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[Rob L]

I didn't think I'd ever really buy into DRM, but Napster seems to suit me at the moment. My CD collection was getting a bit silly, so I thought I'd give Napster a go, and I seem to be sticking with it.

I've got a "plays for sure" portable player for handling Napster when I'm out and about, but my round-the-house system wasn't going to cope. I had networked media players that could play MP3 and WMA, but not WMA with DRM.

At first, I tried the Logitech wireless music system, which was SO close, but I just couldn't get it to maintain the single and it just kept breaking up.

So I've switch to a Pinnacle/Roku Soundbridge. And it looks like it's probably the answer.

Of course, it works with the UPnP server in MC. And it can play back the Napster stuff. Unfortunately, though, there are apparently only two ways to get it to play the Napster/WMA DRM stuff: use Windows Media Connect (now part of Windows Media Player 11) or use MusicMatch, which seemingly somehow takes advantage of WMC.

I've just done a search of the forums, and there are people who've in the past mentioned that they couldn't get Napster/WMA DRM working with MC's UPnP server, and indeed it just isn't possible currently.

But I don't think it can be that far off, technically.

Is there any work going on to look at this?

It really would be great if it could be added - at the moment, I can choose to connect to the MC server and get the advantage of the organisational structure that I've chosen within MC, but if I want to play Napster tracks, I have to connect to the Windows Media Connect 'library', and then it all gets much messier... 

There's some documentation on MSDN here that covers it all off:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa456343.aspx

but I don't know if it's enough to help.

Obviously MC is currently doing something with WMA DRM, but that might not be anything particularly sophisticated, I've no idea. I guess Microsoft might be less keen to expose the UPnP DRM stuff, on the grounds that that then is a differentiator for their server product, but I'm not sure that's true.

Any chance of this getting on the 'to do' list for MC?

[John Gateley]

Hi Rob,

I don't remember at the moment, but I think we may be prohibited from sending protected WMA files via UPnP.

I will be looking at Windows Connect sometime soon for the Xbox, it might help here too. I've added this thread to my list of things to do.

Thanks for the input,

j