Will WMP10 transcode my protected music?

[sn1p3t]

I don't have a Mini SD card (yet). I'm trying to choose between a 256MB or a 512MB one.

Here's my problem: right now I've bought quite a bit of music from MSN Music. It's encoded at 160Kbps. That's fine for my 60GB laptop hard drive, but would be a waste on my phone. Can I tell WMP10 to transcode my protected music to something more managable, say... 96Kbps, or am I stuck with 160Kbps?

[jfreiman]

I have successfully transcoded music downloaded from Napster to my WMP10 mobile phone (Audiovox SMT5600).

It works great.

[sn1p3t]

I have successfully transcoded music downloaded from Napster to my WMP10 mobile phone (Audiovox SMT5600).

It works great.
Could you show me how? I set up the sync to convert my audio files to 128Kbps (vs the 160Kbps MSN Music gives me). When I added some protected and non-protected music, it only converted the non-protected music.

[jfreiman]

My bad, I just went and checked out the my files on my phone and saw that they were no transcoded.

I went and double checked my settings, tried transcoding to another bitrate with no success. It just copies the files over regardless as is no matter what bitrate I request.

Learn from iTunes

I can burn the same audio files to an Audio CD (they transcode to WAV files :? ) and then you can do what Mac/iTunes people have been doing for some time... Rip your burned files back to your PC without protection.

The only downside I encountered was that the CD's tile was not transferred over to my newly ripped files. Track titiles, etc were - just not the album title.

And oh yes, I did just do it myself and verified everything.

This was a good excercise and I will now do this to all my protected music.

[sn1p3t]

That's exactly what I decided to do :D I found a virtual CD-RW (so I wouldn't waste CDs), and have been burning and ripping! So far 160Kbps -> CD -> 128KBps has produced no noticable difference.

[jfreiman]

Hmmm..... Virtual CD writer? That's pretty cool.

But since I have limited writes on these DRM files, I'm making backups of my music files and storing them with my other Audio CDs.