Cracking Napster's Protected WMA Files

Hey all. My college provides Napster for free to all us students, meaning we can download all the free music we want, provided it's on Napster, and everything's all legizzle (legal) so it's a'ight. The files are in .wma format, which you can't put on an Ipod. No problem, I thought, I'll just use Itunes to convert them. Then Itunes tosses back a message at me saying that the files are in the "protected WMA format," ergo it cannot convert them. AAAAH FUCKSTERS. So I go to Napster to see if I can resolve this legally--I recalled reading that if you pay them a bit extra, they'll let you put your files onto a portable mp3 player. But Ipod is not on the list of compatible players. So I've got a bunch of music on my computer that I can't put on my Ipod and it makes me sad. So, does anyone know of a program or patch that can crack the encoding on these files so that I can convert them into a format acceptable to my Ipod?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

You can try FairUse4WM, that might do the trick.

Otherwise, there's the trusty ol' analog hole. Go to Radio Shack and get yourself a 1/8" male to 1/8" male stereo cable. Plug one end into your line-out port (on your sound card) and the other end into your line-in port. Start up a sound recording application (Audacity works nicely for this) and begin recording. Then open your media player and start playing the song. Your recording software should log the "incoming" (outgoing) audio from your media player and write it out to disk.

There are two disadvantages to this method:
1. You will lose some quality going from digital to analog back to digital.
2. You will lose more quality recompressing to MP3 from a WAV that was generated from an already-lossily-compressed WMA.
3. You must do this all in real-time. This means a 4-minute 30-second song will take 4 minutes and 30 seconds to record. That's not counting time to trim off silence in Audacity and save as MP3.

However, there is NO WAY to prevent this from being done, no DRM in the world can stop it, so it's basically your guaranteed failsafe fallback method.

Try FairUse4WM first. Then if that fails go to the line-out line-in method.

Oh, and...

Quote:

legizzle

And also

Quote:

a'ight

Please speak real English. The linguistic dissonance going from "legizzle" to "ergo" just makes my brain make little sicky noises.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by CelticWhisper

Please speak real English. The linguistic dissonance going from "legizzle" to "ergo" just makes my brain make little sicky noises.

Hey, man, don't be hating. I grew up on the west side, homey G. I have grillz. And hoes in different area codes. So don't be messing, shorty. I'm straight up balling.

But, yeah, FairUse4wm looks good. Thanxz0rz!

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.