Club CDFreaks - Knowledge is Power - View Single Post - How to burn or crack protected WMA files?

ZeroSignal · 15-02-2005

catbus: that info is from earlier in this thread!
--
There is someone useful information in this thread, but also a lot of misunderstandings and bad advice. Here's my experience.

I signed with Napster To Go. I'm using the UK version, but I'm sure this would work for other Napster countries.

I use Windows 2000, so I have Windows Media Player 9 installed.

I installed the latest version of Winamp (5.08), which seems to be of the few media players which support DRM WMAs (dbPowerAmp doesn't). You need the 'Full' Winamp, the 'Lite' version doesn't support WMA.

I downloaded a few tracks from Napster. I was able to play these in Winamp, although often I got an error saying 'Opening failed'. If I keep trying it works eventually.

The first thing I tried was to use Winamp's built-in diskwriter plug-in. But when I tried to play the tracks, Winamp just said 'Opening failed' for every one of them.

I read a tip which said to use to use Winamp's Directsound output plug-in instead of the waveOut plug-in, but this did not work.

I then tried using Dietmar's Output Stacker as described above.

Winamp -> Output Stacker - waveOut plug-in + diskwriter plug-in

It worked! However, the WAV files aren't really very practical so I wanted to have MP3s instead.

I then though... do I really need Output Stacker? I replaced it with LAME MP3 encoder plug-in (http://out-lame.sourceforge.net/).

It worked!

Conclusion: Winamp makes a basic attempt to stop you capturing the audio stream to disk. However it only watches for the diskwriter plug-in. If you use any other plug-in, it send the audio stream directly to it. No-one has cracked the DRM for the WMA files used by Napster (yet). By re-encoding the the WMA to MP3 or another format, there will be a slightly loss in quality. It really is quite suprising that Microsoft licensed DRM playback to Nullsoft, since Winamp is a very 'hacker-oriented' player.

15-02-2005	#125 (permalink)
ZeroSignal CD Freaks Rookie Join Date: Feb 2005 Posts: 48	Re: How to burn or crack protected WMA files? catbus: that info is from earlier in this thread! -- There is someone useful information in this thread, but also a lot of misunderstandings and bad advice. Here's my experience. I signed with Napster To Go. I'm using the UK version, but I'm sure this would work for other Napster countries. I use Windows 2000, so I have Windows Media Player 9 installed. I installed the latest version of Winamp (5.08), which seems to be of the few media players which support DRM WMAs (dbPowerAmp doesn't). You need the 'Full' Winamp, the 'Lite' version doesn't support WMA. I downloaded a few tracks from Napster. I was able to play these in Winamp, although often I got an error saying 'Opening failed'. If I keep trying it works eventually. The first thing I tried was to use Winamp's built-in diskwriter plug-in. But when I tried to play the tracks, Winamp just said 'Opening failed' for every one of them. I read a tip which said to use to use Winamp's Directsound output plug-in instead of the waveOut plug-in, but this did not work. I then tried using Dietmar's Output Stacker as described above. Winamp -> Output Stacker - waveOut plug-in + diskwriter plug-in It worked! However, the WAV files aren't really very practical so I wanted to have MP3s instead. I then though... do I really need Output Stacker? I replaced it with LAME MP3 encoder plug-in (http://out-lame.sourceforge.net/). It worked! Conclusion: Winamp makes a basic attempt to stop you capturing the audio stream to disk. However it only watches for the diskwriter plug-in. If you use any other plug-in, it send the audio stream directly to it. No-one has cracked the DRM for the WMA files used by Napster (yet). By re-encoding the the WMA to MP3 or another format, there will be a slightly loss in quality. It really is quite suprising that Microsoft licensed DRM playback to Nullsoft, since Winamp is a very 'hacker-oriented' player.