Remove DRM from .WMA ?

[mips]

My friends ripped a whole bunch of their original cds to their pc. Not being very pc literate they ripped them to WMA which windows gladly encoded with DRM.

Their PC died requiring a OS reinstall (which I did) only later to realise they can no longer play their music. They live quite far away so they put the WMA files on a few DVD's and posted them to me.

How can I remover the DRM crap from these files for them ?
(They are not in the mood to re-rip the cds & some of the cds have also been damaged making them unreadable.)

[hessiess]

i dont think you can, rip cd's into a format without drm! wma is rubbish!

[Andrewie]

torrents.....

http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=108497

and you can try that site, they have some program (runs on windows :()

[mips]

torrents.....

http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=108497

and you can try that site, they have some program (runs on windows :()

Thanks, I will have a look.

[juxtaposed]

torrents.....

http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=108497

and you can try that site, they have some program (runs on windows :()

Yay for torrents, but that site is only a program that plays it and records it - which is like transcoding, and won't be very good quality (especially since WMA is optimized for low bitrates only).

[mips]

Yay for torrents, but that site is only a program that plays it and records it - which is like transcoding, and won't be very good quality (especially since WMA is optimized for low bitrates only).

Well it says tunebites can import drm protected wma files and save them as unprotected mp3s etc.

[juxtaposed]

Well it says tunebites can import drm protected wma files and save them as unprotected mp3s etc.

Converting from one lossy format to another will decrease the quality even more.

FLAC - MP3 > FLAC - WMA - MP3

[mips]

Converting from one lossy format to another will decrease the quality even more.

FLAC - MP3 > FLAC - WMA - MP3

I'm aware of that but they will be more than happy as I've heard some of the stuff on their pc. If it was for myself I would have an issue with it.

[juxtaposed]

I'm aware of that but they will be more than happy as I've heard some of the stuff on their pc. If it was for myself I would have an issue with it.

Oh, ok, I guess that program would be fine for them then.

Just make sure they don't transcode it any more then that - past that, even if you don't know about transcoding and bad quality, they'll probably notice it.

[Polygon]

or if you want no quality loss at all, the best way is to burn it as an audio cd (not data or mp3!) and then re-rip it using FLAC "best", that way you get exactly what the file was when you ripped it to the cd, but its considerably bigger then a mp3 however.

[stmiller]

To test this and see audio information loss visually, you can use a program like this:

http://www.baudline.com/

There is significant information loss in lossy codecs. It's quite terrifying to see.

[thepocketdrummer]

I use WMAconvert (http://www.fidex.biz/english/index.php) to remove it. It's legal and you can use it for Urge, iTunes, etc.

Only problem, I don't think it works with linux.

[edit]I haven't tried to test it out using wine. You may want to check up on it to see if it's possible

[mips]

Thanks for the replies so far, much appreciated. Keep em coming.

PS I have a small windows partition so if it is a windows only solution I can still try it out.

[juxtaposed]

or if you want no quality loss at all, the best way is to burn it as an audio cd (not data or mp3!) and then re-rip it using FLAC "best", that way you get exactly what the file was when you ripped it to the cd, but its considerably bigger then a mp3 however.

But in the end, you would have a big file, but with the quality of wma lossy. And you've wasted a CD.

If someone wants to do that so bad, use one of those converters, but set it to do flac instead.


To test this and see audio information loss visually, you can use a program like this:

To know the quality of a music file you should listen to it, not look at it.

If a music file looks horrible, but sounds great, then... Listen to it :P

Though it is horrible looking at MP3 cutting off everything above 16Khz.

[ricardofilipemoreira]

Hi! Just one thing, to remove DRM from files, does the software need the licenses to be installed or it just cracks the WMA files?:popcorn:

[kevdog]

Are monkey's audio format files smaller than FLAC? Always wondered this as both are lossless formats. I always thought FLAC compression was about 2:1.