Removing napster copyright (.wma files)
 

So my friend downloaded stuff from napster, he's trying to convert it to wav, and in almost every program it shows that it's protected and you must install napster to play it. Does anyone know anything on how I can remove this and encode to wav / mp3?

Tell him to download non-protected stuff from popular P2P networks instead. Circumventing the DRM protection is illegal just as well, so he obviously doesn't have any moral issues with pirating anyway.

Apart from that, the only way to actually remove DRM-protected files is to manually re-record them on the computer with an appropriate software and a soundcard supporting simultaneous playback and recording. Needless to say, it's simply too much of a fuss.

Wrong, there are tools that can strip off the encryption from a WMA file if the user has the license data on his machine. This only works for the current version of WMA (version 2) but not for the old one. Needless to say: the stripping process if lossless, so you won't get reencoding artifacts.

The point is, it's much more convenient to just pirate mp3 (or other non-protected) versions of the music, especially since moral issues aren't of any concern here.

Also, could you link to that tool?

But that was not the question here. The question was if it was possible to remove the copy protection from WMA files. And the answer is yes if some conditions are given.
And don't talk about morals here. As I already said you can only decode the file if you own the license for the file. Without the license the file is not readable and you would need brute-force decryption to get your data (and with the current keylength this could take years). So DRM stripping is only available to you if you already legally own the file. And if I own the file and want to play it on say my standalone in my opinion I have the right to strip off DRM to get the file playing in my standalone.

No, sry - I won't give any links here, but you can quickly find a lot of material on google. Probably you will only find sourcecode that you've to compile yourself, a huge obstacle for the normal user. There is also another problem that is depending on security bugfixes provided by ms that render the application non-operational - so you've to use a virtual machine to get this working.

Does this sound complicated? Yes and indeed, it is. But I didn't say it was easy, only that is was technically possible.

@ LiquidAcid

I was gonna say, if you know of a *good* way to circumvent WMA DRM, you should be all over Doom9... ;)

But seriously, Rock is right. Don't try to break WMA DRM. It is a long, hard and ugly road. Just re-download via Limewire of torrents. It's not hard to get ahold of anything these days.

lol, why not?

I have my reasons galen and the german law concerning the circumvention of copy protections is one of them. I'm a bit paranoid about this topic and I'm not going to change that (partly because of some events involving a fellow student and the police...)

Seriously, if you're that paranoid, you shouldn't hang out at Gamingforce.

We're already quite off-topic, so why not end this discussion here. I think I can decide myself in which boards I hang out and how much information I provide there. I'm only cautious.

Yea, because giving out links to tools is illegal in Germany :(

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/28/1518205

That might help. Google for "FairUse4WM" and see if it suits your needs.

It's possible to convert Napster DRM-audio to unprotected formats by SoundTaxi. However it converts only purchased songs and your subscription should be active ;)