Tesco Downloads (DRM question)

bringitdown

According to tescodownloads.com (£0.79p a track):

Each of the record labels that licence us to sell music downloads, specify the number of times that you can play, burn or transfer music files to other players. In general, under the terms of the licence agreement, all of our content can be played as often as you want on your PC, transferred to a mobile player and played as often as you want or burned to a CD up to three times. Of course, one burnt to a CD, you can play it as often as you want. As an example, if you wish to burn a track to CD more times than you have been given a licence to do, you will need to re-download the track and acquire a new licence.

And maybe this applies to DRM in general but would I be wrong in assuming that if you burnt a DRM'd track to CD (as an audio CD) you could the use said CD to rip the track again and circumvent the DRM?

Would the DRM not allow burning as an audio CD? Anyone know?

I know such an action is illegal but if it can be done it is a a major hole in DRM.

My reason for asking is typical - I have creative MP3 player, the number of times you can transfer a track to an MP3 is usually 3 times but depends on the artist / license.

eg:
Transfer 1: Initial transfer to player
Transfer 2: So say my MP3 player goes tits up, I need to retransfer again
Transfer 3: [dreaming]I got a new mp3 player[dreaming]

License used.... ****ebags.

stevenmu

With at least one form of DRM you have to burn to cd using their application, this then puts copy protection on the cd so you can't rip it again. Different forms may work differently though.

Still, best to use http://www.allofmp3.com and avoid the whole drm mess.

tribble

TBH - if a track is recorded at 24bit at 96KHz, lossy compressed for consumer use onto CD (at 16bit 44.1KHz), lossy recompressed to WMA/MP3 or whatever, decompressed to CD and then lossy recompressed to MP3 again - the quality is going to be awful.

Tom Dunne

I have used both the Wal-Mart and Real downloads, both of which use DRM on their files.

The first thing I do after downloading the files is to burn them to CD and re-rip them. So yes, you can circumvent the DRM by doing this, though I suppose most non-techy type people would not be aware of this, and I would imagine this is what the record companies are counting on.

Just out of curiosity, Stevenmu, what DRM puts copy protection on a normal audio CD? If they did that, then surely the CD wouldn't be playable in normal CD players, would it?

Syth

tom dunne wrote:

Just out of curiosity, Stevenmu, what DRM puts copy protection on a normal audio CD? If they did that, then surely the CD wouldn't be playable in normal CD players, would it?

That doesn't stop them.

Look for the the Compact Disk Digital Audio Logo on the disc, it means that there really can't be any DRM on it. (If there is, then it's false advertising, and you should raise hell).

The best way to do things is to stick to open source apps. You never get any DRM on them, and if an open source app can play/read a file them someone has reverse engineered the DRM and hence there must be a way around it.

stevenmu

tom dunne wrote:

Just out of curiosity, Stevenmu, what DRM puts copy protection on a normal audio CD? If they did that, then surely the CD wouldn't be playable in normal CD players, would it?

I can't remember the company doing it, it was one of the big DRM companies though. The story was on The Register if you want to try and find it. I think it works by putting a data track on the cd with the audio tracks. Most cd audio players will just ignore this and play the music but a cd-rom drive will read it. As Syth mentioned this breaks the CD-Audio specifications so it's not guaranteed to play in all CD players, I think car cd players tend to have problems with this.

Tom Dunne

Ah yes, I vaguely recall something like that. Wasn't the workaround to run a black marker around the outer edge of the CD, thereby hiding the data track and again circumventing the copy protection?

But back to the legally downloaded songs. My question concerned these songs - the files themselves are DRM protected, but I couldn't imagine the software these services use putting DRM on individual audio tracks on a CD that a consumer burns.

As far as I am aware, once you burn these downloaded songs to normal CD, that is the end of the DRM, isn't it? Is it?

Darwin

I know such an action is illegal but if it can be done it is a a major hole in DRM.

There are also utilities (e.g. PowerMP3) that can sample whatever the sound card is currently playing such as DRM protected audio and record to straight to MP3. More DRM holes!

blorg

tom dunne wrote:

But back to the legally downloaded songs. My question concerned these songs - the files themselves are DRM protected, but I couldn't imagine the software these services use putting DRM on individual audio tracks on a CD that a consumer burns.

As far as I am aware, once you burn these downloaded songs to normal CD, that is the end of the DRM, isn't it? Is it?

That is correct. Once you burn them onto a normal CD (if the DRM on the file actually allows it) that is the end of the DRM. CD DRM attempts only occur on pressed CDs. As others have said, uncompressing to CD and re-ripping to a compressed format will reduce sound quality.

Bri

Does that imply that using PowerMP3 etc. would get better sound quality than the burn->re-rip process? Or does sampling the current song and re-compressing into a new file have the exact same effect?

i.e. What's the optimal solution?

blorg

Decompressing to WAV and recompressing would have the exact same effect as burning to CD and re-ripping, quality-wise. The best solution however is to get your mp3s from somewhere like www.allofmp3.com in the first place, where you don't have the DRM and don't have to do these ridiculous work-arounds.*

Having said that, the quality loss from any conversion may not be particularly noticable to you, especially if you just want them in mp3 so that you can put them on a particular player for portable use, etc. Give it a go and see if you can tell the difference.

* Historically most of allofmp3's catalogue is transcoded from 384k mp3 into whatever format you choose; this will however produce better results than transcoding from 128k WMA due to the higher bitrate of the source. Newer entries in their catalogue give you the option of encoding direct from the original uncompressed source.

stevenmu

I think the guy (can't remember his name) who came out with DeCSS also realeased some way of stripping iTunes tracks of DRM so he could play them through linux. I haven't heard of any other but if you already have a library of DRM'd tracks you could try googling for apps that just remove the DRM without any conversions, and hence no quality loss.

RobertFoster

are tescodownloads anygood bringitdown?

This Service is currently available only in the United Kingdom, Isle of Man and Channel Islands. You agree not to use or attempt to use the Service from outside of those territories and that we may use technologies to verify your location.

...?

Bri

Yeah speaking of which why is iTunes still not available here?

RobertFoster

Bri wrote:

Yeah speaking of which why is iTunes still not available here?

Explanation

Bri

Thanks, I never saw that thread before somehow.