Other naming bloopers include Bob, HailStorm, Windows Genuine Advantage, PlaysForSure, and 2007 Microsoft Office System.
We assume it also supports DRM'd WMA playback since the player will be launching with Ultra's, or should we say PassAlong Network's, NepTUNES music service which is PlaysForSure certified.
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In another strong example of Microsoft's continued " investment" in PlaysForSure, it's pulling out of MSN Music, the big M's very own store for selling the not-completely-dead-yet music format.
Nope, apparently Nokia just thought it would be cheaper to buy the firm, which (among other things) specializes in the wholesale setting up of new PlaysForSure partners, outright for 60 million.
But it turns out that there may be a hidden culprit lurking inside your MP3 player, sucking the juice out of your batteries at a faster pace than you even realized: PlaysForSure DRM.
Of course, considering the problems they had knocking out their first PlaysForSure compatible musicphone um, multimedia computer, the N91, we might wonder how long they're going to take to make good on the promise.
From what we understand, the device was 30GB and expected to actually hit 60GB with a 30 hour battery life, as well as having the kind of support we all came to know and love from Rio players, like OGG, FLAC, WMA, PlaysForSure, and eventually even Audible.
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Oh yeah, and in other news somebody hacked XNJB -- the Mac app that makes use of select Windows-centric portable media devices -- to at least partially rock out Zune style (which so far as we know uses a variant of MTP, kind of like how it also appears to use a variant of PlaysForSure).
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One feature you're not getting with this unit -- besides the inability to record OTA programming -- is DRM support, so if you want to load up your PlaysForSure- or FairPlay-protected tracks, you'll need to strip out the copy protection with one of those handy pieces of software first (not that we'd ever encourage that sort of behavior, of course).
We've gotta give Microsoft props forwarding on to a competitor like that (or, at least props for following the terms of a 2005 legal settlement), and in its defense, the URGE store Microsoft started with MTV is still going strong, but with Real slowly moving over to their own DRM, FairUse4WM alive and kicking, and now the MSN Music shut-down, things aren't looking great for PlaysForSure.
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