Sonos & iTunes - playing downloaded music

[Bench]

I want to purchase a Sonos system to play all my fave tracks throughout my house, but I'm worried about the protection iTunes puts on downloaded tracks - would the Sonos system be able to distribute these tracks throughout the house? If not, is there any way round this or is iTunes effectively stopping me from using a music distribution system?

Cheers

[kezza]

I'm afraid Sonos cannot play protected tracks that have been downloaded from the itunes music store. I believe the easiest method to get around it is to burn all the tracks to a cd and then back to the pc. This however could be a real pain if you have a lot of tracks.

Regards

[AMc]

You will loose you quality in the process of buring and then re-ripping unless you rip to lossless.

I refuse to use the iTunes store for that reason and buy CDs and rip to MP3 for cross platform compatibility.

If you want to stick with your iTunes DRM content then you will need to look at the Apple Airport Express. It acts as a wireless access point and has audio outputs to connect to a stereo or powered speakers. iTunes on the PC/Mac sees it as remote speakers and plays whatever it is playing through the iTunes over the remote output too.
You can get a USB remote that allows some control (forward and back in playlist play and pause) but you don't get a display or any complex control.

Other options are iPod(s) and docks in each room - copy the library onto them if it's small enough and access it locally.
Or small PCs or Mac minis in each room either using iTunes sharing to access the master library or with local copies of the library if you don't want to leave a main library computer on.
Or there are some bluetooth speaker extenders I've seen at the apple website which will do similar things to the Airport Express.