Apparently, someone figured out a way to hack the DRM out of Microsoft's WMA format.
Good for them!
I hate crap like that. It treats everyone like a criminal.
No DRM for you!
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damaged_one
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Yeah I downloaded it but haven't tried it yet. My daugters MP3 player died so I gave her mine but it won't play subscription music. So I'm going to give this program a try so she can still listen to her subscription music. Does that make me a criminal? I'll post back on how well it works. (or if I get a nasty letter from the mafia, I mean the RIAA)
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bio
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*bump*
Free music for you!!
You'll only have access to Universal's catalogue of music, but they have a few OMG XBOX huge artists under their wing (U2, Gwen Stafani, Kanye West, The Killers, Eminem, Sarah Harmer, and Rufus Wainwright).
Of course, you can't burn the songs to CD or play them on another computer out of the box. But since they'll be using the same DRM that the FairUse4WM is designed to break, that should take all of a few seconds to fix (download it now... it's disapearing off the web at an alarming rate!)
Sure, they're WMA's, yes, you have to watch 90 seconds of advertising to get them, and yup... they're "protected", but at least the industry is starting to move in the right direction.
Free music for you!!
You'll only have access to Universal's catalogue of music, but they have a few OMG XBOX huge artists under their wing (U2, Gwen Stafani, Kanye West, The Killers, Eminem, Sarah Harmer, and Rufus Wainwright).
Of course, you can't burn the songs to CD or play them on another computer out of the box. But since they'll be using the same DRM that the FairUse4WM is designed to break, that should take all of a few seconds to fix (download it now... it's disapearing off the web at an alarming rate!)
Sure, they're WMA's, yes, you have to watch 90 seconds of advertising to get them, and yup... they're "protected", but at least the industry is starting to move in the right direction.
"That's What"
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damaged_one
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Update
Well I used fairuse4wm this weekend and it worked. It's fairly fast and easy to use but I do have a couple of nits. First it doesn't save the output setting so everytime you use it you have to browse to where you want the files to go. Second you can drop a folder onto the program but it doesn't create the folder in the output directory you have selected. If these 2 problems were fixed it would be uber cool. Now my daughter is happy she can listen to her subscription music again and I can put off buying a new mp3 player until her birthday. Yay!
So in theory: you can sign up for a 'free' months account at Napster (albeit providing a CC number, 'just in case' you love it!), download one song, point fairuse4wm.exe at that file (I guess this provides some license info on your 'invidualized computer'), and un-DRM away.
In theory, anyway.
I'm all for them changing their business model, so I'm glad they're trying SpiralFrog. I'll include my rant on how they've completely goobered up the SACD vs. DVD-Audio war: You now have 2 possibly digital 5.1 formats, yet they make you use 6 analog cables to avoid use of 1 digital cable, like coax or fiber. Digital cables must mean pirating, right?
What does this do in the end? Screw and confuse the consumer. Yeah!
In theory, anyway.
I'm all for them changing their business model, so I'm glad they're trying SpiralFrog. I'll include my rant on how they've completely goobered up the SACD vs. DVD-Audio war: You now have 2 possibly digital 5.1 formats, yet they make you use 6 analog cables to avoid use of 1 digital cable, like coax or fiber. Digital cables must mean pirating, right?
What does this do in the end? Screw and confuse the consumer. Yeah!
Work is the curse of the drinking class
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miftah
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I'm totally with you on this. Advanced resolution audio without compression isn't close-at-hand, it is upon us. The difference between then and now is the same as cassettes to CDs. And where do they send us instead? Extreme OVER compression in the form of downloadable music. If I get one more snotnosed kid telling me that CDs are soooo over, I'm going to slap his eyebrows off. Yeah shithead, so is compression.
Eh, the recording industry's days are numbered anyway. Its only a matter of time until they shoot themselves in the foot fatally. When they do and its all indies again, it'll be like a dove coming down with a branch.
Eh, the recording industry's days are numbered anyway. Its only a matter of time until they shoot themselves in the foot fatally. When they do and its all indies again, it'll be like a dove coming down with a branch.
"Fear of the bee means the honey is for me" - Jhonn Balance
Bastards. Thanks for inspiring the fairuse programmers, and going the wrong direction.
Work is the curse of the drinking class
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miftah
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I just had a bit of caffeine....
Jesus, who even uses WMP anymore? If you do, you deserve every restriction they impose on you.
Microsoft is so paranoid about the threat of a class action suit that its felating every voting member the RIAA can scrounge up. My prediction? Linux will own everything within ten years. Vista is going to be the Edsel of the digital age. MS will hang on based on the only cashcow it will have left: the xbox.
And the reason is as obvious as the Zuma player the put in front of everybody last week. They think the buying public is stupid. So much so that they think simply slapping the MS name on a random player is going to put even a nick in the market share Apple holds with ipod.
This sort of crap would have cut it ten years ago. Not now. Generationally, the kids who have grown up in the digital domain are cycling into the most-active buying demographics. These kids know the score and they're going to choose what will allow for freedom in the digital environment. Its no surprise Apple's notebook sales have already hit their forecasts for sales a month early. Christmas is gonna be a real eye-opener. I'm not saying Apple is going to take over the world, but open-source will and it will happen sooner than later.
MS's dominance is a product of market positioning and ease of integration to pre-existing systems. As soon as a Firefox-like scenario comes along as an OS, its over. I predict a concisely-packaged linux-based OS within the next five years. I don't even know anyone who uses Explorer anymore. If someone makes it viable and free, you watch the PC manufacturers line up against MS. The other software houses that author in competition to MS? They're peeing themselves to get started. All it will take to start the flow of migration will be getting the videogaming houses to port to a leaner, faster system. And it will all be over.
As what used to be specialized becomes the common knowledge, the average consumer is becoming a lot more adept. Sure the grandmas of the world are out there, but they're not updating system software anyway. Further, for that demographic, if you sold them nothing but the bare-bones software that ships with the mac on a box and told them it was Windows, they'd never know the difference and they'd never need to buy a single piece of software. They aren't buying anything but $10 cardgame software at wal-mart anyway.
Open-source just needs the initiative and the vision to put it at the top. Everyone knows Google is already on this. MS is the big fat dinosaur too bulky to react to a threat effectively. Any hungry jungle cat could eat pretty well. If it had a mind to.
Microsoft is so paranoid about the threat of a class action suit that its felating every voting member the RIAA can scrounge up. My prediction? Linux will own everything within ten years. Vista is going to be the Edsel of the digital age. MS will hang on based on the only cashcow it will have left: the xbox.
And the reason is as obvious as the Zuma player the put in front of everybody last week. They think the buying public is stupid. So much so that they think simply slapping the MS name on a random player is going to put even a nick in the market share Apple holds with ipod.
This sort of crap would have cut it ten years ago. Not now. Generationally, the kids who have grown up in the digital domain are cycling into the most-active buying demographics. These kids know the score and they're going to choose what will allow for freedom in the digital environment. Its no surprise Apple's notebook sales have already hit their forecasts for sales a month early. Christmas is gonna be a real eye-opener. I'm not saying Apple is going to take over the world, but open-source will and it will happen sooner than later.
MS's dominance is a product of market positioning and ease of integration to pre-existing systems. As soon as a Firefox-like scenario comes along as an OS, its over. I predict a concisely-packaged linux-based OS within the next five years. I don't even know anyone who uses Explorer anymore. If someone makes it viable and free, you watch the PC manufacturers line up against MS. The other software houses that author in competition to MS? They're peeing themselves to get started. All it will take to start the flow of migration will be getting the videogaming houses to port to a leaner, faster system. And it will all be over.
As what used to be specialized becomes the common knowledge, the average consumer is becoming a lot more adept. Sure the grandmas of the world are out there, but they're not updating system software anyway. Further, for that demographic, if you sold them nothing but the bare-bones software that ships with the mac on a box and told them it was Windows, they'd never know the difference and they'd never need to buy a single piece of software. They aren't buying anything but $10 cardgame software at wal-mart anyway.
Open-source just needs the initiative and the vision to put it at the top. Everyone knows Google is already on this. MS is the big fat dinosaur too bulky to react to a threat effectively. Any hungry jungle cat could eat pretty well. If it had a mind to.
"Fear of the bee means the honey is for me" - Jhonn Balance
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bugfreezer
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Re: I just had a bit of caffeine....
And here is someone bringing that day a wee bit closer....miftah wrote:I predict a concisely-packaged linux-based OS within the next five years....
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
- Sir Winston Churchill
- Sir Winston Churchill
Re: I just had a bit of caffeine....
That's what activates fairuse4wm's decision that you have a protected wma file...miftah wrote:Jesus, who even uses WMP anymore? If you do, you deserve every restriction they impose on you.
I've been using the same verison of winamp, specifically RedwoodAmp, for about 5 years now. Shows how much I'm keeping up with other players, but I've used it for so long now.
Use of WMP wasn't my point, it was MS's approach to the topic.
I agree. Have you seen Vista? It made me think of Windows ME. It was the last, bloated, oddly unstable OS of the old Win95/ 16-bit kernel. Now I think MS has pushed Vista in to the same situation. The ground is slipping away from under their feet.miftah wrote:Everyone knows Google is already on this. MS is the big fat dinosaur too bulky to react to a threat effectively.
Work is the curse of the drinking class
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miftah
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I don't know. I don't use media files wma. And I've never understood why anyone would. I acknowledge that maybe because I like the ability to edit sound files, I might be a special case, but I've just never understood why someone would use a proprietary file format. It doesn't sound better and it limits where you can take it and what you can do with it. Just sounds like a losing format to me. Apart from the fact that its bundled on Windows, I can't imagine why anyone would go and seek it out.
If I found a website that offered only wma files for download, I wouldn't buy them nor subscribe to them, because I know the only reason why a developer uses WMA is that they want the ability to take it away from you later.
If I found a website that offered only wma files for download, I wouldn't buy them nor subscribe to them, because I know the only reason why a developer uses WMA is that they want the ability to take it away from you later.
"Fear of the bee means the honey is for me" - Jhonn Balance
I use WMA because that's the default file format windows media rips to. So after ripping over 1000 CDs before realizing that I was ripping to WMA instead of MP3 I changed it. So I have some where in the tune of 10,000 WMAs but the rest of my music is MP3. One day I may re-rip them, but it is a task I am putting off as long as I possibly can. God have mercy on my soul.
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miftah
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I guess I'm lucky, when I came of age digitally (the awkward nervous stages of which many on this site were witness to), I never even came into contact with WMA. Encap and Bio raised me to be an mp3 child and that's all its ever been until I came to love mp4.
I didn't even know what WMA was until the fall of 99, when I downloaded a free Radiohead song that expired 24 hours after downloading it. That was the only lesson I ever needed. Lots came along... Sony especially... but I was never tempted away from mpeg.
I didn't even know what WMA was until the fall of 99, when I downloaded a free Radiohead song that expired 24 hours after downloading it. That was the only lesson I ever needed. Lots came along... Sony especially... but I was never tempted away from mpeg.
"Fear of the bee means the honey is for me" - Jhonn Balance
I've been collecting and ripping mp3's since the late '90's (boy, the time/ data I spent/ FTP'ing on a 28.8 modem is staggering), and only came to wma because of fairuse. My Pioneer car deck also supports wma, so it's been ok.
With FTP you had to work a little for those files, when you were amazed the files sounded like real music, and not like a midi! At least ftp took a small amount of skill (searching nfo files for good sites, for instance), but the p2p genre sure streamlined it. That genre I haven't gotten in to, fairuse I have, because of before stated issues with the recording industry.
jc, I don't think you'll need to re-rip, it looks like there's a bunch of wma to mp3 converters.
With FTP you had to work a little for those files, when you were amazed the files sounded like real music, and not like a midi! At least ftp took a small amount of skill (searching nfo files for good sites, for instance), but the p2p genre sure streamlined it. That genre I haven't gotten in to, fairuse I have, because of before stated issues with the recording industry.
jc, I don't think you'll need to re-rip, it looks like there's a bunch of wma to mp3 converters.
Work is the curse of the drinking class
