tech industry
07/26/2004, 8:45am, EDT
Monday, July 26th
Real promises universal compatibility for music files
RealNetworks today announced its Harmony Technology, its DRM translation system that allows consumers to securely transfer purchased music to many popular secure music devices, including Apple's iPod (as noted yesterday evening). Harmony technology will be demonstrated on Tuesday July 27th at the Jupiter PlugIn conference in New York City, while a beta version of RealPlayer 10.5, offer consumers a chance to test the technology, will be available on Tuesday. RealNetworks says that Harmony Technology will be available later this year in other music products from RealNetworks including Real's market-leading Rhapsody(R) subscription service. "Generally speaking, Harmony supports any device that uses the Apple FairPlay DRM, The Microsoft Windows Media Audio DRM, or the RealNetworks Helix DRM, giving RealPlayer Music Store support for more secure devices than any other music store on the Internet."
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However, in light of the recent attempts by Real to get Steve to open up the iPod to 3rd parties, it seems like this is a last ditch attempt by Real to save themselves. It's almost like the vacuum cleaner salesman trying to make the sale by going door to door. He gets rejected on the front porch, then runs to the side window and starts knocking on it, hops the back fence, falls down in the mud, reaches the back door only to see a big dog coming to bite his pant leg...
I am not a fan of Real. I think their product quality is only out-crapped by Windows Media. So I think this is them trying hard to survive with a lesser quality product in an iPod world.
Kudos to Real's programmers for Harmony, but get back to work and make your products worthy of actually using.
Why risk your music purchase on a real hack?
Ita obvious that real is desperate.
Just like they stole the pc with bios hacks...now apply it to ipod.