News archive (11 / 1999)

MP3 sharing seems to be the big hit in mp3 scene, since there is once again a new program for this purpose, called eTunnel. Features are pretty much the same as in Napster and CuteMX, but little specialities are also there. Every registered user has 50MB "virtual drive" that he/she can use for temporary mp3 storage and that dir can be accessed with regular web browsers..

Musicmatch offers a challenge to RealNetworks - they are going to start support Windows Media formats for video streaming/playing/etc. MusicMatch is already a real competitor for Real in audio and now it seems to be that they are going to get the similiar status in video, too.

Anyway, MusicMatch's connections to MicroSoft are even more harder after this move -- for me this sounds that MicroSoft is making a take-over of the audio/video generation by a product that doesn't have MicroSoft's logo. Nice move, since everybody knows how bad reputation M$ has in certain areas, so why not to use some other vendor to do the dirty work...

New portable mp3 player that is "skinnable" (you can change the face just like most mobile phones) is on sale now. Player is called as "Nex Player" and it has 64MB RAM and retail price is $179.

Nex player

VH1.com offers full albums from big names for free! Album list includes Blondie - Live and Mötley Crue - Live 1983-1999 Entertainment or Death.

Albums are available for streaming only and the format is WMA.

Yahoo! and Beatnik GrooveGrams teamed up to offer a possibility to remix tracks to make your own versions of latest hits. Service allows users to change guitar, drum, etc. tracks from various selections.

Federal Trade Comission has started investigating the Sony's and Time Warner's plan to merge CDNow into their jointly owned Columbia House -- while the investigation process in on, the merging cannot be finished.

Liquid Audio's announcement few days ago that they're going to sell 3million shares for investors to get capital for expenses has raised some rumours and wonders about Liquid Audio's future - company is obviously in financial problems since they need to sell shares to cover up regular enterprise expenses..

(article from Forbes)

Kenwood, a consumer electronic giant, released their mini component system in Audio Expo '99 that can download and play Internet audio formats such as MP3 and WMA. Stereo system has all the regular stuff such as cassette player, AM/FM tuner and CD player. But as an extra stuff, it has 13GB HDD and modem inside the package..

Virgin opened their streaming audio webpage called JamCast. The site is specially meant for streaming audio, not downloading.

Liquid Audio filed that they're selling 3 million shares to get money for company's expenses and hiring new employees. Liquid Audio's shares went down 3.27% after this..

We improved our newsletter and it will change quite dramatically within next weeks. First thing you'll notice is that the users who have selected HTML as preferred email format (users that use Outlook, Netscape, etc..) will receive new kind of a newsletter full of colors and all the news in full-length!

We will also change the schedule of the newsletter later, propably after next week, the newsletter will come only once a week to your mailbox. We'll also include short listings of newest software upgrades, list of new bands and list of latest skins..

If you don't get our newsletter yet, please sign in! Use either the form in the main page or click the "Sign In" button in the top of the page!

MP3.com and Freei.com announced a deal that offers mp3.com users a possibility to get free Internet access. Deal also includes some marketing stuff - f.e. now MP3.com has a link on Freei.com's portal page, etc..

Music Business International, a research institute, estimated that music will be sold for over $5.2 billion in 2005 - numbers include CDs, DVDs and downloadable music.. Nice bunch of money if you compare it to last year, when the value of whole music business in Internet was appx. $170 million.

Small Australian based company released world's first commercial cap mp3 player, called Xeenon.

Read the story

Now there is also Napster available for Linux, version 0.6b. With Linux-Napster you can do all the things that you can do with Windows version too - and they work together, so you can d/l Windows-based files from Linux client and vice versa.

NetDrive.com offers storage space for free - now you can save your mp3s, GIFs, whatever in your virtual harddrive located in NetDrive.com..

Author of Apollo 37 said that this new version will be the last one that he will publish, since he's totally pissed in doing the product. He said that he will launch the source code for public later on.. We'll see, the guy said 3months ago the same thing and this is fourth release from him after that..

Viacom announced that they are planning to set up an independent company based on their Internet sites - Viacom's sites include MTV.com, VH1.com and SonicNet.com.

MP3.com and i-Drive.com joined their forces to offer 'electronic greeting cards' for their customers. Now users of MP3.com can create their holiday season cards online and include animation and mp3 music in the card.

Lik Sang International is offering a rather cool all-around player called Shinco 830. The player is able to playback DVD and VCD movies as well as MP3 CDs.
The player features everything we've come to expect from modern DVD players such as 10 bit D/A, Dolby Digital and DTS output etc. It's compatible with DVD, VCD3.0, VCD2.0 and even the DVCD (aka MiniDVD and SVCD). Of course the unit is also region free.
At a mere $319 the unit is more than interesting!

NetAid kinda failed - it only collected $1M even that the happening's webpage collected over 2.5 million users. Under 50c / user donation is really disappointing, compared f.e. to legendary LiveAid concert that collected $120M... Maybe the time is not right for Internet charity concerts yet.

Uh-oh, diffult version number... Anyway, newest version of great MP3 sharing tool, CuteMX is out with tons of bug fixes and few new cool features, such as 'play this file' that uses MediaPlayer to play the tracks or video files.

Ericsson forth-coming cellphones offer a possibility to buy add-on cartridge that allows mp3 playing on the cellphone... Interesting - what will Nokia say for that :-)

Guns N'Roses released their new single in the Internet - track is called as 'Oh My God!' and it is in 96kbps mp3 format (meant for streaming). You can find the track from here.

MicroSoft Inc. and Sony Inc. announced a contract in Comdex that MicroSoft's WMA format will be compatible with Sony's new copyright protection tech, OpenMG.

Singles will be history within few years - that seems to be the trend in these days when even the big boys are getting into the digital downloads. This time it's EMI - they're starting an eCommerce site that will sell EMI singles in digital format.

In U.S. FBI has started busting IRC traders who transfer pirated material such as mp3s, VideoCDs and copyrighted programs through IRC channels.. On this week they arrested 15 IRC users for spreading that kind of a content.

Companies specializing in digital audio combined yesterday when eMusic bought CDuctive with $38M in stock-to-stock exchange. CDuctive has few cool names in their lists such as Green Day.

Ok, RIAA did it - they sued Napster... Let's see what happens next.

Wired News

Sony is stepping into the portable mp3 player game with a player that is size of a pen! Sony announced this product in Comdex and promised that the product will be in the stores in 2000.

Most popular hand-held mp3 player on the market, Diamond Rio, will start supporting MicroSoft's WMA standard in the next generation models. The spokesperson of S3 confirmed that WMA will be the major standard that Rio products will focus, but they didn't tell the schedule for the next generation products.

RIAA is planning to file a lawsuit against a Napster - the program that allows users to spread mp3s over Internet.

Disney has finally shed some light about their future plans regarding DVD releases. First of all they're planning on releasing DVDs in the future at the same time with VHS copies. It will be most interesting to see how this affects the VHS sales now that a DVD copy will be made available simultaneously. Also, unlike the current 'Limited Edition' DVDs their plans are to create a permanent DVD library consisting of 26 (animated) titles. The titles are to be realeased during the next two years, and will be available year-round. Finally Disney announced a special 'Disney Platinum Series' limited-time-only line. The Platinum Series consists of ten titles that will be released once a year starting in 2001.
The platinum series has the following titles: Snow White,'' "Beauty and the Beast,'' "Aladdin,'' "The Lion King,'' "Bambi,'' "The Jungle Book,'' "Cinderella,'' "The Little Mermaid,'' "Lady and the Tramp'' and "101 Dalmatians.'' As you can see, some of these titles are already scheluded for this christmas. It is yet unknown if the Platinum Editions are different from the ones out now.

For more information read the full press release!

RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has contacted the University of South Carolina Spartanburg about a student of theirs who was selling pirated MP3s and had turned his PC into a MP3 spreading site. Because of the copyrighted nature of the music the RIAA was reportedly ready to sue both the student and the university.

According to Frank Creighton, senior vice president director of anti-piracy at the RIAA, the RIAA was not looking for a lawsuit. They only made the university aware of the potentional liability and cost of the student's actions. "We request simply that they remove the material. We leave it to the university to decide what action to take," Creighton said.

MP3.com has announced an alliance with Zing.com - a site that is focused on 'printing, sharing and permanently storing pictures'. The goal is to offer picture service and pictures for MP3.com's artists and fan pages.

An other software creator so far (other is MusicMatch) offers a change to change their RealJukebox licence into some other mp3 software. This time the offer comes from [mp3 explorer] - a neat mp3 utility that you can use for managing your mp3 collection.

You can download the shareware version from our software archive.

Group of Internet users has sued Real Networks Inc. to court. Case is based on that fact that Real Networks' product Real Jukebox collects the user-defined data of user's music tastes and sends that information to Real's database -- without asking a permission from the user.

InsideDVD will host an interview with Steve Gustafson and Mark Atkinson, two of the "Saving Private Ryan" DVD producers and broadcast it live on their website. You can send in your questions via e-mail or phone in your question live from a toll-free number that will be posted an hour before the webcast.

Steve and Mark will focus on the creative process they went through to create the DVD for this 5-time Academy Award-winning film.

You can start e-mailing in your questions Wednesday evening by sending them to www.insidedvd.com on Thursday, November 11, 1999 (Veteran's Day) at 10:00 PM EST (or 7:00 PM PST) to view the webcast and participate.

Seagram / UMG formed a new totally Internet based recording label that finds new talents from the Internet. Trick is that that UMG has a deal with MusicTV, USA Networks and AOL that those companies will help UMG to promote new artists that they sign up..

Real Networks is rumoured to buy Scour.net, one of the largest multimedia sites in the world. The price would be something like $100M...

Read more from CNet

Real Networks released first beta of their RealPlayer 7 for Windows & Mac platforms. RealPlayer 7 basic is free and RealPlayer 7 Plus costs $29.99.

MusicMatch is offering a free upgrade for realJukebox users to change the RJB into MusicMatch Jukebox. This should be interesting for all of those guys who are totally pissed because of Real's privacy policy.

(article from Cybertropix)

BladeEnc has moved, our software archive has now the correct file linking, please try to d/l the software again if you have failed during past few days.

Sorry 'bout this people...

StreamBox released first beta version of their brand new program called StreamBox VCR - with this program you can save the streaming data such as RealAudio & RealVideo clips into your harddrive.

StreamBox VCR

New Line is preparing a Platinum Series edition of David Fincher's Se7en. No exact details are available as of yet, but you can count on it being filled with extras (and probably a commentary track). The disc will also be an RDSL dual-layer disc (as opposed to the current movie-only flipper version).

The release date is set for March 2nd, 2000.

One more band, Counting Crows, released their newest single "Mrs. Pottler's Lullaby" in the Internet. You can find the track from their homepage - track is in mp3 format 128k quality.

Counting Crows

There is a rumour going on that NullSoft is going to release WinAmp v3.0 with ShoutCast v2.0 within few days. Let's see..

Record label TVT who has contracts with such a names as Nine Inch Nails, made a partnership contract with Musicmaker.com that Musicmaker will offer TVT's albums for customers in various formats, including WMA and MP3.

MusicMaker.com

Third Eye Blind released their single "Anything" in Internet. This track will be available in www.mjuice.com until 23rd November when their new album will be released.

MJuice

DeCSS, the tiny bit of software that makes it possible for anyone to copy encrypted DVD-video content, has caused a huge fuss on the Internet.

Wired.com has interviewed various parties regarding the matter, but unfortunately they weren't able to get a comment from the MPAA, whose word has alot of weight in the Hollywoodian motion picture industry.

Xing Technology Corporation, the producer of XingDVD player, has not yet commented on the matter. Xing had not encrypted their DVD decryption key, which enabled the hackers easily reverse engineer 170 new decryption keys. In essence it means that DVD format is now open. DVD-movie producers could of course remove the XingTech -encrypted key from future DVDs, but it wouldn't make any difference, since there would still be 170 more keys to use.

According to CSS license Xing Technology Corporation will be fined $1M for breaking the license terms.

Buena Vista is still holding back on releasing anamorphic DVDs. The upcoming Life is Beautiful "Collector's Series" DVD will be 1.85:1 widescreen (non-anamorphic), with English 5.1 and original Italian 5.1 soundtracks, a "Making of" -featurette, Academy Award TV-spots, and a trailer. That's not alot for a disc with a price tag of $39.95, now is it?

Of the remaining 1999 Buena Vista releases only the following are anamorphic: A Bug's Life Special Edition, The Castle, Break Up, Shakespeare In Love Special Edition, Teaching Mrs. Tingle, The Very Thought Of You and Rogue Trader.

MP3.com will webcast TLC's concert tapes recorded in their first concert five years ago.

mp3.com

Competitor for famous Napster has arrived from creators of CuteFTP. The program is called as CuteMX and it should be much more stable than Napster is (Napster is propably the second buggiest program in the world right after Windows 9x).

You will find CuteMX from our site very shortly!

MicroSoft Inc. and MusicMatch Inc. announced their strategic relationship agreement for developing next generation audio and video products for consumer markets.

This will most likely mean in first phase that MusicMatch will be supporting WMA as primary format in audio encoding.

Just fixed few annoying bugs related to membership info and joining, all should work now.. Report all the bugs to me, webmaster@afterdawn.com

Korn released their newest single "Falling away from me" in the Internet for free. You can download the track from this link. They are also making some donations for charity - for every person who signs up in their guest book they will donate $.25 for charity. You can visit their website from this link.