Last night my wife and I decided it was time to finally dive into the digital music download world. I'm quite "techie" and I think even borderline "Techno-Geek", so this should be a walk-in-the-park.
We bought a MP3 player
But there were a few songs that Andrea wanted that we didn't have on our CDs
Download the music to 1 computer and back up music to 2 additional computers
Make 10 burns to a CD
Make unlimited transfers to a portable device
It is a little restrictive, but tolerable.
The actual purchasing of the five (5) songs and the subsequent downloading was painless, almost even a pleasure.
Then Came The DRM Monster!
After the music was on the PC that we had executed this entire transaction on we tried to play them in the latest Windows Media Player (WMP), they all played correctly.
Then we tried to burn them to a CD, three (3) of them burned fine, the other two (2) files said we didn't have rights to burn them...
WHAT! We just legally paid for the right to burn these files, and it says we don't have that right! ARGHHH!
OK, so we decided to copy the files to a different PC over our network. They copied fine, we tried to play the five (5) files in the 'new' computer using the latest WMP, the three (3) files that the first computer was able to burn would not play on the new computer, again it said we didn't have the right to do it (
But the weird part was that the two (2) files that wouldn't burn on the first computer, would play on the 2nd computer (what's going on here?). But ,like the first computer, it would not burn them to CD.
Having the software that is on your computer act as judge, jury, and executioner is like having your car shut down if you were going 36 MPH in a 35 MPH zone. In my case it is like the car shutting down when I was going 5 MPH because it thought I was going too fast.
To The Rescue
I'm sure there are a number of ways around the DRM problem, I found one that is simple and elegant.
I found a program called tunebite that allows you to record anything that your sound card in your PC plays, you have the option of a few different formats, including MP3 (
Problem Solved (?)
My wife has since called me to let me know that Wal-Mart has fixed the problem, it seems that the version of WMP we were using was too up-to-date
Microsoft: <heavy sarcasim> Great job making your software backwards compatible
Future Purchases
Will we purchase music on-line in the future?
Will we purchase that music from WalMart.com or other stores that only sell DRM embedded music?
What will we do?
What sites will we use?
Wal-Mart, RIAA, et al: Please take note of this incident (put on my Mr. Potato Head 'Angry Eyes'