“When users take the specifications of an MP3 player into consideration, one very important factor most take into account is the rated battery life. However, as many are aware, the battery life stated is generally the runtime from a full charge in ideal conditions, such as when the player is left playing without any sound enhancements (EQ, bass-boost, etc.), volume set to a moderate level, all music is 128kbps MP3, backlit display goes out within a few seconds and so on. However, according to tests conducted by CNET, they found that while many players met or exceeded their claims, one feature that has a drastic affect on battery life is the infamous DRM,” Seán Byrne writes for CD Freaks.
“When it comes to the Creative Zen Vision:M’s 14-hour claim, CNET got about 16 hours of playback time with MP3s from a full charge, which was a nice surprise. However, when they tried playing WMA 10 DRM crippled subscription tracks on it, they only got just over 12 hours; a loss of almost 4 hours (~25%) of playback time due to the battery-hungry DRM. CNET found similar results with other players with WMA DRM drastically reducing battery life by up to around 20%. Apple’s FairPlay DRM seems to have less of an effect with battery life being reduced by around 8% when compared with MP3 playback,” Byrne writes.
Full article here.
This doesn’t tell us that DRM is battery-hungry. This tells us that Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio (WMA) is horribly inefficient and causes the processor work so hard to decode that it saps 25% of battery life versus playing MP3 files. Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), which is used by Apple, is more efficient than Microsoft’s WMA (big surprise, huh?), causing an 8% battery hit versus playing MP3 files. So, this test is about codecs, MP3 vs. WMA and MP3 vs. ACC. To test whether DRM affects battery life, unprotected AAC files need to be tested against protected AAC files and unprotected WMA files need to be tested against protected WMA files.
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Shouldn’t Apple actually indicate this advantage in some way especially as it would by definition show the superiority of AAC over WMA. It can’t be less accurate than Sony’s totally misleading claims for the rediculous number of tracks supposedly loadable on their players, nor Microsofts laughable claims to be on top of security in their adverts for that matter. After all it rather blunts the supposed superior battery life of most of the opposition, the one area where the iPod generally is at the lower end of performance and certainly made me personally wonder about the relative efficiency of AAC and might just tempt away some users with similar notions.
nice take MDN — CNET demonstrates its ineptitude once more. The author over at CDFreaks should have pointed this out.
Don’t we generally learn about controlling for the right variable in grade six science?
What an idiotic slant. Different hard drive or CPU architectures negates any reliable battery life analysis based on software DRM alone.
But hey, let’s just bash Microsoft.
This is not old news to me. Was this mentioned on MDN or an other news site?
M$ SUCKS the life out of everything.
“But hey, let’s just bash Microsoft.”
Cool! Is it true that WMAs can also cause rectal polyps?
I thought that only deaf people use WMA!
Moron, er, Copernicus:
The slant is not “idiotic.” The only thing “idiotic” about this is your response. Try reading it slowly and attempt to understand the point, you dunce.
MDN MW: “policy” – It is not usually my “policy” to publicly correct and demean the retarded, but in this case, I must make an exception.
“Cool! Is it true that WMAs can also cause rectal polyps?”
Having a hard time sitting down, Ampar……? Using those M$ products just a little too much?
The only problem I have with AAC formate it doesn’t retain the album info when ripping a burned cd to another mac.
I could be wrong but I thought only MP3 retains album info.
MDN makes a good point about comparing apples to apples etc. as did one of the original posters at cdfreaks.com. Actually what this article is saying is that DRM requires extra power to read the DRM protected tracks. If this is true (and more testing needs to be done) then this is dynamite. This may mean that DRM of any flavour sucks the life out of your music player’s battery. The obvious solution is to steer clear of DRM encoded music.
Now I’ve been attacked for using sites that in all probability may NOT pay a remittance to performers but I made this decision for two reasons and two reasons only:
1. I hate DRM and won’t touch it with a barge pole and
2. The bit rate at iTunes Music Store is just too low
So I use allofmp3.com. It serves my needs and I purchase AAC songs @ 320 kbps which I then rip to the ipod(s) at 224 kbps. I can also do this from cd collection but I can’t do this from practically every on line music store. Why? Because of those bastards from the music companies that’s why!
If Apple and the others ever fix the two aforementioned points I’ll whip out my Visa card quick smart…and Apple’s store would be my only choice. But I’m not holding my breath for any change any time soon.
No, TF! Polyp free Mac user.
WMA – We Mangle Acoustics
WMA – We Mangle Acoustics
Or, more appropriately:
WMA – We Mutate Asses!
But but…
oh just fsck it.
I didn’t have time to read the whole article yet, so maybe it’s in there, but I’d be really curious to see what the difference in battery life is when they encode music from a CD to WMA (in other words, no DRM) vs. MP3.
Microsoft should really just get out of the codec business all together.
Its well known that these reports are not biasssed.
Windows technolugy is inefficent.
Their are no reasons to use WMA, since AAC is cleerly superior.
Apple doesnt egage in WMA usage so they will never have these issues.
Mu 3rd generation iPod gets 22 hours of battery time on a fresh charg.
This is old news, but now the PC drones can take it to heart.
bikersrule-
Why the double compression scheme? Two conversions with a lossy encoder doesn’t seem like the way to go if sound quality is a top concern, as you indicated by your 128kpbs comment. iPod capacity the reason?
g$
There’s no real difference in quality between 224 kbps and 320 kbps (at least to my ears anyway) and the first import is for burning onto a cd. I then reimport from the cd. Battery capacity and available hard disc space on the ipods are other reasons.
So, you get better quality audio out of the WMA online stores, plus you have the option of re-downloading the song if it gets deleted. But, you lose a couple hours of playback time due to DRM (author said nothing about the efficiency of the codec). I don’t just listen to my music on a little portable player, so better sound quality due to higher bitrates is clearly more of an advantage.
Another thing that occurred to me, most of the hard drive based players load the music into ram and don’t continue to spin the hard drive until it needs more data. If you assume the average WMA online store sells music at 160kbps or higher, it’s approximately a 25% increase in filesize over the typical 128kbps song downloaded at iTMS. That means that the player is spinning up the hard drive more often to retrieve more data. More hard drive activity, less battery life.
Of course, you’d never hear about any of these issues in a MDN take.
Yes, but 160kbps WMA still doesn’t actually sound as good as 128kbps AAC.
That has been confimred in a number of codec shootouts, and WMA is always near the bottom and AAC near the top.
So with WMA you are buying/encoding at higher bitrate for lower sound quality and if putting it on an MP3 player, sucking the life out of the battery too.
Sure, that makes sense. Not.
BTW, a friend’s experience with a Creative something-or-other MP3 player confirms what this article states. He had a bitch to me that he gets more battery life if only playing MP3 compared to WMA. I told him to get an iPod, but thanks to his anti-Apple bitch partner….
Hey, how come I didn’t get a Heads Up mention for this???
I sent MDN the link to the original article two days ago..
http://www.mp3.com/features/stories/3646.html
uh oh…i can see another lawsuit in the works. Similar to the hard drive capacity case, this one will be picked up by the perpetually victimized who’ll bleat that <insert MP3 player company name here> did not indicate that battery lifeis affected by DRM’d files. Lawyers, fire up the laptops and charge your cell batteries. There’s manna on the horizon…
<i>WMA 10 DRM crippled subscription tracks</i>
Heh. It would seem CNET has a rather openly severe attitude toward DRM.