[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by hockeydude

I used Windows Media Player 9 to transfer them there from my computer and it works fine. Is this illegal to do? If so, I wasnt aware of that. It says you can transfer to an unlimited amount of mobile device's.

Consider yourself lucky that it works. :-) There seems to be some random chance in terms of when it will work and when it won't, but you're the first person who's ordered from Wal-mart that has gotten it to work. Unless Wal-mart changed their DRM implementation?

[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by hockeydude

I used Windows Media Player 9 to transfer them there from my computer and it works fine. Is this illegal to do? If so, I wasnt aware of that. It says you can transfer to an unlimited amount of mobile device's.

Consider yourself lucky that it works. :-) There seems to be some random chance in terms of when it will work and when it won't, but you're the first person who's ordered from Wal-mart that has gotten it to work. Unless Wal-mart changed their DRM implementation?

[szamot]

Originally Posted by Jason Dunn

It might be possible with some virtual CD mounting software, although I have my doubts that a ripper would see it as a valid music source - that seems like a lot of work to save 20 cents. :-)

Let's see if I understand this DRM stuff - in simple terms. Let's say I am thirsty and I have a pitcher in one hand and a water hose in the other. So I use the pitcher to dig a well, then I put the water hose in the well and fill it up, then I use a bucket to draw some water and have a drink with the dirty pitcher I just used to dig the well. Yep, got it - it all makes sense now....if I could only market this brilliant idea. Honestly it seems the more technology we get them more steps back we have to take to make the simplest thing work. No wonder so many people just use a walkman to this day.

[alexkro]

Originally Posted by Jason Dunn

The only solution is to burn a CD and re-rip the track at the same bitrate that the original file was in - that should minimize audio quality loss.

If you think that you don't have any quality loss you're wrong. The encoder that media companies use is not the same as the encoder the desktop media players have. They use better, more sofisticated encoders. I bought tracks from Napster encoded at 128 Kbps. Then I compared it with the music I rip from my CDs with the same rate. The result is that Napster's tracks have wider frequency range and sound better. I was able to get closer to the Napter's encoder at the rate about 164 Kbps.

So my advice would be if you burn and re-rip: use higher bit rate than the original track's rate. Otherwise the quality loss is inevitable.

[surur]

This is why I bought total recorder, which can rip any sound stream that makes its way to the sound card in whichever format I specify. I have wasting a CD for every song I buy, and I hate having to wait for 10 songs to accumulate (which can take weeks) before I burn.

I think excusing the companies because we can burn and rerip is wrong. Not only is the music then degraded, but we lose album art, lyrics and all other id3 data, which have to be re-entered manually.

The lack of integration between microsoft's various products have always amazed me. Why was the pocketpc not designed to be the premium player of WMA DRM content? Surely it would only have made sense, would not have been too difficult, and would have driven sales. Instead they go down a completely different route with their mobile media players, for which there is currently no significant installed base.

They are set to fail, and its because they dont put consumers ahead of their DRM customers.

Surur

[PatrickD]

I have a Dell Axim X5 which has an CF and SD slot. I discovered (after many frustrating hours, and several customer support emails) that I can copy DRM protected content I purchased from PureTracks to my CF card but NOT my SD card :? My best guess as to why, is that the SD card on the Axim is not SDIO. In any case it doesn't matter since I have resorted to the old burn and rip like everyone else. I wouldn't mind going through this tedious process if I could actually see how it would prevent or reduce piracy. But it seems to me that if I can burn and rip, so can the pirates and file swappers, therefore it is just an inconvience that has no real impact on piracy. Actually the music pirates are probably the only ones who still buy CD's, so they can get a cheap high quality master copy to base their work on.

[Shuushin]

Originally Posted by szamot

Let's see if I understand this DRM stuff - in simple terms. Let's say I am thirsty and I have a pitcher in one hand and a water hose in the other. So I use the pitcher to dig a well, then I put the water hose in the well and fill it up, then I use a bucket to draw some water and have a drink with the dirty pitcher I just used to dig the well. Yep, got it - it all makes sense now....if I could only market this brilliant idea. Honestly it seems the more technology we get them more steps back we have to take to make the simplest thing work. No wonder so many people just use a walkman to this day.

Brilliant.

The next step, if you want to have clean water again, is to shut off the hose, empty it out and very carefully pour the water from the bucket back into the hose. Some will spill, but most of the dirt will stay out - and you can toss the crappy bucket.

Then you can drink from the hose (hoping that it is still water and not knowing for sure until you taste it).

[BugDude10]

Great, now I'm confused *and* thirsty. :?

[PetiteFlower]

Wow, that's probably the most obscure analogy I've ever seen.....

:confused totally:

[Kati Compton]

Originally Posted by PetiteFlower

Wow, that's probably the most obscure analogy I've ever seen...

I think that was the point.

[Janak Parekh]

Originally Posted by PatrickD

I have a Dell Axim X5 which has an CF and SD slot. I discovered (after many frustrating hours, and several customer support emails) that I can copy DRM protected content I purchased from PureTracks to my CF card but NOT my SD card :? My best guess as to why, is that the SD card on the Axim is not SDIO.

I don't think that's it -- I've heard troubles reported from SDIO-enabled devices. From what I've read in the forums, people seem to have a bit more success with CF than SD. Why, I don't know. Both are still unsupported.

Anyway, I personally refuse to burn-and-rip -- the quality degradation is too much for my ears, and the hassle is tremendous. Instead, I buy most of my music on CDs, which enables ripping into multiple formats. I do have a bunch of iTunes tracks, and if I needed to play them on a Pocket PC, I'd find a magical way to use a player that handles AAC (and I refuse to elaborate further. ) Fortunately, I've not been in that situation yet.

--janak