Over at cdfreaks there is a news article about a neew copy protection called Darknoise. It claims to put a signal in the music which will prevent analogue recording of the decoded digital data. The signal is claimed to not be audible until it is rerecorded either as a low level analogue signal or by placing a mike in front of a loudspeaker. It is also supposed to prevent digital compression by making the output too noisy.

This is in the news because the technology has been purchased by SunnComm. If you remember, Sunncomm has a CD protection that secretly installed a driver on any computer that a Sunncomm protected audio disk was played on. The protection could be defeated by pressing the shift key to prevent autoplay.

Wonderful world we live in.

people will have to make anti-darknoise filters
anyway hype is hype... we'll see when it comes out

sounds to me like you could just grab a noiseprint in soundforge from a musical piece where there is "supposed" to be digital silence. Now you have the "Darknoise" noise print and can remove it from your rips...

Fine. Not audible is not equal to "original", it will definitly stand for quality reduction!

How exactly could it prevent analog recording? Doing something in a normally inaudible frequency range just to mess with the mic? :/

Cynical outlook: It works by making the recording sound so bad that nobody wants to copy it.

So what your saying is that this darknoise will be in the form of another manufactured Britney Spears song?

Impossible to prevent analog recording - if you can play and hear it you can record it. Except if the disc itself is unplayable, which would keep it from being recorded, but then....

Preventing analogue recordings? Did I step into a time machine and went about 10 years back into the past?

Some interesting bits:
1) If you go to the Sunncomm website Sunncomm you can't enter the site without agreeing with some kind of EULA.

2) If you do agree, then there is an interesting Q&A posted on Sunncomm.com. I'm not sure what the answer really means - it seems to be a contradiction that it prevents copying in any way and "empowers the user to make and even share personal copies of their purchased music..." Somehow forces WMA with DRM?:



3) I get the feeling this is hype / hoax.

Not only that, but there's a huge amount of consumer audio hardware out there that relies on internal sampling of analog data to work. Digital wireless headsets and digital equalizers are just two examples off the top of my head. If darknoise's claims are right, then their tech must break an even larger portion of the music gear in use today than Cactus ever will

They have a website. They claim that the "spoiling" effect originates from two things that happen during sampling: aliasing and beats originating from their "modulation" process. Heh.

German article on Darknoise on Spiegel Online. Just had a glance, there seems to be nothing new. Maybe I'll post a summary tomorrow if i find the time.

wonders never cease as to how hard old dinosaurs of old distrubution methods are fighting the tidal wave of audio compression and music proliferation. i just bought a couple tracks on iTunes because a) i didn't want to hunt down a CDS of a Conjure One song i wanted and b) wanted to toy with QTFairUse i'd finally succeeded in compiling to see if i could unwrap me a clean un-DRM'd AAC file after toying (unsuccessfully) with another DRM'd file.

if even i, who didn't think i'd touch any DRM'd file short of nearly lossless, can buy a track, i think those fighting online music need to wake the hell up.

edit: and not fighting our ability to share music with friends is one of those ways...

darknoise looks like unworkable bollox. _if_ their claims are true, they will indeed not work on a lot of people's gear (including very high end stuff) that use digital conversion.

also, their copy protection is based on a macrovision-style AGC (automatic gain control) exploitation. your tape deck must be one of those crappy ones with slow attack/release compressors on them to keep the levels "right". you can pick up an old (brand name) tape deck with manual record levels and VU meters for $10 in a second hand shop, and suddenly darknoise is beaten.

i sincerely hope this technology is never used seriously, because a lot of artists will lose a lot of their share of profits simply because NOBODY would buy such a horribly corrupted CD. we as consumers still have the ability to control the market after all. simple - boycott these technologies if and when they appear and they will not survive. of course it means going without the music, but i suppose we could see these bands live.

also, i don't think any serious artist would like this done to their music. if this forum has taught me one thing, it's this: even if you can't hear it, doesn't mean you're not uneasy about it's prescence.

i'm a little worried about fried tweeters from this as well. remember "udial.ape"?
maybe new mini hifi units will be coming out with "tweeter protection" lowpass filters at 15k+. that'd be a laugh.

simple solution:
Don't buy CDs from major labels. Don't buy CDs from Artists which use copy-protection.

Problem solved.

- Lyx