Billboard reports: “The music industry is pushing bitter technology rivals—most notably Microsoft and Apple—to shake hands in the interest of promoting digital downloads. Hardware makers and digital format developers, including many traditional adversaries, are engaged in private talks aimed at meeting the music industry’s goal of compatibility among competing digital music devices by 2005… Executives with knowledge of the talks say much of the focus is on transcoding—the process of converting a file from one format to another. It is impossible right now for consumers to directly convert a file protected by one type of digital rights management (DRM) into another type of secure file.”