which_chick | (no subject)

Not that this is news, but I really hate the way that the law-abiding people get fucked with DRM. Case in point: Theron somehow got a huge pile of .wma music. I'm not sure if he ripped them from CD and let things default to .wma because that's what Windows picks automatically or if he downloaded them (for money) from somewhere like Napster. I'm damn sure he didn't steal the files because nobody, but nobody, pirates .wma files as .wma files. These things were probably legitimately acquired once upon a time. He had them on his antique Win98 computer, which died here recently. Like a good soldier, though, he had a backup. He had burned the .wma files directly to a CD because "you can get more of them on there that way". Huzzah.

No, of course it's not all good. If it were all good, I would not be whining about it at one in the fucking morning.

He feels that he has a legitimate claim to this music. Fine. I agree with him. He feels that my music is greymarket at best (which is largely true) and does not approve of either my music or how I get it. Nobody says he has to. My music is my business.

The thing is, he's the one "doing the right thing" according to the RIAA and according to Microsoft and so forth. He's one of the good guys. All of his legitimately acquired .wma music, though, none of it will play in Ubuntu. (It might if I fucked around a bit but I don't feel that I should *have* to fuck around with it.) It wouldn't play in XP, either, until I begged Msft for a license the which it gave me grudgingly and only so long as I spoke to it with the Approved Big Blue E Browser. (Fucking Msft. They are gunning for the day when the entire internet is visible in Firefox except for www.microsoft.com et al.)

There exist softwares that claim to unDRM .wma files but as yet I can't cobble together a set of solutions that works with the key I have. I can play the files on my personal crappy xp laptop but I can't *do* anything else with them at the moment because I don't have a CD burner on that box. If I had a CD burner, I could burn the shit to audio CDs and rerip it. It would take a metric ton of CDs but it would work. (I may have to look into attaching my external burn drive to the shitty laptop. That's a project for tomorrow, though.)

I can drop thirty bucks on a quasi-legal piece of software to strip the DRM. Sound quality is a little tinny, but what the hell. That might work, too.

I can spend some quality time on the torrents trying to find the artist/album combinations to allow me to PRETEND that I have fixed the problem. While not entirely ethical, this would work... assuming I can find the stuff. Some of it is vintage.

I'm not out of ideas yet, but the thing here is that I can't get the fucking music that he carefully backed up off of his fucking CD into his new (ubuntu Ibex) computer and from there onto his kid's fucking mp3 player.

All the stuff I've stolen over the years, though, all of *that* stuff works just great. No problems.

My Three Jolly Luck Takeaway lesson for this venture into DRM: The correct, trouble-free way to get music that actually works *all the time* is to steal it in the first place. Failing that, buy hard-copy CDs and rip them to a format like .mp3 so that you can later do whatever you like with the files. You can also buy DRM-free .mp3 tracks from places like amazon.com and have those. (If you just want a single track (like Beyonce's "Single Ladies", the amazon.com option is stellar.)

DRM: For suckers. Will eventually prevent you from doing something you want to do with your music. Theron never figured he'd need or want to put music on an mp3 player. He was wrong about that.