Microsoft's Plans For Windows XP

Or should that be 'experience the copy‑protection'? Windows XP looks set to be protected with a new key system that could have an effect on how freely the host PC can be reconfigured.

Dave Shapton exposes Microsoft's plans for Windows XP copy protection, and explains why he thinks digital mixers are on the way to becoming all‑purpose control surfaces.

This month's Cutting Edge nearly didn't get written at all, for one simple reason: Reason. I think it's fair to say that I've never been so completely gobsmacked by a single piece of software. People who I normally don't even say "Good morning" to are stopping me in the street and saying "Have you tried Reason yet?" I'm going to talk about the technological significance of the software in a future column. If I can drag myself away from it long enough. (If you're reading this and haven't got the faintest idea what I'm talking about, have a look at Derek Johnson and Debbie Poyser's review in March's Sound On Sound).

Closing Windows?

I've just heard that Microsoft is thinking of introducing a new kind of copy protection for its next version of Windows (Windows XP), and it spells trouble for honest, hard‑working musicians.

Up to now, the ease with which Windows can be copied has caused Microsoft significant losses of revenue. Fact is, there's nothing to stop you using the same Windows disk you paid a hundred pounds for to set up a hundred computers. However much you may feel uncomfortable about Microsoft's dominance of the Operating System arena, you can understand their concerns about such an open door to piracy. I've yet to hear a coherent argument that says it's OK to have copyright in music but not in software, but if you're not yet convinced about the copyright argument for software, let's just have a closer look at why, if you're a software producer, you need it.

In the professional media industry — that's audio, video, graphics and that strangely intangible entity called 'multimedia', software can be expensive. That's because it's specialised. It's so specialised that anyone from outside the industry probably wouldn't even understand what it does, never mind be able to use it. This means that not many copies will ever be sold. And yet this type of software is amongst the most complicated ever written. It certainly doesn't take any less intellectual effort than writing an office suite that will sell to millions.

So how do you pay the same number of people it takes to write a mainstream piece of software when you're only going to sell a tiny number of units? You have to charge more for it. And that's OK, because it's the specialised skills of the people using the specialised software that allows them to charge suitably large sums to their clients. As a commercial composer of music, using the latest and greatest versions of Cubase or Logic, and perhaps Macromedia Director for authoring multimedia CDs, you'd want to charge a fair bit for your work, wouldn't you?

Avid, who have some justification for their claim that they are the industry standard for video editing, can charge tens of thousands of pounds for upgrades between different levels of their software. So, of course, they copy‑protect it.

And they do it with a dongle. Most of us have come across dongles. Some have even suffered from 'dongle dangle', a distressing condition that happens when you have so many dongles stuffed into the parallel port of your computer that the combined weight of them threatens to damage the socket they're plugged into.

The good thing about dongles, though, is that you know where you are with them. If you have the right one your software will work. If you don't, it won't. But what Microsoft is proposing with Windows XP is dongle‑free copy protection. Sounds good, doesn't it? But just wait until you hear how it's going to work.

Finding Keys

What Microsoft is actually proposing is that when you first install Windows XP, it will audit the hardware in your computer and generate a key — a number that is not only unique to your computer but also the exact computer configuration it finds at the time of installation. You will find that there is no limit to the number of times you can re‑install your Windows XP software — as long as you don't format the hard disk!

I know that I'm not typical, in that I have several computers and often format the system drives. It's simply the quickest way to 'clean up' a computer that may have had all manner of conflicting software on it. If I'm reviewing software, I always do it on a 'virgin' installation, as I don't want to be reporting apparent bugs that are actually caused by the remaining vestiges of a previous software installation. So every time I do this, I'll have to apply to Microsoft for a new software activation key. The same applies if you make any changes to your computer's hardware configuration. That includes changing the graphics card and possibly the simple addition of a new soundcard. Quite often, when setting up a new computer, I will make sure it works in its basic form before adding new hardware. You can imagine the problems this would cause with the new copy‑protection proposal.

To make matters worse, the decision as to whether a new installation is to be permitted is going to depend on what Microsoft euphemistically describe as "artificial intelligence". I can only hope that it's better than the artificial intelligence of a certain national cinema multiplex chain's automatic telephone box office. When asked "which cinema do you wish to visit?", I said "Leeds‑Bradford", to which it confidently replied: "You have chosen Southampton".

So you can understand why I won't be entirely happy if I am in the middle of a complex project for a client, running late as usual, and in the middle of the night get a string of hideous error messages that mean only one thing: time to re‑install Windows. Never mind that I have conscientiously backed up my project files, and that my media files are safe on a separate drive from my system drive. The fact is that I don't want to have to sit there as my CD‑ROM frantically re‑installs Windows, with an additional worry as to whether Microsoft's artificial intelligence algorithm is going to allow me to finish my project.

The Bleeding Edge

You can probably tell I feel strongly about this. That's because I've been through this before with a piece of software called Speed Razor.

It's a great product, which takes an unconventional approach to editing video and audio‑for‑video. A few months ago, Speed Razor's creators, In–Sync, decided to go dongle–free, using the same sort of technique that is now being proposed by Microsoft, but mercifully without the alleged artificial intelligence. Still, what followed was bad enough, with customers stumbling on what was actually a fairly simple procedure. Simple, that is, if you'd done it a few times. Even worse, dealers for the product took much of the flak for a new system that they objected to as much as the end users.

Luckily, In‑Sync listened to their customers and now have two versions of the software: one with dongle protection and the other with the (in my opinion) dodgy dongle‑free method. The dongled software costs more, because dongles are not cheap, but I'd prefer it any day to a system whose performance is one step removed from what seems like pure chance. And if Microsoft do go ahead with this, I'd have to say that anyone whose livelihood depends on their Windows XP booting up every day should be on the lookout for an alternative operating system. And the only other one that supports the main music applications is the Mac OS.

Mixing The Future

I met up the other day with a friend who has quit the Pro Audio industry (where he used to sell mixing desks the size of shopping malls) to work for that rarest of things: a dot.com company that is actually making money! We inevitably started talking about the state of the business, and specifically about how much demand there will be for full‑scale desks now that there are superb control surfaces for Pro Tools and the like.

Then a thought occurred to me. It's somewhat controversial, but I'll share it with you anyway: digital mixing is now so good, and carried out at such a high resolution, that we can almost regard it as being generic. In other words, for any high‑end mixing device, you can almost 'assume' competence in the audio processing. Now I don't mean this in the obvious sense, that if you've paid three hundred thousand dollars for a console then it ought to sound pretty good; what I mean is that if you took the control surface from one high‑end console and used it to control the audio processing from another high‑end desk, the two combinations would effectively sound the same.

I have to come clean here. I actually don't think that any of the above is true. I've spent enough time comparing digital audio gear to know that (for example) two digital audio workstations, which on the face of it do exactly the same thing, can sound quite different — even when processing exactly the same audio and using the same A‑D and D‑A converters.

But these differences are becoming less and less pronounced. Assumptions made due to limited resolution, both in mixing and EQ, are becoming less of an issue as processor power increases, digital word length gets longer, jitter is minimised, and converters get better and better. It's just possible that before long there really will be no discernible difference between two digital mixing engines. Apart from EQ. And dynamics. And other stuff. Processes such as EQ and dynamics tend to have their own sound, even in the digital domain, and that will continue to be the case, because the way digital EQ sounds depends on how the DSP program was written. It's even possible to physically model specific types of analogue EQ. This alone would distinguish the 'sound' of digital consoles.

But it's also possible to 'port' DSP code between processors. Just as you can run Cubase on both Mac and PC platforms by re–compiling the source code (the stuff that programmers actually write before they 'compile' their programs into the native machine language of the target processor), you can transfer DSP code between platforms. It's more of a deal than with moving applications, because a lot of DSP code is hand‑crafted to make the most efficient use of the processor: gain a few extra efficiency points and that could mean six instead of five parametric EQs per channel. But it can certainly be done.

It may be some way off, but at some point in the future I think all digital mixing desks will just be controllers, and that they will plug into a generic processing device. Like a PC or a Mac, for example.