crunchysteve

It arrived today. I'm impressed. The FM receiver doesn't seem to work indoors, although I live in a "radio shadow" for the mountain where all the FM transmitters are, but everything else works a treat.

Bluetooth to my JBL headphones is stable and clean, the EQ settings are garbage, but they are on almost every audio player I've ever owned, including "Mr Pink" the now dead 2006 iPod Mini and my iPhone FTM, so it's set for flat. (So's my iPhone, re crap EQ presets.) It also has a 3.5mm jack, so I can use this on my bicycle! (Off road trails only!)

I haven't tried the video player functions. The e-reader on this tiny screen would be hard work, but I didn't buy it for that, nor did I buy iot for picture display. The voice recorder is pretty damned good quality, almost the equal of the mic in my iPhone! Certainly good enough for a songwriting sketch pad to take down guitar or bass part ideas.

Hey, it plays music. Well. REALLY well. That's all I bought it for. The music app part of it is something Apple should reverse engineer. F*** streaming. F*** DRM. BTW, this thing is playing tunes I know are Apple Music only! Stuff I bought downloads of a few years back, but hey, nothing I've ever tried before has worked on these tunes, only my iPod Mini could play them. I had to rip them to MP3 before I could use them on other devices.

Re DRM, I want artists to be paid, I'm a musician, I'd like to be paid for my music. You know, I worked hard for the money. What money?! The thing is, DRM is focused on record label profits, not on artists rising from a fan base and, as youtube, spotify, etc become saturated with label music. Independents struggle to be found - they're even downplayed by the major streamers. Capitalism locks up culture and makes everybody beg, the artists and the fans.

I believe in the model of what I call Digital Rights Protection. A tool that allows artists to encode music inside a secure, hash-signed applet. The artist would use an affordable studio app to encode their masters into the app, playable only from that app, in order decided by the artist. The playlist app could be shared, but not the individual tracks.

If the audience want to make playlists of their fave tunes from this kind of digital album, then they pay the artist a preset price, per track or discount for the whole album, from within the app with all the standard payment backends included in the studio app at compile time. Maybe the artist only unlocks the singles in their version of this deal. The files are inside the app, encrypted, but the app won't give them up without the artist's public key for that album.

Share the app with anybody. The music will be playable, but only as an album. You want the files to make mix lists from, you have to get your card out, click the "buy" button, select the tracks. The money goes directly to the artist who launched the album. There are no A&R dudes spruiking deals that make the label rich, nobody else, not even the artist. The money does not pass "Go," the money does not lose $200 per sale, it goes directly to the artist, because the artist is the artist, producer, label and distributor.

This software is not only possible, it is inevitable. No blockchain, just encryption. Normal javascript backends for payment, fanclub, etc. The studio creator app would simply be a package of templates, an encryption hash generator like GPG. Using a tech like Gun.js as a database, there wouldn't even need to be all that much server hardware required - the biggest expense in running a backend.

The "killer app" for this is, it's selling files. Any file, provided it doesn't have any existing DRM tags or blockchains. It could sell art of any kind. Images, music, films, ebooks, 3d print files. Anything an artist wants to get a payday from, but isn't greedy. Maybe the app is called "FleaMarket" and the artist's encoding tool is called "FleaMarket Studio Pro."

The Napster dream is alive, still my tiny, cheap MP3 player delivers on the consumer side. We just need an open-source collective to develop a javascript framework standard that makers of players like my iPod replacement can include to run the product applets and to develop "FleaMarket Studio Pro." All artists, in control of their own art, at all times. Sure, there's a bit of leakage around the edges, but you have to know how to make your files "leak." Most folks can't be arsed to learn that stuff. Right now they use Apple Music, GooglePlay, Spotify and YouTube to get their music. And the artist gets BIG debt, after BIG debt, after BIG debt!

I know how to test a piece of audio gear to near breaking point. I don't know enough to create this hypothetical app ecosystem. I know a little C, enough to make an Arduino go "bleep blip blip blip" like Boss DR-55. I know WAY less javascript/node/GPG. I could learn more, but I have 20 years of life left, at best, I really have to stop and smell roses while I can. If I'd had the opportunities 40 years ago...

Digital Rights Protection (DRP), Free Open Source Software (FOSS) and the Artist in control. That's what I stand for. I only wish I'd been born 20 years later. Meh, maybe it wouldn't have been any different.