Apple and others are posturing that the purchase of music online (with DRM) is contributing to the regeneration of the music industry.

I'm not aware of any digital music servers in the custom installers channel that can handle DRM files.

Are your customers asking for the ability to include their iTunes or other DRM music in their playlists? What are you saying?

Thanks,

Norton

Yes, they are asking. I'm telling them no, not yet. Music server sales have hit the wall for me.

?? Hit the wall = stalled/stopped? What are people buying?

I-Pods, mainly. And some people are using their pc's to act as a music server.

I am having issues with one client who uses his main computer to store his music. Some of the music has DRM protection. When we try play that music through his network to say, the kitchen, there is an issue as media player 9 or 10 thinks the music is being copied and prompts for the client to pay for the licence. Does anyone know how to get around this.

Yes! Buy a PC with Home Media Center Installed. Then use Media Center Extenders. Unfortunately you can't even buy Windows Home Media Center Edition by itself, and install on your own PC!!!

Sometimes Microsoft is a real PITA! I take that back... Microsoft is always a PITA!!!

The best way to handle all this is to buy all music on CD's. No worry about losing your Digital Rights Files, you can rip them to almost anything. The CD is still king.

Digital Rights Management is a neat idea... but it isn't ready for the mass market. Problem is, that hasn't stopped the music and software industry from implementing lots of incompatible flavors of DRM. Until the industry straightens this out, or I run acrosss a good program that hacks DRM, I'll buy all my music as a physically delivered entity.

So, does anyone know of a good program that hacks any or all of the DRM schemes?

SUre you can.....
[Link: newegg.com]

[Link: zipzoomfly.com]

Thats a sad day when the ipod is the main source of an audio system. I am still selling music servers, but I am also integrating computers and ipods in the same systems. Go figure.

I don't know of any one program that will hack all DRM schemes, but there are certainly programs that will hack each one of them. Apple recently changed their DRM scheme and the same guy that cracked it the first time had it re-cracked in a day. Google search for PyMusique if you want, but I think they got knocked off line.

The wackiest solutions to handling DRM'ed files are the new iPod docking stations. From a system architecture point of view, this is backwards. Now the system is there to serve the iPod. The iPod should be there to serve the system. The iPod should find the household content server and allow you to take some of it with you. However we have become coo-coo for iPods, and more power to Apple for thinking of it first.

But all these DRM laden files are for the birds. The lowest common denomiator in digital music is the MP3 file. From the consumer's point of view, there should be no need for another file format. All this other crap is only being pimped by the distributors of the music. If all your music was stored as MP3s, you can vertically go anywhere - iPod, ReQuest, WinMCE, etc, etc. My entire library is stored as high quality variable bit rate MP3s, including the last stupid CD I bought, "Kings of Leon", that had some dumb Suncomm copy protection on it. Luckily my virus protection stopped it. I had it ripped down to MP3s in about 15 min. Really dumb.

The long term problem with device and/or OS specific DRM media is that you are married to it. Unless Apple comes up with a world domination plan for consumer elcetronics and content distribution, everyone using iTunes is painting themselves into a corner.

Ok... If you want to break the licensing agreement you can. But the software comes with a Microsoft System Builder License agreement.

Basically, if you are not installing a new motherboard or video card, you are breaking the license agreement. Note that this license agreement is in place because, as I understand from some friends directly involved in business in this area, Microsoft is not providing support for this software, this is getting pushed into the resellers lap.

THose are OEM licenses. Very leagle and very common. Yes. You do need to buy a piece of hardware WITH the OEM software. But technically, a $5.00 NIC card satifies microsofts requirements.

Yes... There is no "Microsoft" supplied tech support..... Boo Hoo..... Have you ever tried talking to those people? Its bad enough when I have to talk to a real person to reactivate a copy of Windows..

You get better Tech support by Searching Microsofts Knowledge Base and other WIndows forums on the web. THats all these tech support guys at Microsoft are doing when you talk to them....

This is not only so true, but isn't it exactly what the RIAA would like us all to be saying? Trouble is, then they don't want us to make our own copies of it!

Hey, RIAA : WE ARE SAYING, GO OUT AND BUY CDs. Now that we have our CDs, and our quality sound, we are going to make copies for personal use, so go away and shut up!