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Napster Has Been Cracked
Sabathius writes "Users have found a way to skirt copy protection on Napster Inc's portable music subscription service just days after its high-profile launch, potentially letting them make CDs with hundreds of thousands of songs for free...""
The jig is up. I was hoping I'd finish my 14-day trial before anyone found out about this. Oh well, I got 8 gigs already, and I can get more today.
I use a program called tunebite that plays the files back and records them to MP3, as well as copying over album/artist metadata from the tags.
Hopefully I can get everything copied before they fix it (if they ever can fix it).
"Growsing about rejected submissions" my behind -- I submitted a better worded snap with more informative links two days ago...
WinAmp has pulled the plug-in in question from their site, it seems...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
On linux, so long as you're playing via /dev/dsp you can always grab the digital signal, for example via vsound. I wouldn't be surprised if that's possible with MacOS X too, or even Windows.
you are absolutely right, however, the difference here is, napster is a subscription model. (with a free trial to boot.) so the circumvention of the DRM means you get as many songs as you want for little or no money. music download sites, like iTMS or MSN, you have to pay first, then crack it all you want... so media/content companies aren't quite "losing" there to the same degree...
Yes... OSX can do it too!
Trolling using another account since 2005.
It's not actually been cracked - They can't make real digital 1:1 copies of the songs - What they do is record from the sound card. That's not so bad if you just want to burn them to CD, but if you want to re-encode from WAV to Ogg or MP3, the quality will deteriorate further...
You can do this will *all* DRM media, nothing new here - It's only because it's Napster (woohoooo) that people think it's revolutionary. It isn't.
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
Divide the number of songs sold on iTunes by the number of iPods sold, and it works out to only something like 5 or 10 albums per iPod. Unless people are buying much much bigger players than they need for some reason, it looks like people are mostly putting things other than iTMS music on their iPods.
Napster have already responded on their site (link in top right) and basically said the same thing. They also rightly pointed out (i think, as i've not tried) that this would be a 1:1 copy, so a 60 minute album would take you the same amount of time to copy - which isn't going to be much fun to do lots of.
Apparantly rumour has it that Steve Jobs contacted music executives, pointing them to the site and the Napster CEO countered by pointing out several sites which showed you how to do the same with iTunes files. I'm not sure how true this is.
Interestingly enough, the Winamp plugin required to do this - Output Stacker - was pulled from the winamp site. Which I find a little odd, since there are perfectly legal uses for the plugin - so I don't understand why they're playing censorer (to be safe?)
If anyone knows where to get it from, it would be appreciated since Googles cache shows no homepage and a Google search of the author gives only a set of links to a non-working winamp.com URL.
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get the LAME output plug in, it will create and tag an mp3 for you
A response from the Napster CTO taken from the homepage of Napster.com:
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It has come to our attention that there are a number of inaccurate statements posted by various sources on the Internet regarding the security of Napster and Napster To Go. As Napster's CTO, I would like to officially state that neither Napster To Go, Napster, nor Windows Media DRM have been hacked. In the interest of providing the most accurate information to consumers, the following is some background on the subject.
There is a program that allows a user to record the playback of tracks directly from the computer's sound card. This process can be likened to the way people used to record songs from the radio onto cassette tapes, but instead of capturing the music on a tape, the file is converted into a new, unprotected digital format. This program does not break the encryption of the files, which can only be recorded one at a time making the process quite laborious. It would take 10 hours to convert 10 hours of music in this manner. It is important to note that this program is not specific to Napster; files from all legal subscription and pay-per-download services can be copied in this way.
We hope that the information provided above clarifies the matter and puts questions regarding the security of Napster and Napster To Go to rest. Napster's mission is to provide consumers with a legal environment in which they can experience and discover the world's largest collection of digital music. We believe that artists should be compensated for their work and intellectual property rights should be respected. While we acknowledge there are always going to be those who do not share our belief, we remain committed to providing the most enjoyable and flexible digital music experience for those who do.
Output Stacker plugin has been pulled from the WinAmp site, but you can still get it in their forums.
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The details on the plugin are cached here, this is the PULLED page:
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:zsalM
This thread lists where it can be found NOW:
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?thr
And this contains the plugin:
http://forums.winamp.com/attachment.php?
Google is a wonderful thing when companies wish to backtrack like that.
The plugin has tons of geniune uses... pulling it, well yeah I understand AOL/Time Warner's motives... but they're kinda dumb.
Many sound card drives (Echo Mia, Egosys Waveterminal, Emu series, to name a few) allow internal rerouting of a digital signal to and from various virtual ins and outs. Simply playback anything through the mme driver, route that to an asio or WDM input, record, and voila. But really people, just buy the music. I know I'm going out on a limb here, but look at a service like Rhapsody. $10 a month for as much 44.1/16 music on your computer as you want. Albeit the bitrate isn't that great (im guessing 128), if you're really using kazaa for virtuous reasons such as "discovering music that you can't find in the record store because the RIAA shoves pop down your throat," then you'll buy a cd when you find something you really like. Rhapsody has a huge library of songs, stuff you would never see on mtv. It has a 30 day free trial, see for yourself. No I'm not a Rhapsody employee =), I just honestly enjoy the service.
And do them in parallel to beat the real time limitation.
Actually, their drivers do contain something similar.
For instance, I'm in the pro audio industry and folks have always claimed that a soundblasters S/N and other specs are right up there with the big boys. Of course they are -- their team is comprised of greats from around the industry including their aquisition of Ensoniq a few years back.
What they don't tell you is that the digital outs and otherwise are disabled in the drivers. The claim is that you get 24bit in / out -- but the reality is that even if you are doing a pure pass through, that 24 bit randomly drops bits down to a signal of as low as 14.
The strange this is this doesn't happen with the free drivers that were available for Linux nor the Mac solutions. And then someone backported one of the Ensoniq proaudio card drivers after realizing the chipset was identical and was able to bring this back to the PC by doing a little hex editing...and the audio in phenomenal (although the driver is still a bit buggy and I wouldn't recommend it for anyone that needed a serious project undertaken).
But yeah, if Creative needed to make the industry happy, they'd throw in Macrovision in a heartbeat. Sad that your post is rated funny...
Note: This was true several years back...I don't deal with audio interfaces as I once did, so it may not be true any longer.
Also now, this is Off Topic, please rate it accordingly. I'm an AC and don't give a rats ass.
The difference is Napster offer 14 day trial, meaning that you an download as much as possible and rencode at the same time, meaning you can download, with a reasonable amount of effort, a thousand free songs. In iTunes you can burn 'perfect' recordings of downloaded songs without any audio 'trickery' but you still have to pay for them! So Jobs can call them out on this, but he still shouldnt. Nobody likes a snitch!
Two tears in a bucket. Motherfuck it.
Well according to Napster, this is not a crime. Quotting from the article: "The DRM (digital rights management) is intact. Basically, people are just recording off a sound card. This is nothing new and people could do this with any legitimate service if they want to use a sound card".
And you are STILL losing quality even if it was just transcoding like that.
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-If you use the "Out-lame" Winamp plugin in the Output Stacker in place of "Out-disk", you can convert straight to MP3. It still encodes no faster than realtime, but this is a great way to conserve space. WAV(Out-disk) is still recommended if you are burning CDs and want to keep as much quality as possible. I can confirm that this all works.
-You can run multiple instances of Winamp at once, each converting its own song. Each instance's playback will not interfere with any of the others, illustrating the fact that this is not simply recording the music off of your soundcard. Doing this, you can get FAR MORE than 252 full 80 minute CDs within 14 days. I can confirm that this works.
You can transcode(MP3) or decode(WAV) X albums in the time it takes for the longest track on the album to elapse. And since you're not limited to only tracks from one album at a time, you can trans/decode as many tracks as instances of Winamp your computer will run limited only by your computer's resources.
Quote from Napster's official statement: "It would take 10 hours to convert 10 hours of music in this manner."
With the updated methods, you can convert 100 hours or 1,000 hours or 10,000 hours of music in 10 hours. The only limit is your computing resources.
--- Eat my sig.
The only Virtual CD Burner software I've seen is called Original CD Emulator. It creates a fake CD Burner in the same way DaemonTools creats a fake CD drive.
If anyone knows any other software that can do the same things as these too, please post them here too.
Wrong.
Original recording -> MP3: loss
MP3 -> WAV: no additional loss
WAV -> MP3: more loss
Each time you convert to a lossy format, there is more going on that "throwing away the parts of the music you can't hear", which is often the quick, oversimplified explanation of lossy compression. There's added noise due to compression as well, and that noise will be, at least to some extent, cumulative with additional generation of compression.
Even if the psychoacoustic models used were perfect (which they aren't, especially at low bit rates), at the very least there would be generational loss from calculation round-off errors when converting from MP3 to WAV and back again.
I have spoke to a friend within apple who has told me they are aware of this rumour, it is NOT true, and it is apparently being spread by people like gmajor(look at his several replies acting as if the "email" is a fact) as some sort of FUD campaign (maybe gmajor does the astro???). I have to admit though, he had me at first...we all know between running sucessful companies and coming up with innovative products steve is busy RABIDLY FOLLOWING BLOGS!!! UZ PWNED!
CRAP saves space by throwing away data, losing quality. However, you only lose quality the first time around. You can transcode between FLAC and CRAP as many times as you want, and there is no subsequent data or quality loss.
The problem arises when different formats/encoders throw away different parts of the spectrum. Then, the end result is a file that contains only the frequencies nobody threw away along the transcoding pipeline.
In the end, I mean to say a transcoder in and by itself won't cause loss of data. You can convert to wav and back to a compressed format with no data loss, if you know what you're doing.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
hah!
Actually, the DRM can be bypassed by having winamp send the audio straight to a raw WAVE file. Winamp stopped this previously by preventing DRM files from using a direct write-to-wav plug-in. However, this hack uses an additional plug-in to bypass this.
The sad thing is that the Output Stacker has been pulled from the winamp website.
Users have been posting links to sites that still contain Output Stacker in the forums.
This recipe contains the step-by-step directions for the hack and active links to the plug-ins.
This is only true for lossless codecs. This won't work for any lossy codec. You can't go from MP3->WAV->MP3 for example without quality loss. Same with WMA, AAC, and pretty much all the popular lossy codecs. For more information, see this discussion on HydrogenAudio.