Dealing With DRM

I was going to copy my Madonna tunes to my iPod when I ran into a problem. (Don’t laugh, you know you love a little Madonna every now and then. Immaculate Collection. A classic.) Well, the first problem, of course, is that iTunes can’t convert DRM-protected files to import them into your iTunes library. So, the first thing that had to be done was burn a CD with the DRM-protected WMA files.

However, after I loaded the burn list into Windows Media Player, I got a message upon starting the burn that "an error occurred." Oh, thank you! Can you be more specific please? I’m prompted to right-click on the song, go to Properties, then the license tab. Hmmm. License tab is blank. That could be a problem. I double-click the song to try to play it and a window pops up saying that Windows Media Player cannot find the license for this file and if I don’t have one ("You thief!" it implies), I could purchase one now. Alternately, I can log in to my Buy.com account to acquire the license. Well, I don’t know what happened over at Buy.com from a year ago to now because I’ve been on the same PC, the same Windows installation, etc. the whole time, but apparently my licenses went MIA. 

I googled my Gmail and found my receipt, and thankfully, what email address I had used a year ago to purchase the darn tunes. I entered that email address and password to my Buy.com account in the blanks and clicked "login." Bingo. License acquired. And then you know what I had to do? I had to type in that email address, password, and click "login" for EACH and EVERY song on that blessed CD! My friends, that is SEVENTEEN songs. Tedious.

Look, I’m all for purchasing music legally, but if I’ve said it once…IT SHOULD NOT BE THIS DIFFICULT. For me, sure, I managed to only waste a few minutes of my time typing logins and passwords…but what about your average user? DRM really expects people to jump through hoops just to have access to bought-and-paid-for music, doesn’t it? All the online retailers of tunes need to get together, decide on one standard, support it in their media players, support it in their portable players, and basically get over themselves and how superior their precious proprietary way of doing things is.

There, I feel better now. My affiliate link to Buy.com has been removed. And Madonna finally made it the iPod. Whew.