Hi there,
I've been a beta tester for and am now a paying user of Napster's new 2.0 (legal) music service. For $10 a month, their Premium all-you-can-listen-to membership is pretty nifty.
But alas, both free (Premium) and paid (regular) downloads are each wrapped in annoying WMA DRM
.
On the positive side, MC9 is the ONLY program I've found which is able to convert paid Napster downloads to other (and thankfully DRM-less) formats, allowing me to listen to these songs on an old MP3-only portable, and so on. This doesn't breach any ethical boundaries IMHO, because I've paid for these tracks, and should be able to do what I wish with them (short of stupid stuff like posting them on KaZaA, obviously).
Unfortunately, MC9 can pretty much only
play the
free Napster downloads. In a way, this is understandable, since being able to re-save them would be a major security breach of standard WMA DRM. However, one of the major bummers as a side effect is that I can't run the ANALYZE AUDIO feature on these tracks, which means -- from what I understand -- that I can't have a nice consistent volume level on playlists which contain free Napster tracks, right?
Is there any way around this? I would think that as long as I'm not trying to get around Napster's main restrictions (sending the track to a portable or burning it), I should be able to listen to the tracks in any way I please on my computer, and auto-leveling is a part of that (not to mention the helpfulness of having BPM determined for me automatically and so on).
Your thoughts?
Author
Topic: Challenges (and successes) with regards to Napster's DRM (Read 720 times)