I have 30 gigabytes of music that are .wma. It would be impossible to get all of the cds and rip them again since they have been borrowed and this music took a long time to get all of it. Some of the music can be played using w32codec with xine and mplayer, but other songs have DRM. Can I convert it to mp3? I have tried audacity in Linux. That did not work. If I copied the music to a computer with Windows, could I convert it, and copy it back to Linux? If Audacity could successfully convert the music, each song has to be converted individually. That would take a long time with 30 gb of music.

DRM prevents transcoding - that's the whole idea of it! You can convert unprotected WMAs okay, but you'll lose audio quality in doing so.

Well, I just solved my problem with wma and drm. rm removed 14 gigabytes of compressed drm music. I'm going to get all the music again this time using ogg vorbis and mp3.

ogg vorbis is a much better technology anyway than mp3 and crappy wma.

It was a pain for me to re-rip 4 gigs of music to .ogg so I don't envy you in your task.

private codec is never good for any consumer. the only people it protects are the makers of the codec and the product, not even the artists.

Sorry I didn't see this earlier... hopefully you have them backed up, because if you obtain your MP3's legitimatley, that would probably cost a fortune.

I fought this problem for quite some time. I'm presuming since you had DRM files, you have access to some form of Windows...

http://www.tunebite.com

Basically, you move your DRM protected files into the tunebite interface, it then plays them, and as it plays, records it back onto your PC in whatever format you choose. Only thing that sucks, your PC must not have any other sound events going.. (IMs, etc..) or it will come up in the new song. But you can drag multiple files into the interface, turn your speakers off, and let it do the work while you sleep.(thats what I did with about 4gigs worth of DRMs). When your done, you'll have the DRM, and the MP3 on your PC. I burned the MP3's to a CD, and put them in my music folder under Xandros.

When I first tried it, I thought there would be a loss in the quality of the of the music, but it is still high quality, and any loss is not noticeable.

Good luck

IGF

Now I don't support DRM and such, but it's things like this that make me appreciate the music producer's position on the matter.

Part of me understands that you probably wouldn't purchase this music, but another part of me believes that you don't deserve to enjoy the music either. Of course that's a gut reaction - you could very well grow up to be a great supporter of music artists, in part due to your exposure when you're young.

Just come across this thread, and although it's now of some age, it deserves to be resurrected.

I say this for the following reason:-

My son, (a windoze user) has legitimately bought CDs of some of his favourite artists from our local record store, and has then copied them to his PC so he can listen to them when he is on the net etc. Anyway, I got for him an MP3 player which also handles WMA files. So he's gone to transfer some of his music to his player, which went OK until he tried to play them, when he was surprised to find that they had become protected by MS DRM obviously during either the origional copy to his PC, or subsequently being played by Windows media Player. So, how do I convert these files using Linux back to something he can play on his MP3 Player, or has he got to go through the whole rigmarole of re-burning them to a useable format.
Also, what are peoples thoughts on whether MS has a legal right to do this. After all, the CD's belong to my son, he has paid for them, so presumabely the artists have received their royalties, so how do MS get away with dictating what he can do with the content once it is on his PC, which after all is not theirs anyway (neither the PC or the music)

Don't use Windows Media Player to encode music. If you want mp3s, use the lame encoder. You can use Grip with lame in Linux. I use oggenc with Grip in Linux to Rip and encode music to ogg vorbis from CDs, and it does a very good job and my music does not have drm when it is finished. I don't agree with what MS did to your son's music. If you really don't want to re rip all the music again and don't mind losing some of the quality, then you can do what IndyGunFreak suggested and use this software on your son's windows computer. http://www.tunebite.com/

So is there a version of lame for windows with a nice gui frontend? (he is a teenager after all) and only knows winderz!!!!!

It is typical Microsoft policy. Their idea is that you might own the plastic of which the CD is made of, but not the contents. That is in their EULA as well, you don't own the software, it is not yours, you have the right to use it.

They can't help: this is their view on the world, hence they treat other contents the same way.

jlinkels

I used to use CDex in Windows: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cdexos/
It can be set up to use any encoder (lame, vorbis, etc) and I believe it comes with lame. If not, it's easy to install lame too.
Of course I think GRip is nicer to work with