News archive (12 / 1999)

Apparently Singapore has decided there are now 32 days in December. Atleast according to their Webcam.

Happy new millennium and new year for all our users!

-webmaster

Even though it''s not year 2000 in Europe yet, you can already see the effect it has on Swiss watches.

According to the page:
Current time in Auckland, New Zealand is:
Saturday, January 1, 19100 - 02:56:06

InterTrust Technologies Corporation announced today that they've acquired XAudio MPEG-1 decoding technology. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Xaudio is widely licensed MP3 decoding engine, used by companies and products such as MusicMatch, Diamond Rio, Empeg and MacAmp.

Santa Clara County Judge William J. Elfving rejected the DVD Copy Control Association's request for temporary restraining order on DeCSS distributors.
The gallery at the courtroom reportedly loughed out loud, when the plaintiff's attorney claimed that DeCSS was only made for promoting piracy.
Read the full story and coverage at SlashDot.org

MP3.com acquired seeUthere.com, private owned website that allows artists to plan and schedule their events like gigs, etc.. Transaction was made totally in stocks.

Since huge traffic to our PDA pages, we've been having some difficulties updating the pages without hesitating anyones sync'ing, but those problems should be solved now. But please, dear PDA users, report to us if any problems occur! You can either email me at webmaster@afterdawn.com or to visit our website and leave feedback!

We will also develope our PDA site to be even more informative in January 2000..

Yesterday (12-27-99) the court in Göta, Sweden decided that "it is legal to have links to pirated music on a homepage in Sweden if the links are to a server in a country where it isn't illegal to pirate music." Earlier this year in Skövde, Sweden, a teenager was charged for linking to pirated MP3s. The charges were dropped mostly because the prosecutor could not convince the court that most of the links pointed to US servers.

Microsoft released newest version of their Windows Media SDK. You can use this SDK to create your own programs to use WM technology. If you're interested to download it, please visit this link.

Remote Solution's new portable mp3 player, called Personal Jukebox PJB 100, is first one that can carry over 100 CDs of music in palm-size player. Now they announced that they will sell this player with a bundle that includes 12 free downloads from EMusic.com.

Below is an excerpt from an e-mail received by Slashdot.org from Robert Jones (Devzero.org):
"I have just received an email which I think will be of interest to many Slashdotters. Apparently, the DVD CCA [Copyright Control Association] has applied for a restraining order against myself and approximately 70 others to keep us from distributing 'any proprietary property or trade secrets relating to the CSS technology'. The hearing will be at 'the Superior Court of Santa Clara County, State of California, on December 29, 1999, at 8:30 a.m.' This will probably result in the bastards silencing us, but what can you do? If this goes through, I will never purchase a DVD player using current technology."
Related links:
DeCSS v1.21b
Slashdot.org
Devzero.org

Early this month, Microsoft trotted Bill Gates to San Jose to launch a new initiative in the company's battle to dominate development of software that sends audio and video files over the Internet.
Gates gave the keynote address at Streaming Media West '99, a trade show for the new technology's wide-eyed minions. The world's richest man told a scraggly group of twentysomethings about Microsoft's plans to provide the core infrastructure that would help their companies sell digital music and video over the Internet.

(whole story from Seattle Times)

Real Networks Inc. sues StreamBox for cracking their RealPlayer's source code. StreamBox is a product that allows users to save Real Audio and Real Video streams directly to their harddrives -- which takes the advantage of website owners to have "listen only once" music and video on their website.

Yahoo! Music and TVT Records teamed up to offer music from TVT's music catalog to Yahoo! users. Music is available as downloads and they are offering 60day trial period when all the music downloads are free. TVT Records' artists include such names as NIN and Snoop Dogg.

In Thursday, some false speculations about Yahoo.com dropping Real Networks as their no. 1 audio & video solutions provider, caused Real's shares to drop 16%.

Both Yahoo and Real deny the rumours and say that their business relationship stays strong.

Merry christmas to all our users around the world!

-Petteri Pyyny, webmaster

A site dealing with DVD playback on various Nvidia cards has been opened at NvidiaZone.cjb.net. The site contains tips and FAQs for getting the best DVD acceleration from an Nvidia board, getting full-frame TV-playback without black borders etc.
Definitely worth checking out, if you are an Nvidia user!

InterVideo, Inc.announced today that its highly acclaimed software DVD player, WinDVD, had passed Microsoft's new test requirements for a Windows Hardware Quality Labs logo for Windows 2000 on a Dell Dimension system configured with the Nvidia GeForce 256 graphics. WinDVD is the first software DVD solution to be granted Logo status by Microsoft on the new Windows 2000 operating system.

Trap Door, an "Intergalactic Bump" band with 12 members, will be releasing their second album on MP3.com. The album is called Conscious and it will also be released as a Digital Automatic Music CD, which will contain the songs in MP3 format in addition to regular audio CD tracks.

Encoding.com, Internet audio & video solutions provider, got $48 million in its third fund raising. Companies that invested money this time to Encoding.com include NBCi, Microsoft, AOL, CBS and Intel.

Encoding.com will use the money for expanding their markets in U.S. and international.

Samsung Electronics Inc. announced this week that they have designed a chip that combines DSP and MCU (multipoint control unit) chips in one chip. This makes possible to manufacture smaller mp3 players.

GETDigitalMedia has acquired Songs.com, Intenet's leading independent music ecommerce site. Financial terms of agreement were not disclosed.

Eagles may release their upcoming album in Internet and only in Internet. They don't currently have any recording contract with any labels and they've announced that Internet might be the way to sell their record to audience.

Epitonic.com announced that they are now NBC Internet Service's Snap.com portal's official digital music download site. Contract includes also promoting on NBC's media and in Xoom.com pages.

Macrovision and Universal Home Video announced a five years contract of providing copyprotection to UHV's video and DVD titles. Macrovision is a world leading video copy protection provider -- Macrovision code can be inserted into recorded material so that it doesn't effect to picture, but copying the material with basic equipment is hard, almost impossible. Contract covers U.S. and Canadian titles of Universal Home Video.

Altho' there are lot of "Macrovision removers" for most of the video capturing cards and DVD players, the mass audience don't know a heck about these tricks, or just don't care. And this makes video distributors very happy - for now.

Since its first commercial appearance in 1985, Macrovision protection has been used for over 2.5billion video casettes and for over 96 million DVDs.

Creative Labs Inc., world's leading multimedia hardware provider, is going to release its support for Macintosh. Support will include almost all hardware that Creative has in its product line -- NOMAD portable mp3 players, Sound Blaster cards, ...

Products will be demonstrated in Macworld Expo, in January.

Microsoft is making strategic moves in streaming business -- today they announced that they've invested $30M in streaming pioneer Intervu. Intervu will use capital in developing Windows Media compatible streaming solutions.

ReQuest announced today that they've selected Quantum as HDD supplier for their upcoming MP3 home stereo equipment called AudioReQuest(TM) Digital Music System. System can store appx. 300hours of near-CD quality mp3 music. System also supports WMA and other popular Internet audio compression technologies. Device will be available in January 2000 and priced in $799.

Just recently we changed our software listing a little bit and groupped those great mp3 search / spread tools into own section. You can find these utils (including Napster, CuteMX, ...) from sharing/search utils ategory in our software archive.

World's biggest recording companies have filed lawsuits against two mainland-China based websites that offer illegal mp3s of worldwide known artists. Recording companies behind the lawsuit are Universal, EMI, Sony, Warner and Chinese company called Guangzhou.

This is interesting news since China doesn't have any specific laws against music piracy and this is kind of a test for Chinese copyright laws.

After the impressive DVD player sales of last week (over 123,000 units sold), the total number of players sold in the U.S. marketplace climbed over the 5 million mark. The sales next week will be probably even higher what with last minute christmas shopping and all. Next week there will be more DVD set-top-boxes in U.S. than there are Finns...

WinAmp's site was totally redesigned and opened in this week for public with new layout -- kinda AOL'ish I must admit. At this point, they also set up a new and improved plug-ins and skins section, which is kinda sad for us, who try to keep up our popularity by having that kind of a content; luckily they didn't open a newssection :-)

Anyway, check their site at WinAmp.com

Online survey at DVDTalk.com revealed, that the amount of coupons are the number one factor, when choosing an online store to purchase DVD movies from. Coupons were concidered more important than, for instance, price, customer service and order fulfillment.
Check out the full survey results at DVDTalk.com

According to recent multimedia report, so called "stand-alone" DVD players are becoming one of the most popular items in our living rooms, while DVD-ROM growth isn't that great...

(for full story, click here.

EMusic will offer two major artists more - they announced that they've made deals with Bush and Beck and those artists can be found from EMusic's digital music archives ready for purchase.

MP3.com announced that one of the most successful rock bands of the century, Eagles, will offer free audio and video streaming in MP3.com. They also have a contest going on where winner can win transportation and front-row tickets for Eagles' Los Angeles Millennium gig.

Video Business Magazine named DVDExpress as the Online Video Retailer of The Year 1999 in their annual awards special. DVD Express is number 1 DVD retailer in the world at the moment.

NetFlix and Beyond.com joined their forces - NetFlix offers 10 free DVD rentals for Beyond.com customers. Offer is limited up to $40 and it will expire on 31st December, 1999.

SDSIC (San Diego Software Internet Counsils) awarded MP3.com on Monday as The Internet Company of The Year 1999.

Now EMusic owns 100% of CDuctive and will start offering CDuctive's samples for free downloads and full tracks and albums for sale in mp3 format. CDuctive has over 65,000 tracks in its collections.

Real Networks released their RealSlideshow v2.0 that supports mp3 audio and Lycos' Tripod homepage builder. Program creates SMIL (synchronized multimedia integration language) based pages that can be shown with RealPlayer 7.

FreeDiskSpace.com offers 300MB free HDD space for its new users instead of old 100MB limit. You can use the space however you want to, for example storing your temporary mp3 files.

The highly publicized return of Sir Paul McCartney to Liverpool's famous Cavern Club will be broadcast live by MCY.com. Sir Paul's first-ever cybercast will be available at www.mcy.com live on Tuesday, December 14 1999 at 3:00PM (EST). The webcast will also be available on-demand 18 hours after the event.
Sir Paul and his band, David Gilmore and Mike Green on guitars, Ian Pace on drums and Pete Wingfield on keyboards will be performing rock & roll from his latest album Run Devil Run, and playing songs by Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and other of his influential heroes.

FMP3 is a device that is attached to your soundcard's output jack and it sends the audio on air through FM waves -- basically this means that you can use whatever regular FM radio to listen the music that your PC sends on air within 200ft range.

I don'y actually know is there any use for innovation like this, but funny gadget anyway, priced in $189.

BT Mobile will offer to its customers in UK a service of daily sent music news to users' cell phones through SMS. Music news are provided by EMI.

Hole is rumoured to left their record label, Geffen, and continue album releasing only on Internet. Representatives of Geffen don't want to comment.

MP3.com is BIG - one proof is that they just broke limit of 250,000 uploaded tracks by their artists... We have appx. 30 :-)

Lyra announced that it would be adding support for MusicMatch Jukebox, the popular personal jukebox software running on Windows 9x/NT/2000 enviroments.
"MusicMatch Jukebox brings RCA LYRA customers the richest multimedia music experience with exceptional management of tagged cover art, lyrics, notes, and support for the popular Microsoft Windows Media format. One of the great advantages of the LYRA is that you can upgrade the software at home, so that you're not missing out on the latest advancements," claimed Jeff Scott from Thomson Advanced Audio who also added that; "Thomson is able to offer this flexibility because we're using a Texas Instruments Digital Signal Processor (DSP) that makes it easy for the consumer to upgrade the LYRA from home."
Users that have already brought a Lyra player will be able to switch over to MusicMatch to manage or organize their collection of digital audio, from their own personal stock.
Only a couple of days earlier MicroSoft announced a deal with Thomson Multimedia in which Thomson agreed to use the Windows Media -format in their audio and video products...

Audiohighway.com today announced that it has begun offering a service that allows its users to create and customize theird own free "rich media" Web sites. Using Homestead.com's easy-to-use drag & drop front-end the users can fill their 24MB of server storage space even without prior knowledge of Web-related programming.
"Users will be able to post a variety of content including MP3 files. These free Web sites also provide the company with new advertising opportunities," said Nathan Schulhof, president and CEO of audiohighway.com.

James Brown's new album "James Brown Christmas for the Millennium & Forever" is available only in MP3 format - you can buy the album from eMusic.com.

RIAA sued authors of Napster, mp3 searching and spreading tool, in court. RIAA claims that Napster creates open black markets for music pirates by offering a tool to use when spreading illegal mp3s. RIAA asks $100,000 for each and every song that is spread through Napster!!

Microsoft Inc. announced yesterday that it has made contracts for bunch of new partners for supporting Windows Media in audio and video distribution and encoding.

New partners include Thomson Multimedia (manufacturer of RCA Lyra mp3 player), General Instruments (company makes cable tv boxes) and Texas Instruments (which makes, among other stuff, audio & video decoding and encoding chips).

MJuice, world's largest secure digital music retailer, and Gigmania made a contract for marketing and distributing each others content. Gigmania has music videos, music and tour information for over 25,000 artists.

Trans Cosmos USA invested $5M in SoundsBIG.com - a site that offers digital music for streaming and downloading. They also have artist chats, etc fun content in their pages.

MJuice and PortalPlayer made an agreement that PortalPlayer's products -- including PC applications, firmware and chips -- will support MJuice's secure-MP3 technology.

Universal Music and BMG are planning to build a new website together that offers downloadable music for consumers. The plan is that the project called Project Nigel would be ready in summer 2000.

Toshiba comes into portable mp3 player game in December 25th (Japan markets on that date) with their new player called dIGO. Device supports MP3 and SolidAudio formats and retail price will be about $259.

Hole puts their newest single "Be a Man" available on Internet. You can download the track in RealAudio and MP3 formats. There is also a discussion board available where you can comment the track.

The link is here.

MP3-2000 reopens with new staff. This time-ago so popular mp3 leeching website is totally different now - no illegal mp3 links, no direct downloads, etc... Quite typical legal mp3 page nowadays with nothing so-new-and-special, but maybe they'll surprise us in future.

EMI Records Inc. and Launch.com made a contract that allows Launch.com to offer EMI's music for its customers. Launch.com will set EMI tracks and videos available for streaming only, streaming can be done by using Real or Microsoft products.

MyPoints.com will promote MJuice's digital music store for emails to registered users and some other promotional ways (banners, news, etc that lead users to mjuice.com).

NetRadio.com and Microsoft Inc. announced their technical and marketing agreement that gives NetRadio a nice place in Windows Media site and for Microsoft a strong supporter for WMA technology.

Few problems occured on this week on our site and we are very sorry about these.. First of all, debug information was set on by our ISP without informing to us - this is fixed now. Second problem has come up few times so far - the guys who have ordered our newsletter in English, have received newsletter with many problems (same news 100 times or so...). This problem is also fixed now.

As I said, we are sorry about these problems. If you find ANYTHING that should be changed or fixed on these pages, please mail us to webmaster@afterdawn.com

AOL and Riffage announced a two-year contract that gives AOL a right to distribute Riffage's music content all over AOL's brand sites.

EMusic.com, a pioneer in this digital audio business, bought Tunes.com and all the subsdiaries of Tunes' including RollingStone.com. Deal was made with stock-for-stock transaction and it was worth of $130 million..