mr dave

so i found out the hard way that all the cds i ripped (and initially PAID CASH FOR) are digitally 'protected'. i was hoping to be able to slap some tunes onto a thumb drive so i could listen to them at work and got denied.

does anyone know of a safe and easy way to remove DRM from mp3s? they were ripped using Windows Media Player 9 if that matters.

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Guybrush

I don't know how or if it's even possible.

Might it be legal for you to download these albums from elsewhere as you've already bought them? Depending on what you bought, that might be the easiest solution.

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Jedey

You probably added the protection as you ripped the CDs, go into rip settings and unclick copy protection.

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Guybrush

I always try to steer clear of the .wma format myself.

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mr dave

that's what i figure happened. too late now though, the protection is already in place and all the discs neatly stored away :S i remember seeing the option to have protection but i could have sworn i nuked that one a LONG time ago.


@Tore - didn't bother making .wmas, managed to get it to give me 192k mp3s instead. i was just hoping there was some sort of app that could just rewrite the mp3 without the protection as opposed to having rip all my discs again (i won't).

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jtwilliams

I just got a cool 320gb External on sale for 40 bucks, so Now I can keep my stuff to check out on there so as not to waste space

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Freebase Dali

This wouldn't be the most time-efficient way, but if you were hard up, you could just download Audacity or something and import the songs and export them as MP3 without changing anything. All the crap written into the file would be gone.

Frumious B

I'm at around 2,000 physical discs, all CD, which equals about 800GB of lossless copied to two separate 1TB drives. For daily listening that library is cooked down to about 130GB worth of AAC files that I use on the iPods and iPhone.

The CDs are more an insurance policy than anything else for me. They are rarely played. I ripped to lossless so I don't ever have to rip the whole collection again, but I didn't have secure ripping set up properly for some of that process so I still run across a bad rip occasionally. In those cases I just pull out the disc, make sure it's clean and rerip.

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jtwilliams

This is what I do too. No reason for the physical copies to get scratched. You never know, you have some horrendous computer problem and lose that music, your going to want that physical copy thats for sure.

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Frumious B

Except for my boxed sets which are on bookshelves, all my CDs are literally locked away in metal cabinets. Sometimes I get this urge for full lossless audio quality when I'm sitting at home and I don't have a setup that enables me to get my lossless music from my hard drive to my stereo yet though I know there are devices available for just that. That's when a CD sees daylight for a bit. Other than that the only time I ever play a CD is if I'm driving home from the place I just bought it. Most of the time I'm content to listen to an iPod or iPhone connected to my home stereo via a docking station, though my car stereo or just with earbuds.

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"Take a circle, caress it and it will become vicious."-Eugene Ionesco