make sense that we use iTunes to sync content that comes from iPhoto.app, it might just as well be a core OS feature. After all, we have Handoff etc. built into OS X now...

On Windows it's incredibly bloated and has really bad UI design. Apple always used to trick people into installing Safari and Quicktime bundleware-style during updates as well. (Source: Every computer I've maintained over the years and asked the owner 'why did you install Safari' and the answer is always 'I guess iTunes did it')

I believe iTunes formerly required QuickTime.

It did years ago, but hasn't in a while. Since then, Apple Update would pre-select to install Quicktime and Safari when you updated iTunes unless you purposely unchecked them each time.

Speaking from personal experience on Yosemite: slow UI, constant beachballs and stutters (despite lots of RAM and no platter drives), paint/refresh bugs while scrolling, 100% CPU usage to play tracks (without FX/EQ), years of mission-creep, and a general conceptual mess since version 12, with its multiplicity of modes and sub-modes.

As an iTunes apologist and power-user since 1.0 (my huge library admittedly is not helping), 12 has become the last straw on using iTunes as anything but a sync tool and database. As a media player, it's a disaster.

> paint/refresh bugs while scrolling,

Good to know I'm not the only one. I've become used to scrubbing the pointer up and down over the list of podcasts until the part I'm looking at is legible, and plugging my iPod in twice to get it to show up. But IMO iTunes is actually one of the less-bad recent Apple software screw-ups. At least it doesn't have enormous memory leaks, like Safari and Keynote, which regularly beachball my poor laptop with "only" 4GB of RAM long enough to go make a cup of coffee.

> But IMO iTunes is actually one of the less-bad recent Apple software screw-ups

I would argue the peak in bug severity was 11.0, which randomly deleted podcasts: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5324634?tstart=0

For me that meant 30 GB of podcasts gone, most of which I can't download again (publisher went broke, original download required payments etc.) Sigh. I used to be a big fan of iTunes as well.

Podcasts used to be simple: follow an RSS feed, download the audio files, listen to them, delete them when you're done. Now they're "cloud," so your computer is just a cache, and God only knows when you have those files, or when some program lets you use them.

Find a place where you can actually download them and do so. You're still drawing from the cloud, albeit just not dynamically.

This one bit me too, and I was/am livid that an assumption would be made that user data is merely an expired cache to be deleted without warning.

For me, no linux support is an issue. But then, I have plenty of options for open source media players so I don't particularly need iTunes.

> What's crappy about iTunes?

In addition to what other have said:

  * no support for FLAC, OGG, WMA(?)
  * I don't _think_ there's support for ReplayGain.
  * Frankly, I just find the UI hard to manage.
  * _any_ marginally advanced feature.[1]

[1]: (I "DJ" for dancers) fade outs, volume changes in actual decibels (the volume bar is completely unlabeled), simple one time gain even if it results in clipping (quality matters none if you can't hear it), stop after current song, don't trust duration metadata or guesswork (I have MP3s that completely break the seek bar), start song from an index that isn't 0:00…

Mostly, no Linux support. I really want an open iTunes alternative which runs on Linux or any Unix, and can re-encode my entire music library with the codec/bitrate I want, while retaining music metadata. iTunes is good at that. Opus/Ogg support would be great. Anyone know of something like this?

You might like Clementine[1] it seems quite popular as an all-in-one music manager... though I usually use either `opusenc` or `fdkaac` via `ffmpeg` for transcoding with intact metadata.

[1] https://www.clementine-player.org/about

The UI ignores all the guidelines Apple sets and they redesign it every release from what I can tell? All the other applications on OSX have sensible close/minimise/zoom buttons on a titlebar but iTunes has long ignored that, with no obvious titlebar to move the window. Now that everything is bundled into the space where the titlebar should be, how do you move it without risk of clicking on something else?

Additionally, it is a LARGE application just for playing audio. I know that it does other things too but it seems to have outgrown its original purpose? There is now a crossover between iTunes and the App Store on Mac, from what I can tell? I wonder why they don't merge.

Having said that, I like the glaring red icon they now use (not sure why they changed from blue though!)

foobar2000 and GoneMad Music Player? Dunno, I'm that propeller hat guy who carries his music around in Opus Format on his Android ...

What's Opus like for day-to-day use? Do you notice any battery hit on Android from it being decoded in software? (assuming AAC is done in hardware - could be wrong)

What kind of quality/filesize do you use? If I'm used to ~170kbit VBR AAC/MP3 for headphone use, what settings would I need for Opus?

Just tried a few encodes: to my poor ears, 64kbit Opus is fine on headphones!

No significant battery hit, I really don't care. There is an ARM-optimized version of libopus that seems to use vector operations, I don't think it gets much better than that.

I'm using 72-96 kbit/s as bitrates, I've been playing around with that actually. 72 kbit is too little sometimes, 80 is fine, 96 is safe. Encoding is done in foobar2000, copy everything into a playlist, right click -> encode. My archive structure is this: At the top, there is one folder "Lossless", one folder "Lossy", each with subfolders for artist and album. foobar2000 and any other players syndicate their library from both folders.

I have separate versions of my music archive on my laptop and on my phone, each of which are complete. For the laptop, Lossless gets converted to Opus, Lossy remains the same, folders get merged. On the phone and tablet with tighter space constraints, I just re-encode everything to opus and merge. I won't notice the artefacts of re-encoding MP3 to Opus when there's a train humming in the background and people talking.

My best headphones for use with my phone are the 50€ Shure earphones. I also have some large open headphones from Thomann. Both are kinda good, but not studio quality good, so some details will escape me. I could maybe find some differences between Flac and Opus in some recordings if I tried very hard, but frankly I hate paying attention to audio quality. It's a very draining task that I restrict to comparing amplifiers/DACs and speaker setups, and I'll always use Flac for that anyways.

Google Play Music

Android?

YouTube, Spotify, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, Pandora, et. al.

Those just aren't sufficient IMO.

I like being able to listen to music when I have no internet connection.

I like being able to listen to something when the original was taken down.

I like being able to listen to something that the vendor no longer offers.

I like having smart playlists in my library and on my devices that automatically update themselves based on meta data such as what I've played recently.

Unfortunately I like being able to use my music program on an operating system of my choosing as well, and am looking for an iTunes replacement. But then replacement can't be worse than the original. That's a deal breaker.

Spotify premium, uploading anything they don't have, and using Offline Mode?

Isn't most of the music purchases on Amazon DRM-free? And downloadable in regular MP3's with a standard web browser? It's been a while since the last time I acquired any music.

Yes. I purchase Amazon MP3s and play them on Linux. I like actually owning my music as good old-fashioned files. Highly recommended.

Amazon doesn't just provide a link to the files once you purchase them, there is a downloader client. I have never tried the official one, there is an open-source command line alternative called "clamz" that works perfectly.

Have you tried groove basin? It satisfies your requirements except for smart playlists. But that feature is planned :-)

Have you tried Google Play Music? You can start by uploading 20,000 songs that you already own and just sync them to your phones/computers for offline listening.

Won't fit all of your criteria, but foobar2000 is wonderful. Works well under wine in OS X.

Buy CDs, rip them, and listen to it on any player you like. Or when an artist does not release CDs, they usually at least have a Bandcamp where they offer FLAC downloads, DRM-free.

Other than smart playlists, your requirements describe pretty much any media player released in god knows how long.

Personally I usually have an internet connection except on the train, so I use a Subsonic server, and my Android Subsonic client is set to aggressively precache my playlist (so it plays happily through tunnels, even if the tunnel lasts 10+ songs).

Maybe not for you, but the original question was what do other people use.

GrooveShark Exellent HTML5 app. No installation required. I deeply hate Spotify and Itunes.

I use Clementine on Linux, and sometimes on my Mac.

It handles more formats than iTunes (FLAC and OGG, maybe others), and the interface is okay, but not as polished as iTunes.

I haven't used it to add or remove music from my iPhone on either platform, but the Linux version can play music from the phone, so maybe it works.

> the interface is ok, but not as polished as iTunes

Is 'polished' some kind of euphemism in this context that I'm just missing? The last time I tried to simply copy an MP3 from my laptop to my wife's iPhone I wasted almost an hour wading through nonsense errors, online tutorials, and absurd UI before I decided it's actually impossible to copy/paste an MP3 through iTunes and downloaded a standalone free player so I could load the file to the phone through the browser.

I don't own a lot of music, I don't have a library of albums, just a folder of files I wanted to copy/paste.

I think you were doing something wrong, it is supposed to take less than a minute.

I use winamp, ample customization and plenty of plug-ins with good performance on my largish (~8k items) library.

VLC media player.

Tomahawk on linux is the best I've found.

Go old school and use the FM radio. I mean the physical item.

Private media collection.

http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/

Torrents

Enqueue (available on Apple App Store) - simple, powerful interface, automatically finds/adds music to your library, support for many formats including FLAC

What was the RealPlayer they introduced for Linux called again? Gold something or other? I have a vague memory about that, as I installed it (RedHat 7.0??) and then realised I didn't actually need it as I didn't watch any RM content.

I think it was Helix Player? My memory is also not clear.

Ahh that's the one! Thanks! I really don't miss that, although it did feature curved edges to the window. Shaped windows were all the rage at one point but thankfully we've all gone back to Rectangle Land.

Wow http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=RNWK+Interactive#symbol=R...

Yes, Virginia, as hard as it may be to believe today, once upon a time RealNetworks was a very big deal.

For a real spit-take, though, put one of the companies that we think of today as Very Big Deals next to it for comparison. Like, say, comparing Apple's performance to RealNetworks' over the decade from 1997 to 2007:

https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=0&chds=0&chdv=0&...

(I omit the last few years because AAPL has gone up so much over that period that if you include it you can't see the line for RealNetworks anymore. But check out how long it took Apple just to reach the heights Real was at in the late '90s.)

Or Adobe, all the way up to now:

https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=0&chds=0&chdv=0&...

Comparing two companies over a period of time without taking into account splits, reverse splits, dividends, etc. isn't very meaningful.

Both Google and Yahoo Finance already adjust for splits. Yahoo has an 'adjusted close' value that reports the price adjusted for dividends, but these adjustments don't change the stock price so much that it would make comparing unadjusted values 'not meaningful'.

It's not meaningful to compare because they are different companies with different market caps. I actually hear people talk about stock prices as normalized values in every day conversation, but don't know any way polite enough or fast enough to correct them.

This kind of thing happens way too much. For example, I've seen it with currencies as well. It's amazing how many people appear to implicitly assume that when you can buy, say, X >> 1 yen for one USD, that somehow means that the yen is an inferior currency. Unless you put things into historical context, those ratios are meaningless.

People understand this at a rational level when you point it out to them, but I do wonder about the extent of the economic effect of their flawed gut-level intuitions.

Are there any good charting sites which graph market cap and float instead of price and volume?

Although true, that's not relevant in this situation: both links posted by @smacktoward deal with percentage change in stock price, not actual stock price. Double-check the y-axis values.

That Google finance page, ironically, uses Flash.

I thought you had posted broken links because it was just showing a little chart for RNWK. Then I noticed:

"For the ubercool interactive charts, you need to install the Adobe Flash Player"

Just seemed a bit ironic, given the topic.

RealPlayer's popularity was being first. At a time when most of the internet was accessed with dial-up modems and they offered a high compression media format.

What killed them was the iPod. Or rather, computers and bandwidth improved so better quality compression could be used. Then RealPlayer limped along on name recognition alone. Although during the early days of h.264 it was the easiest way to play an MP4 on Windows.

Actually, it was Windows Media Player that killed them. Real lost it about 2000, years before the ipod.

"years" is a tad much, considering the iPod was first released in October 2001!

Ok.

I didn't know it was that old.

Chart at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#Sales says ipod really took off in 2005, though. Before then it was not a very big seller at all.

RealPlayer was capable - just barely - of streaming sort-of watchable video over 56k. That really was revolutionary at the time.

Such blockiness, but very true!

Fun fact: Github uses Flash to copy link data or raw code to your clipboard.

Only because it is literally the only way to support the feature. Nothing sneaky about it.

Clipboard API and events. W3C Working Draft 09 December 2014

http://www.w3.org/TR/clipboard-apis/

That's awesome, I didn't know about this draft at all! Still wondering how such a native feature hasn't been drafted within the first 25 years of web browsers. Any (un)official ETA?

11% global support, so far.

http://caniuse.com/#feat=clipboard

Having read your comment, I have just uninstalled Flash on my machines in delight.

I had been using ClickToPlugin under Safari to force HTML5 videos on sites (and mainly for a way to send YouTube videos to the AppleTV via AirPlay, as there was no other way to do it) but now all machines are Flash-free.

I think I'll have a coffee to celebrate.

God I hated RealPlayer so much, truly awful piece of malware.

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