ML Starkey's Weblog: Service with a smile!
Providing Technical Support to Sun's customers and other topics

I bought my daughter a SanDisk MP3 player for Christmas. It's a 256K (double the capacity of my iRiver, so I'm a bit jealous) and it was a good deal at Circuit City. It came with a "Digital Music Essentials Pack" that included a blank CD, 10 free downloads from MusicNow (which still required a credit card to obtain, but that's another rant) and a few other items.

So far so good, but since the MusicNow service requires Windows Media Player, I suspected that the music would be DRM'd and I was right. She picked out one song and I downloaded it and copied it to tbe player using Windows Explorer (the file management tool). It copied, but the player wouldn't play it. So we copied the music to the player using the Windows Media Player tool, and that worked.

Now, I have no intention of continuing this MusicNow service after the 10 downloads are done and I really don't want to be forced into using Windows Media Player for all eternity. Now I'm hunting for ways to convert the legally purchased digitally locked music to mp3. A quick google brought me to the site of Zittware.com, which has a tool to allow you to open your legally purchased DRM music, but you can't do a direct convert. You have to open the music, burn it to CD, then you can rip the burned tracks back to mp3. Alot of hoops to jump through, if I can't find anything less kludgy.

What an annoyance. My older iRiver, which only understands mp3, doesn't put me through this. I can understand wanting to preserve legal rights, but there should be a better way.