Edit: Apparently, Engadget has found another solution, FairUse4WM,
which achieves the same objectives without needing to playback the file.

Note:
This article assumes you have paid for music
that you now wish to play in a non-compatible media player.
It should not be construed to condone file trading and/or copyright infringement.

Ruckus will be coming to Penn in the Fall.

The only problem is that the files are DRM’d .wma or .wmv files,
which willl not be playable by iPods or by any mp3 player
lacking Microsoft’s imprimatur (wait for the irony) “Plays for Sure”.

Fortunately, there are ways to get the music you paid for
onto the iPod or other mp3 player you paid for -
the most popular being recording software,
as discussed in the article below…..

Craig Crossman column for 6/21/2004

CAPTURE ANY SOUND YOUR COMPUTER MAKES

We like to think that we are in control of our own computers
but we really aren’t. We see things on our screen but
we can’t save or print them.

And there are sounds our computers make that we can’t save
so that we can play them back at another time or burn them to a CD.
But fortunately for us, there are some products out there
that give us back at least some of that control.

Most of us are familiar with screen capture utilities that let us take “snapshots” of the entire or any portion of the screen
and either save them to disk or send the image to a printer.

What you may not be so familiar with are two software utilities
that let you do the same basic thing with sound.

Anyone who uses their computers to play live audio streams
using Real One, Windows Media Player and other similar products
knows that there is no easy way to capture the live audio stream
and save it to disk.

In fact, there are many applications that generate some kind of sound
with no facility to capture the audio. Up until recently, the only way to capture the audio was to literally plug in some kind of audio recording device into the speaker outputs.

So let me tell you about two capture programs,
one for the Macintosh, the other for Windows.

Both basically do the same thing.

They let you capture any audio your computer generates
and save it to disk.

Technorati Tags: ruckus, drm, wma, wmv, mp3, itunes, ipod, plays for sure