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Friday, 18 February 2005 |
Unlock Protected Music
ABC News
When you buy music from an online store, the copy-protection scheme may not
allow you to play it on your portable player or to manage your music library
with that player. The most commonly offered suggestion for unlocking these music
files is to burn a copy to an audio CD and then reimport it. We challenged the
conventional wisdom to see if there was a better way—and there simply isn't. If
your machine can handle rewritable discs, the process isn't even wasteful. Just
follow the directions in your media player or online store software to burn
tracks to a CD. The process is digital throughout, so you don't have to worry
about recording levels or codecs. Once the file is in CD format, you can then
reimport it into any other format.
For example, if you buy music from Napster, it's delivered to you in protected
WMA format. If you want to play it on your iPod, you have no choice but to burn
it to CD and import it as an MP3 file that your iPod can handle. Likewise,
iTunes delivers its music in a locked MP4 format that's keyed to your software.
How to Unlock Protected Music The inherent problem is that you'll never get a
better-quality recording than the source, and the fidelity of music from the
online stores often leaves something to be desired. The common
128-kilobit-per-second MP3 lacks dynamic range, and 128-Kbps WMA chops off the
highest frequencies and sacrifices midrange dynamics for bass dynamics. When you
move songs in these formats to CD, their sonic flaws move with them. When you
reimport the song using another compression scheme you can compound the problem,
because the other scheme might take away dynamic range, frequency response, or
both.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 16 March 2005 )
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