Arrrrgh!

david

I wanna get a new MP3 player to replace my 40gb Creative Nomad... But here's the problem... almost all of the mp3's on the Zen are right-protected so i cant get them off of it! I gave the source CD's to my cousin so is there anyway at all to transfer the mp3's?

J-blk

As far as I know, there's no way to get rid of the DRM protection applied to your tracks and even if hacks were out there, openly posting about them here would be an instant ban for anybody doing so as the same information could be applied to cracking tracks purchased from an Online Music Retailer.

Unfotunately, you'll have to re-rip the tracks from your original CDs and possibly use MP3 this time around, to avoid any further problems with DRM...

david

Ah crap, I'll have to get the CD's back so... And it took me like 4 days to rip them in the first place. Ugh...

J-blk

Yep - as I said though, use MP3 and you'll have no problems... WMA comes with a lot of "baggage". If you have the hard drive space on your PC, rip the CDs into 320Kbps MP3s for best quality. You can always easily batch convert them to 128/192 or whatever you listen to on your MP3 player and you still have access to the top quality file, should you need it.

OfflerCrocGod

If you have a huge amount of spare space you may want to convert the entire CD collection to FLAC, it's lossless and you can then convert them to mp3, ogg wav, wma etc as you need them and you need never worry about your CDs again as you have the perfect quality backup.

david

Yeah.... oh the hassle... ugh... I cant get automatic names for some of my cds so it'll take me agggges to rip them again.

NotMe

If you ripped the mp3s from cds in the first place then how are they copy protected? That doesn't make sense to me

Ciaran500

More than likely he used WMP to rip them which by default has DRM enabled to stop sharing.

J-blk

freakonaleashx wrote:

Yeah.... oh the hassle... ugh... I cant get automatic names for some of my cds so it'll take me agggges to rip them again.

Some CD info databases like CDDB (that the Creative software uses) allow a user to submit info on less well-known artists' CDs, etc. There's a "Submit" button in the Mediasource software, when you are ripping a CD. Not much use to you now, but if you do this after you manually enter all info on the unknown CDs, next time somebody tries to pull the ID3 tags on the same album, the info is on that database. Kind of a community sharing system - though to my knowledge, if a record label has submitted the info, you can't submit your own over it and mess with the original...

NotMe - It's exactly what Ciaran500 said: if he used Windows Media Player to rip the CDs into WMAs first time around and had DRM (Digital Rights Management as Microsoft snazzily calls it) enabled, the tracks are locked to that one PC he ripped them on and once transferred to an MP3 player that supports DRM, they can't be shared from that player to other PCs. DRM is in fact the default option with WMP 9 and 10 and the user has to switch it off, first time ripping a CD...

david

Yeah I used WMP... I didnt notice the DRM thing until about 2000 tracks later... Hmmm... I have the PC with the original rips somewhere... Will I be allowed to burn these to a disc? Or even disable the DRM on them?

Ciaran500

NotMe wrote:

If you ripped the mp3s from cds in the first place then how are they copy protected? That doesn't make sense to me

So are they "homemade" cds or just unknown artisits?

Cause I have never ripped a CD that didn't have the info on CDDB

J-blk

Ciaran500 wrote:

Cause I have never ripped a CD that didn't have the info on CDDB

Have some CDs from various Greek bands/artists in my collection - full originals, but CDDB has no idea what they are (except for a few and then, only from user submissions).

Happens very rarely with artists from English speaking countries, but yes, it does happen...

J-blk

freakonaleashx wrote:

I have the PC with the original rips somewhere... Will I be allowed to burn these to a disc? Or even disable the DRM on them?

I think you may be able to burn them to CD but there's a catch - the tracks will be converted back to WAV format and you'll end up with copies of the CDs you already have. You'll then need to re-rip them and re-acquire the tag info, etc. So nothing gained there...

The DRM will also prevent you from converting the tracks to another format directly, like MP3 or WMA without DRM applied.

weemcd

use a program called FreeRip mp3, no drm and you can query the cd's name from a database so the tracks will be named automaticaly for you

NotMe

weemcd wrote:

use a program called FreeRip mp3, no drm and you can query the cd's name from a database so the tracks will be named automaticaly for you

That's what I use aswell. Never trusted WMP for ripping cds.