Get rid of Microsoft’s sneaky DRM when ripping CD’s in WMP
I ran into a problem today that many people may not know about. Figured I would share with you all.
A friend of mine bought a pretty inexpensive MP3 player. It looked like a knockoff of an iPod Nano. His problem was that he transfered a bunch a music from his PC to the MP3 player and none of the files would play. He had been dealing with it for a week or so and happened to ask me about it.
I fiddled around with it for a few minutes and the problem jumped out at me. The music that was transfered to the device was all copy protected, and the MP3 player didn’t support any type of copy protection.
How did the music get copy protected? They were his CD’s, He ripped them himself using Windows Media Player….Oh wait a minute. Windows Media Player is the culprit.
Inconspicuously hidden within the menu’s of Windows Media Player, there is a little setting that you want to make sure is UNCHECKED.
Get rid of Microsofts sneaky DRM copy protection when ripping CD’s in Windows Media Player
In Vista, when you right click the menu bar in Windows Media Player to bring up the menu…go to tools > options. Then click on the "rip music" tab. About half way down that box is a option to "copy protect music". If it is checked….uncheck it.
In Windows XP, you can get to that option almost the same way…a little different….but basically the same.
If that option is checked, it will add DRM to any music file you rip to your hard drive. And that was his problem.
Many MP3 players support that DRM or copy protection so its not a big deal, but sometimes when you go the budget route, you miss out on some of those features.
DRM is already enough of a pain when it is forced on you, you sure don’t want to add it yourself.
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June 6th, 2007 at 6:12 pm
OMG OMG OMG!!!!!! that happened to me!!!!! except that im too duhhh to get it and i just throw that sucking player into my no use stupid things basket!!!!!
June 9th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
This is a really good tip. Like 99% of the human race, I hate having my music crippled by DRM. I’m at least a year out from upgrading to Vista anyways.
June 10th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
This “feature” is also in Windows XP, actually the first time I ran into this problem was on an XP machine.
Just a reminder, this doesn’t remove the drm from music you buy from an online store, it only keep you from unknowingly adding copy protection to music your ripping yourself from your own music CD’s
June 10th, 2007 at 11:02 pm
Thanks for the heads-up, Mate. Cheers!
July 5th, 2007 at 6:24 am
hi….sweet - with this tip you can put to use immediately. i think most of them don’t know this problem.This is a really good tip!!!
July 2nd, 2008 at 9:33 am
Thank You! I had the same problem a few months back, I thought my JNC player was up to crap. I was even thinking about giving it away to a poor person. Sweet, thanks for the tip.