Ranting to /dev/null

The end of DRM as we know it

Someone has finally done what should have been patently obvious: written a program that simply loops back audio output through your sound card into an mp3 file. What's the point, you ask? It means that anything that you can play with Windows Media Player can now be converted to an mp3 with little-to-no loss in quality. And because it's simply reading the raw audio signal, not the data in the file, it doesn't matter what the input format is, nor whatever DRM regime may be protecting the content.

It's called "Analog Whole", named after the so-called "analog hole" which has always been the Achilles' heel of content protection. Simply put, as long as it's possible to get the data from a file to your speakers, you could always capture the audio by simply taking a cable, sticking one end in line-out and the other in line-in, and hit "record". Analog Whole skips the cable part, routing the output straight into a file, so there's no loss due to poor connections.

It's only a minor step to make it convert AAC files, so I'm betting that's next.

The great thing is that this is probably entirely legal. It shouldn't violate the DCMA at all, because while it does functionally circumvent copy-protection techniques, technically it's doing nothing of the sort. It isn't cracking any encryption or modifying any files, as "DVD Jon" did with De-CSS. This isn't even circumvention as in the magic marker trick that fooled an ill-conceived Sony scheme. It's just using a computer to do what it always could do: make audio recordings from audio input. So while Sony and Apple will probably have kittens over this, the author hasn't done anything wrong.