Well, actually, I know what it means, but I wonder what the implications are. Here are my thoughts.

The iTunes Store is already very popular among those who buy music by the file. But, it ties into the Apple system: iTunes (the app) and iPods. Nota Bene: the majority of mp3 players/DAPs out there are iPods. Not hard to notice.

Enter a DRM-free movement that puts pressure on Apple. Apple eventually concedes; at first part of the Store, and then they're going DRM free (I don't know if it's happened yet). Seems like a smart move to me. After all, why should we buy from Apple's closed system when we can buy from the myriad of other digital music sellers, torrent it, or rip it off a friend's CD? Two things that spring to my mind are convenience and the very wide range of materials available in the iTunes Store (to my knowledge).

Now what? Two venues: DRM free downloads from the Store and conversions of previously purchased material to DRM free.

It seems to me that new DRM free downloads will have the bigger impact. I don't know how well the news will spread, but I can guess that among average users, they might not hear about it for a while, if ever. Or if they even knew there was DRM, or even what DRM is (perhaps thanks to Apple's successful integration scheme). When an already popular source offers a sweeter deal, maybe it'll go boom even bigger. I can't really see it hurting Store sales. Now, the second part to this venue: the format. No longer will people have to use the notoriously clunky iTunes to play their purchased music. Heeello Foobar, Winamp, Amarok, Banshee, Songbird, and everything else that can handle .m4a. And this also means players; I have it in my head that some players out there do handle that format and I know that Rockbox does (Sansa e200 v1 FTW!). So, because of the last two things I mentioned, some people who didn't like the iTunes system before may now join up/come back.

The second venue is conversion of your old Store goods to the new DRM free format. Actually I suspect they're not so much conversion involved; I think Apple may be doing some file modding that just removes the DRM, as has been done before by, umm, certain tools. So how many people are going to pay Apple's fee to convert their collection? I can't say. But it would be interesting to get some statistics on it, or even some feelings from the public on converting their stuff.

One note here: I've assumed in this post that the conversion involves videos, and I'm assuming they are DRMed. I don't know either for sure; in fact, I've never bought anything from the iTunes Store, only witnessed a purchase once. I don't even have iTunes installed right now (Safari, though… free Lucida Grande font and I should use it a lot more for webdev testing, but then again, Chrome has WebKit, so… sigh).

And, on a somewhat related note, I find the lyrics of this song somewhat funny. It's about pirating music and bucking the system, I think. Lolz. Take a listen for you health.

Thanks to a comment on that DownloadSquad free music post I linked to a while back, I wanted to see if I could grab some free music from brother-sister.net, mewithoutYou's official site for their latest released album, Brother, Sister. Four songs from the album are available for streaming.

So, like the commenter, I installed the Firefox add-on Live HTTP Headers, which is kind of fun… it let's you see the HTTP calls the browser makes. So I pointed Firefox to brother-sister.net, and it let me see the calls the Flash element, in this case, was making when I switched songs. I saw that it was pointing to .swf files, Flash files.

Yesterday I grabbed all the URL's and downloaded two of them with Free Download Manager. Since they were Flash files, my idea was to convert them to mp3 (or maybe something else) or grab the sound out of them via decompilation.

The two programs I grabbed to do that were HooTech's SWF FLV to MP3 Converter trial and Decompile Flash Free Version. Neither would open the .swf files. I admitted defeat.

But, later that night, I thought… I did download something… and they were several megs each. Then it occurred to me that maybe they were actually MP3's, so I tried it out, and boom! They absoballylutely were! So, there you are, four free mewithoutYou songs with a small effort.

The following instructions are for Windows using Firefox, but the process is fairly similar with other operating systems and browsers.

The .swf links:

a Glass Can Only Spill What it Contains (track 5)
Nice and Blue (pt. Two) (track 6)
C-Minor (track 9)
O, Porcupine (track 11)

So, if those don't download and just sit there, just right click the links and select Save Link As… Or, if you have a download manager, add new downloads for the files… right click the links and select Copy Link Location to get the proper address and then paste them into your download manager.

Then, when the .swf's have finished downloading, open the folder you downloaded them to, and change the extensions to .mp3 (for example, change C-Minor.swf to C-Minor.mp3). This can easily be accomplished through right clicking the files and selecting Rename. If you can't see the extension (so C-Minor.swf would just look like C-Minor), you need to turn on known file extensions.

And there you go, you have your MP3's. And at a fairly good 112 Kbps quality. They don't have any tags, though so you could automatically tag them (put in information like artist, title, album, album year, etcetera) with Mp3tag or Auto-Tag in Winamp. Or you can manually tag them with a program such as Windows Media Player or iTunes (album information here).

Enjoy.

Also, I further tried out Decompile Flash Free Version and SWF FLV to MP3 Converter this morning using a real Flash file. SWF FLV to MP3 Converter seems to work OK, but it's only a trial; on exit you are told that it's a trial version and "The version only converts 50% audio and extracts 5 sound elements at most." Decompile Flash Free Version, however, extracted all of the elements of the same Flash file for me… for free. And it's not a trial. I extracted all the sound elements just fine. So, if any of you Windows users need a decent (to me) Flash decompiler and partial editor for free, this looks great.

Maybe.

It's actually become fairly like the OS X dock. The idea is, "why show a button for an app that already has one in Quick Launch?" So Quick Launch is getting consolidated. This is actually a pretty big move, considering how long the taskbar has been relatively the same. And I'm told there will not be an option to go back to the old style. It's a pretty cool idea, but of course it has risks and naysayers. One person pointed out that taking the text off of the title bar could remove a source of information via changing window titles (e.g. a game score or inbox count). Good point. Also, it was asked in the comments, "how do you know what's running and what's not?" Also a very good point. I think if the W7 team can pull off making it concise, clear, and useful, it's worth it (and customers might even like it).

Also interesting: Aero Peek. Move the mouse over a window thumbnail from the taskbar and that window appears and others fade away. Sounds like a cool feature to me. Not actually switching, but you can get a bigger look if you want to.

This post over at the Engineering Windows 7 blog (yup, from the MS team) illustrates and talks about the new taskbar in depth. Definitely worth reading if your interested in that sort of thing.

Sigh. The royalty rates didn't go up, and Apple keeps on selling the tunes.

Other news: Nintendo shows off the DSi. It launches in Japan on the first. Hmmm… it has a web browser… this should be interesting.

And… watch the VP debate if you can. We don't have live TV, so it's a no go for me, but if you do, hit the tube tonight.