Wmp + drm = grr!

[hamishmacdonald]

I'm having a devil of a time getting my music to play on my WM device all of the sudden (an HTC Touch Cruise). It's worked for ages, now it won't play any of the songs I (foolishly?) bought through MSN Music UK. I get this error message:

A digital rights management (DRM) error has occurred.

Background:
- I can play these songs on my PC.
- I've deleted these tracks and re-synched them (countless times).
- I've selected "Show all items" in the file explorer, deleted all the DRM files, and re-synched, but that didn't help.
- I've tried a different card, but the same thing happens.

Does anyone have any insight into how I can make this work again? My WM device is my sole music player, and now it's useless for this purpose. (And I'd rather not hear "burn the songs to CD", because I've bought lots of songs from the shop and really don't want to re-tag them all.)

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: Mea culpa: I was using a cooked ROM. I dunno if that was at fault, but I reflashed back to the OEM ROM, deleted all the DRM files, resynched, and now I can play my songs.

(Gosh it feels geeky to post a sentence with so many three-letter abbreviations in it.)

[Jason Dunn]

EDIT: Mea culpa: I was using a cooked ROM. I dunno if that was at fault, but I reflashed back to the OEM ROM, deleted all the DRM files, resynched, and now I can play my songs

DRM is a dark art, and you never know what hooks they put into it to identify the device. DRM sucks. If I were you, I'd try to crack the DRM and free your songs from the shackles...you paid for 'em!

[hamishmacdonald]

I know! And this was me being all responsible and grown-up, figuring I could afford to pay for my music and wanted to get it quickly, easily, with all the right tags and artwork. In practice, the MSN music store has been about 85% fine, but when things get glitchy, I truly wonder why the songs I've PAID for are the ones that are most difficult to handle.

This, too, shall pass. As the lead singer of Barenaked Ladies put it, why should we punish people for wanting our work? Surely there's some co-operative way for this exchange to happen between true fans and artists.

As a self-publishing author, I'm especially curious to see how the intellectual property swap is going to work in the years ahead.

[hamishmacdonald]

From a technical standpoint, though, I've tried DRM-stripping software like TuneBite (when I wanted to escape from iTunes), and I'm not terribly pleased with the quality of the resulting files, since it does a wonky "re-record through the sound card" trick rather than just stripping the DRM out of the file. You can hear pops and such as the processor got bogged down with the task.

Bah.

No more song purchases for me. Don't even get me started on the Microsoft Reader books I bought and couldn't swap between devices. I gave up on those years ago; so did Microsoft, it seems.

[Jason Dunn]

From a technical standpoint, though, I've tried DRM-stripping software like TuneBite (when I wanted to escape from iTunes), and I'm not terribly pleased with the quality of the resulting files

Yeah, I hear you. FairUse4WM removes the DRM from the files without impacting the quality. I haven't used it in a while, but it's worth checking out.

http://undrm.info/remove-DRM-protection/FairUse4WM-freeware-DRM-removal-Windows-software-Strip-copy-protection-from-WMV-ASF-WMA-Windows-Media-Player.htm

[hamishmacdonald]

Oooh, I thought that only worked up to WMP 10. Thanks!

It's dodgy, but hey, I bought the stuff in the first place. And if the MSN Music service goes offline, I'll be covered. (I know they said they wouldn't for now, but the fact that they announced they were going to discontinue it says that it's something they don't have any compunctions about doing at some point.)

[hamishmacdonald]

Bah! It didn't work. The error message seemed to be saying that it doesn't yet work with the latest version of WMP.

[Jason Dunn]

It's dodgy, but hey, I bought the stuff in the first place. And if the MSN Music service goes offline, I'll be covered.

Exactly. That's the only reason I suggested it: you paid for it, you own it. Sorry to hear it didn't work out. :(