Napster + Sony

For Christmas, I recieved 30 songs on Napster. I got a free trial of the premium service for 3 days and I (:)) downloaded over 50 songs for free lol.

I'd recommend Napster to anyone, you download a song in less than 4 seconds, at least for me. The interface is pretty straight forwards and you get a .wma file... Well it turns out that there are two different .wma files with different protection.

The free files have this protection attached on them:
- Protected Content
- Playback expires on 12/30/2003 (5 days)
- Copy to CD not allowed
- Copy to portable player not allowed
- Copy to an SDMI-compliant player not allowed
- Licence backup not allowed

Now those restrictions are acceptable. You get 5 days to enjoy the song. If you like it, you can buy it.

The paid songs have this restriction:
- Protected Content
- Licence backup not allowed

Yep thats it. You can burn those songs as many times as you want to any CD/device. For 99 cents its a great deal! And its so legal.

However, Sony's gay $$$$ing SonicStage won't allow me to burn any .wma file that is tagged with "Protected Content" even if the song's licence allowed me to burn them (I'm talking about the paid files). I complained to Sony and spent 1:30 hours talking to them until I got to level 4 support. The guy told me that there was no way, even if the software was bugged. There will be no patch, no newer version. He told me to forget it, return the minidisc (which I bought 4 months ago), and buy an iPod! :rolleyes:

What an idiot! He's supposed to help me! All the time he's giving me this attitude...

So although minidiscs are the coolest things ever made, I will not recommend anyone to buy them simply because of their poor support and their inability to burn paid songs.

What's really ironic is that I used to burn illegal Kazaa-downloaded mp3's on my minidisc and now that I have a legal, paid-for song, I can't burn it! Now I'm forced to burn the songs unto a cd, then burn from the cd (which has no protection) to the minidisc. Its a real pain.

I just thought I'd let people know and if anyone knows how to convert protected .wma files into mp3's, I'd appreciate the help!

I am not exactly sure, but I am sure that www.wotsit.org probably has the file formats for both .wma files and .mp3 files. You could write a little proggy to do it ;)

I am sure you could also find quite a few programs to do it on the net. Just go to www.google.com and type in something like "wma to mp3 conversion"

Dude.. winmx. Use it, It's much better then napster, kaza etc. No signing up, don't pay a cent!

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Dude.. winmx. Use it, It's much better then napster, kaza etc. No signing up, don't pay a cent!

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Dude some of us like to do things the legal way.

Write your own CD burning software :)

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Write your own CD burning software

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I love linux for that, as it has system commands that are for CD writing, So its only 100 lines of code for a detailed PERL based CD burner

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and you get a .wma file

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wma files are bologna! Ogg Vorbis is better.

Im sure if you search hard enough youll find a program to remove the protection from the wma

edit: just did a quick search, and it seems that the files are encrypted, so breaking the protection isnt going to be so easy (although im sure someone will come up with one eventually, maybe you can email that norwegian guy :p). Although there are programs that will decompress the wma and then reencode it to something else, although youll lose sound quality that way.

My friend had the same issue here, with not being able to burn/copy the WMAs he got from Napster... ended up just doing a loopback and recording/encoding it himself. Hey, it works. :p

that is a good idea. there are programs that will record all the data that is sent to the audio buffer.

play the .wma file, record that data sent to the audio buffer, and then save it in mp3 format.

oh, and here are some links you might want to check out:

http://www.wma-mp3.com/

http://download.com.com/3120-20-0.ht...ion&tg=dl-2001