DRM Dream.exe on linux works nicely

I'm sitting in front of a shiny new install of Ubuntu 7.04 listening to the Radio New Zealand International digital broadcast on 7145kHz in perfect clarity.

This Ubuntu version is very slick as we've come to expect. For some time I battled to build the Dream receiver source code on this system without joy. Lots of roadblocks for me, mostly to do with Qt. Almost as an afterthought I installed the Wine windows emulator and tried the pre-built windows binary, after adding only a few DLLs (MSVCP60.DLL and qt-mt230nc.dll), it was up and running.

Sound in and out all just works out of the box and it runs indefinitely. Playing with the UI, for example, changing sound settings, causes it to exit, but it's perfectly usable.

Regrettably, Darwine isn't quite up to supporting this application just yet, seems to be missing some functions in the 3d graphics area which I think are used in those fancy spectrum displays. Can't wait for the day I can run this on my Mac.

Fairwell DRM, hello fingerprinting?

I'm as happy as everyone to see that it's going to be possible to buy music without DRM. I've only purchased a few tracks as I regard buying with DRM as being like renting rather than buying.

This move will surely stimulate more content sales, and perhaps better, will open up the market to iPod alternatives that will play your purchased content.

The purpose of DRM is to make it hard to pass on the content, the downside is so bad (honest customers losing the ability to play stuff they paid for because they upgraded or something) that it could be that less intrusive alternatives are being sought.

The obvious one to me is content fingerprinting. Add a unique customer code to the data in the content that doesn't affect the play but can be used to trace where the copy came from. Sure, there'll be ways to strip them out in the end, but for most consumers, if they know their purchased tracks can be traced back to them it will dissuade them from "sharing".

I'm making this up, it might not be on the agenda at all, but it is possible.

Radio New Zealand (RNZI) back on DRM

Just noticed that Radio New Zealand has started transmitting digital radio using the DRM system again. It's the best DRM signal I can get here. So far very patchy decoding for me, the picture to the right is about the best signal I've got so far.

My receiver is a DRT1 controlled via serial from the Dream software.

As I write (approaching 6pm AEST) the signal is improving and I'm getting a signal to noise radio of 20dB sometimes which gives perfect decoding.

Update: It's 9pm AEST and I'm getting perfect decoding with 28dB SNR. Changing "Time Sync Tracking" to "First Peak" seems to improve things for me.