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The Day The Music Died: Windows Media and DRM

Posted by michael on from the coming-soon-to-a-computer-near-you dept.

SampleMinded writes "The Guardian reports on an early glimpse of what a DRM controlled future looks like. Imagine backing up your files, reformatting your hard drive, then copying the files back over only to find your music no longer works. It happened to this guy. Now That's what I call Xperience!"

8 of 688 comments (clear)

  1. It's already happening by crivens · · Score: 5, Informative

    It happened to my fiancee. She backed up her music made using Real Jukebox to her D drive. We re-formatted drive C and re-installed Windows. Of course, not having saved the security key, when she restored her music files she couldn't play them.

    As always, the honest people suffer.

  2. Don't even have to do a reinstall by taeric · · Score: 5, Informative

    You don't even have to try to reload backed up data to get bit by this. Not too long ago, I upgraded my processor and was subsequently locked out of all the media files I made using Media Player.

    I was less then pleased, for obvious reasons. It was just a minor headache remaking files using other programs and such, but it was a minor headache I could have lived without.

  3. Re:don't use media player? by mrbill · · Score: 4, Informative

    Whoops, I just checked (www.soundjam.com):

    "Casady & Greene, Inc. ceased publication of SoundJam MP on June 1, 2001 at the request of its developers. We believe that SoundJam MP will continue to give our customers long and useful service, and, in keeping with our philosophy of putting our customers first, Casady & Greene will continue to offer tech support to SoundJam MP owners. The SoundJam development team is now working for Apple on their popular iTunes jukebox software, and will continue to work on exciting and innovative products for Mac use"

  4. Re:Windows Media Player?? by slagdogg · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, his first mistake was not disabling the 'Personal Protection' feature ... this would have solved his problem just as well as using another product.

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    (Score:-1, Wrong)
  5. Re:It's already happening (Creative Labs DRM) by dtfan579 · · Score: 5, Informative

    When updating my soundcard drivers recently, I discovered a notice of Digital Rig^H^Hestrictions Management from Creative Labs. Apparently copy protected "intellectual property content" causes the digital output of the sound card to be shutoff. Of course this only works on WMAs, so I believe this fits in the context of this article. For more information visit this URL Creative Labs: DRM with WMA

  6. Re:me like by Boiling_point_ · · Score: 4, Informative
    If I didn't have so many files to convert, I'd consider the technically better Ogg Vorbis format. Anyone know of a batch MP3>OGG converter?

    You won't pick up any quality converting an already-mp3 file to ogg - it's still lossy compression on top of lossy compression. Anyone know of a batch cd-ripper/robot arm disc changer combo?? :)
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    "If you create user accounts, by default, they will have an account type of Administrator with no password." KB Q293834
  7. Re:Why DivX died? by tswinzig · · Score: 4, Informative

    No, DivX died because the company was trying to sell you a limited use disc that had less features than DVD's that could be bought/rented/re-sold.

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    "And like that ... he's gone."
  8. not anymore by Trepidity · · Score: 4, Informative

    From the Winamp changelog:

    Winamp 2.61:
    * In accordance with Microsoft's license agreement, we no longer allow you to use DSP plug-ins or alternate output plug-ins when playing WMA files.

    So you'd have to find a version older than 2.61 for that trick to work.

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    10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10