Windows DRM and MCE

[Dave_M]

I've bought quite a few albums from MSN-Music and these are stored on my main server. They play OK from there.

From any other machine in the house I get a message saying that I can only play them if I transfer the digital rights licence to the local machine - and I can only do that a limited number of times, after which the track will only be playable on the last machine it was accessed on .


Does anybody out there who has MCE know if this issue still exists with that? Ideally I'd want to be able to store all music in a central place and then play it in any room I liked - and since most rooms have an XP Pro machine on hand then ideally I'd like to play things through Media Player or similar.

[KraGorn]

Welcome to the wonderful world of WMA .. the RIAA want you to purchase a copy for every machine you want to play it on and M$ happily oblige.

Whether the fabled 'MCE Extender' technology will help with this I don't know, but in my limited experience with MCE the base product doesn't do anything differently.

[hermanmunster]

Media Centre music playback is based on good ol media player so everything you are suffering now remains the same

[Dave_M]

So it looks like I need Media Centre Extenders to get the music to other rooms ...

[samsdad]

Or you could download Blaze Media Pro and remove the DRM

Blaze Media Pro

[Dave_M]

I've found another solution which is faster than real-time recording ...

When you get the WMAs you're allowed to burn them to CD a number of times. If you do this then you can just rip the CD into whatever format you like.

I've tried this burning the CD using Windows Media Player 10 and then ripping using Easy CD-DA Extractor to rip to MP3s and these now play anywhere. Of course I have to make sure I don't copy them outside my home network as this would breach the rights I have.

One further strange thing I've found about DRM is that on WinXP the rights are tied to the user account they were originally granted to - so my wife logs on and buys some music, it's there on my PC but when I log on (seperate account as I have admin rights and she doesn't), then I can't play it! Is this copyright control gone crazy or what ?! People will always want to circumvent right management while it stops you from doing things that are patently sensible and could never be construed as breach of copyright.

[samsdad]

I can't use that method due to Napster not recognising my MP3 unit. So because of this I have to pay an additional 79p everytime I want to burn to CD or copy to my 'unrecognised' MP3 player.

I have a PSP so the only way round it is real time recording and popping it on to my PSP. It's crazy as I pay £14.95 per month for the privelage of not having to pay the extra 79p per track I burn/transfer!

As for the rights being tied to one users account, the same stupid idea applies to our i-Pod account, I log on and it's fine, the account pops up with Purchase history, then the missus tries on her log on and it wipes the Library clean because the account it linked to my log on

[KraGorn]

Sadly, people are paying for this crippled material so those selling it will continue foisting it on customers.

Stop buying it and maybe they'll come up with something more acceptable.

[Stiggy]

I'm trying to import Windows Media Audio material from my old PC to my new MCE machine, and I'm running into all sorts of errors which seem to be DRM related.

In the past, I'm sure if just clicked on files moved from one computer to another, it would prompt me for a user name and password. This time I get weird errors about license backups.

Am I missing something here, or has the process changed in MCE?