Barry Willis

After months of wrangling, the <A HREF="http://www.sdmi.org/">Secure Digital Music Initiative</A> (SDMI) has selected <A HREF="http://www.musicode.com/">Aris Technologies</A>' MusiCode as its recommended form of digital audio copy protection, according to an inside source at SDMI. The decision came at the end of weeks of <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10511/">testing</A&gt; various watermarking techniques on the music industry's "golden ears"&mdash;recording and mastering engineers, music producers, and professional audiophiles. The official announcement is expected later this week.

Last year the music industry was jolted from its complacency by the rise of MP3, a scheme for the quick and easy transfer of digital audio files over the Internet. Legal attempts to block the format as a form of copyright violation failed, and the industry began scrambling to find a way to prevent the wholesale piracy of higher-resolution formats to come. The Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), an alliance of more than 240 hardware, software, and music-publishing companies, has been working overtime trying to develop an unobtrusive technique for preventing unauthorized copying&mdash;something that digital technology is making easier than ever.

Yet another major music company has joined the digital downloading stampede, in the wake of the Secure Digital Music Initiative's (<A HREF="http://www.sdmi.org/">SDMI</A&gt;) recent progress toward formulating copyright standards. On July 19, <A HREF="http://www.unimusic.com/">Universal Music Group</A> announced its intention to make its titles available for downloading to the coming generation of portable audio players. New devices from Diamond Multimedia, Toshiba, and Panasonic&mdash;all expected to hit the market by the winter holiday season&mdash;will play encrypted tunes from Universal and other big labels.

Last week, the Secure Digital Music Initiative announced that it would allow free MP3 downloads to co-exist with new encrypted forms of digital music transmission. Despite this, widespread concern in corporate legal departments about copyright-violation liability has prompted software developers to come up with blocking techniques to prevent pirated music from entering company "Intranets."

Since the earliest days of stereo&mdash;the first experiments with more than single-channel sound happened back in the 1930s&mdash;recording and playback have been based on a horizontal model: left-center-right, left-rear, right-rear. "Laterality," as it's sometimes called, can be exploited very well in creating plausible sensations of spatial events, especially by film-industry sound engineers. The believable reproduction of music is considerably more problematic.

Folk wisdom has it that it's wiser not to lock the gate after the horses have escaped. The <A HREF="http://www.sdmi.org/">Secure Digital Music Initiative</A>, a consortium of 140 music, software, and hardware companies, has taken that adage to heart. In a significant departure from its original intent to block the distribution of free music on the Internet, the Secure Digital Music Initiative announced in the last week of June that its forthcoming specification for music software and hardware will accommodate the "legacy content" already in existence. There are reportedly as many as 500,000 songs available in the MP3 format, and they will continue to be available even as new, robustly encrypted music comes onto the market.

The high-end audio industry may be in a slump, but the public's appetite for recorded music appears as voracious as ever. MP3, the hottest upstart in the digital audio market, got a big boost in late June when <A HREF="http://www.diamondmm.com/">Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc.</A> announced the next generation of its popular Rio digital music player, the Rio PMP 500, due to arrive in stores this fall.