Please tell me how the @#$& buying music on line works.
My son wanted 6 cuts on mp3. He found Walmart.com, where he could buy each cut and download them. Fine. Download works. Payment stuff works. They aren’t mp3. They’re .wma. Gotta have Windows media player 9.0. Fine. That’s the only thing they’ll play on. Download that. Gotta be connected to the internet to play them them the first time. Some registration BS. Fine. Got thru that. Want to burn them on a CD. Gotta convert them to mp3 or .cda. Don’t give a rat’s which. Downloaded a trial converter. Supposed to convert pretty much any format to any other format. Won’t work. Gives me a “protected or damaged” message.
So, what’s the deal? Can I buy individual cuts and burn them on a CD, or what?
What can I use to convert these .wma files to .mp3 or .cda?
Addendum: If you want cheap, high quality, unprotected music, check out www.allofmp3.com [English link in upper left]. Music, including full albums, for $.01 a megabyte [credit purchased 1GB at a time for $10]. You can usually choose the format and bitrate you want to download in, as well.
Walmart.com has a FAQ on burning CDs from music you buy from their store. It looks like you can use Windows Media Player 9 to do this, and you can only burn the song to CD 10 times.
Your converter definitely won’t work on these files: they’ve been encrypted specifically to prevent you from being able to do this. The thought is, if you could convert them to MP3 you could then turn around and put them on a P2P network and essentially give the song file away to the whole world for free. Which, needless to say, Walmart and the original artist aren’t too keen on.
So they make you go through a little bit of inconvenience with a “protected” song file that you can only play or burn with Windows Media Player 9 to prevent you from doing this.
Can you record from your sound card’s line in while playing something on the line out? If you can, I suggest getting a cable with two mini-jacks on it. Connect line in to line out, play the music, and record it to mp3.
If you can’t do that, you could try a setup with two computers. One playing, one recording. Use the same cable. This piece of software may help.
I am not a Windows user, so I don’t know to defeat the DRM (digital rights management) through software. However, no silly DRM can protect a piece of music once it’s on the wire.
Tentacle Monster: Telling someone how to defeat a copy protection or access control mechanism is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [pdf]. This includes telling people how to use a sharpie marker or disable autocomplete to get around CD copy protection, as well as advising people on analog methods that may be used to defeat protections. Contact your congressman to express your opinions on this.
I’m not especially familiar with Windows Media Player, but what’s to prevent someone from burning a song to an audio disk, and then using an mp3 converter on the audio disk track? I’m sure the audio quality would be worse, but would there be a noticable difference to most folks’ ears?
Alternatively, you could get an iTunes account, and then be able to download exactly the tracks that you want instead of buying an entire disk. Get an iPod and you’re good to go.
Aleron, how many times have posters on this board told you explicitly that changing the medium of the work (VHS to DVD, MP3 to Cd, whatever) is ALLOWED according to the DMCA you so kindly linked to?
Not only that but you are allowed to make backups for your own sake (not to sell or distribute, obviously) and are allowed to defeat copy protection to fulfill that purpose (but for no other purpose).
In addition to what Kinthalis said, even if the DCMA didn’t explicitly make it legal for a user to make copies for their own use, the RIAA v. Diamond appeal affirmed that making format changes (i.e., WMA -> MP3) is explicitly a fair use of copyrighted material.
Alereon: Oh, I have contacted my congressman. Unfortunately, since I don’t have great piles of money to stuff up his ass, I don’t think it made much of an impact.
IANAL disclaimers apply, as I should have noted in my last post.
Kinthalis: Cite? Your interpretation is the way the laws stood BEFORE the introduction of the DMCA. If your interpretation was correct, backing up DVDs would be legal. Now, whether one is allowed to format shift UNPROTECTED WORKS is an unsettled legal issue. Specificially, the question is whether format shifting is fair use. I, and the EFF, believe that it is. Many Intellectual Property lawyers disagree. As for protected works, you are NOT allowed to break the protection. You may excercise your fair use rights to the extent that you DO NOT circumvent the access control mechanisms (DRM in this case).
See this Wired article for more information on the illegality of telling people how to circumvent access control mechanisms, even through simple means.
I apologize for confusion in my previous post with regards to access control mechanisms and copy protection mechanisms. I would welcome any information anyone can provide that would clarify the difference.
Punoqllads: AFAIK, that decision is only valid in the ninth circuit. The EFF Fair Use FAQ has more information on the legality of format shifting and mentions that decision.
Or, unless I’m missing something, he could stick with the WalMart service and still be able to download exactly the tracks he wants instead of buying an entire disk…
As others have said, you should be able to burn those WMA files to a CD with Windows Media Player. You should also be able to upload them to a compatible portable audio device without conversion.
While they’re certainly not as common as CD players that speak MP3, many CD players will play WMA files with no problem. My car CD player does it, I have about 6GB of WMA files burned right onto CDs and they play just fine. Not necessarily the best workaround but worth looking into.
Some soundcards have the hardware to do this–such as, almost all SoundBLasters–however, infuriatingly enough, Windows drivers for anything past 98 and ME will not allow it with many soundcards. Part of the reason is the use of direct-hardware drivers that Microsoft refused to support in the later OS’s, and the other part is to prevent you from making unauthorized copes of audio. Some videocards that can do complete motion-screen captures in Win98 and ME have that feature blocked in later OS’s also. Funny coincidence, that. Mot of the other features are usually still present… I find this a wonderful reason to pirate media: in that Microsoft is willing to disable potions of your computer’s hardware to suit their business plans.
The point is that you cannot–any MP3 file tagged as created by WIndows MEdia Player, and tagged as copyright-protected, cannot be copied in that Windows OS, at all. By any software. The OS will not allow it. Just like how screen-capture programs cannot capture frames fro most WMP, Quicktime and Real video files. If you try, you get a frame with a black screen.
Yes, but the fear there is that somewhere down the line, for whatever reason, Microsoft will stop supporting that version of WMP file–so guess what? Since it’s a proprietary format, and now (because of the DCMA) nobody else can write a program to play it, so—> you are screwed, no matter how many Windows Media Player CD’s you paid to make. They are useless. Do you remember the Divx fiasco?
~
Well everyone, thanks for the help (and the bad news).
black455 all I have to say to you is “Arrrr, matey”.
This is such a load of crap. If I buy the fargin’ music on a CD, I can pretty much do what I want with it (legal or illegal). But because I legally downloaded and paid for 6 tracks, I’m screwed? I can’t convert it to a form my stereo can play? No wonder the illegal download business is thriving.
What genius thought this up? Somebody in the music business needs to get their head out of their ass and see the future.
Screen-capture programs (or just the Print Screen key) don’t capture video playback because the video streams are generally processed by your video card separately from whatever internal software buffer Windows uses to draw the rest of the screen. If you go into your video card properties and disable any hardware acceleration, you’ll find that screen-capturing from video works just fine, since everything is being rendered purely by software. You’ll also notice more sluggish video performance and lower quality on scaled video files.
If you don’t feel like fiddling around with device settings every time you want to take a screenshot of a movie, you’ll be happy to learn that Windows Media Player even has a hotkey that lets you save a frame of the movie you’re watching (Ctrl-I).
Microsoft isn’t ‘disabling’ any of your hardware, in fact it’s doing just the opposite: letting your video card do as much of the work in video playback as it can, and then giving you an easy way to save screenshots.
To reiterate…burning the files and ripping them to your computer, which strips files of their protection, is wrong. Just thinking of the days where I could do what I want with things that I legally owned sends me into convulsions… Excuse me…
