wma to mp3 conversion

[paddyofurniture]

I know someone here should be able to help me. I just signed up with Napster. The music is downloaded in .wma format. I wanted to standardize my music which is mostly mp3 so was going to convert these to mp3. I downloaded and installed the two codecs I was supposed to have and I still get the message wma' is encrypted which dMC is not able to decode. I tried another .wma converter which didn't even recognize the music files that I had downloaded. Can someone tell me what is going on?

Thanks,
Rob

[drspy00]

Re: wma to mp3 conversion

I could be wrong but I think files downloaded from music sites like napster that you have to pay for may be copy protected and cannot be converted. Like I said I could be wrong. there may be a way to override it also.

Its pretty stupid when you are actually paying for the files and doing the right thing and you get punished like this when you can download from other networks for free and be able to do what you like with the files. Thats the so called illegal way though.

I hope I could help. If someone knows the correct answer to this please correct me if im wrong.

[paddyofurniture]

Re: wma to mp3 conversion

I sort of suspect you might be right but would love to hear from someone who knows definitely. I'm an 'old' guy and most everything I download are oldies from the 60s-80s. And 99% of what I download I own on lp or cassette (but these days I have no turntable or decent cassette player so I choose to play them on my computer.) I never felt a bit of guilt for downloading things I owned a copy of (often multiple copies) from the free sites, however the free sites are drying up now (at least for a lot of the older music) so I have gone to Napster for some things I just can't find. It is going to make me exceedingly angry if I find that even though I have paid for the right to download the music I can't convert it to whatever format I choose.

[ChristinaS]

Re: wma to mp3 conversion

I sort of suspect you might be right but would love to hear from someone who knows definitely. I'm an 'old' guy and most everything I download are oldies from the 60s-80s. And 99% of what I download I own on lp or cassette (but these days I have no turntable or decent cassette player so I choose to play them on my computer.) I never felt a bit of guilt for downloading things I owned a copy of (often multiple copies) from the free sites, however the free sites are drying up now (at least for a lot of the older music) so I have gone to Napster for some things I just can't find. It is going to make me exceedingly angry if I find that even though I have paid for the right to download the music I can't convert it to whatever format I choose.

I saw a thread dealing with this just recently, but cannot really remember the outcome of it.
A workaround is to use Auxiliary Input and capture the audio of your wma file to another file type, while you are playing it in whatever player can play it.

[Spoons]

Re: wma to mp3 conversion

the music i have purchased off sanity music i use "Auxiliary Input" to convert it to whatever i want.

but i don't know of any software that actually cracks the protection.