How to Remove DRM from WMA – Is it Legal and Worth the Effort?

Technically, it’s illegal to remove DRM from WMA protected music. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is part of the music industry’s effort to curb piracy. There are legitimate reasons for removing it, but first understand DRM can not be removed from file sharing network downloads. Most tracks can be legally copied 3 to 5 times, and this has been exceeded long before they appear on a peer-to-peer network. You must have either purchased the music or have unrestricted free music downloads.

There is no easy way to remove DRM, but it can be removed with some effort and know-how. The best advice is to only download music in the format you need, and that you have the right to copy to an mp3 player, CD or other device. It’s also important to determine that the player will recognize and play the DRM protected WMA track.

What if I Really Like the songs and Want to convert them?

Let’s say you’ve already downloaded music and need to convert to another audio codec. The common conversion method is to burn the tracks on a CD, then rip them in the desired codec’s format. Even this requires special ripping software and numerous steps because the DRM is still embedded in the tracks. And because codecs like WMA, mp3, OGG, AAC, etc. are lossy formats, the sound quality will be degraded.

Lossy formats selectively discard sounds the human ear can’t hear to make the file smaller. But each format removes slightly different sounds. For example, converting a track using a WMA to mp3 converter is now missing the sounds that both codecs have deleted.

There are other ways to remove DRM and convert WMA to mp3, but they require numerous steps and more software – and they’re not for the technically challenged. Free WMA to mp3 conversion software and detailed instructions are available on the Internet.

By W R Kirk via link

Related post: How to strip DRM off iTunes music on Windows and Mac

How to Convert Protected WMA to MP3 for iPod

“The majority of my albums are in my Windows Media Player and I would like to transfer those albums to my iPod. Now I don’t know how to. All I know is that WMA is incompatible with Apple iPod. So how do I rescue my songs? I tried to use limewire to download free music but it is a mess.”

If you meet the same problem, you got the right place! The following tutorial details how to convert both protected and unprotected WMA (Windows Media Audio) music files to MP3 format for Apple iPod.

If the WMA files you are going to play on your iPod is unprotected, you just select and drag them into iTunes Library and they should be automatically converted to whatever iPod format you selected in iTunes preferences for importing.

If they are WMA files protected by DRM, it is not that easy. You need to use some software to remove the DRM from your WMA files and then convert the WMA music to the much more widely-supported MP3 format.
Note: As with any transcoding, the quality will go down. But if you’ve got a lot of protected WMA files you’d like to convert to MP3 files to get on your iPod, this solution would do the trick.

In this tutorial, I’d like to show how to remove DRM from WMA files and convert the protected WMA files to MP3 format using TuneClone Audio Converter. Let’s take a look at how it performs:

1. Make settings at TuneClone

Download TuneClone (fully compatible with Windows XP and Windows Vista) and install it. After launching TuneClone, click the “Settings” button. In the pop-up dialog of “Options”, you can specify the “Output Folder”, “Output Filenames”, “Output Format” (here we choose MP3), etc. for the output files.
Tip: You can get the output protection removed MP3 music folder by clicking the “Folder” button after the whole process.

2. Burning at Windows Media Player(WMP 11)

Create a new playlist and drag into it the WMA files you are going to play on your iPod. After that, click the “Burn” button and select “Audio CD” from the drop-down list. On the right panel of “CD Drive”, click “Next Drive” to locate the CD drive to TuneClone’s Virtual CD Burner.

Note: If you are unsure whether TuneClone’s Virtual CD burner is successfully installed or where it is installed, please refer to the bottom left corner of TuneClone:

Then, drag the playlist you created just now to the “Burn List” and click the “Start Burn” button to start burning the playlist. While the burning gets started, TuneClone will automatically convert the WMA playlist to MP3 files. You can open the manager screen to show all the converted music files.
Note: If you get the output files formatted as 01-1.mp3, 01-2.mp3, etc., please click the output MP3 songs in the manager screen and drag the counterpart original WMA songs to the “Track Info” panel of TuneClone one by one. The information about the artist, album, title, etc. will be changed accordingly. It would be a time-consuming process if you are burning a big collection of WMA music. However, since Windows Media Player 11 doesn’t support CD-text burning, this seems to be the only way to get the information back.

After you get the output MP3 files converted from the WMA playlist in your Windows Media Player, you can now begin to transfer the MP3 files to your iPod with the sync of iTunes.

You may also have interest in:

How to convert iTunes 8 protected AAC (M4P) music to MP3

How to strip DRM off iTunes music on Windows and Mac

There are many ways to remove DRM (short for Digital Rights Management) protection from iTunes music. On Windows OS, you can remove the iTunes DRM using the burn-and-rip method or you can turn to programs like TuneClone and Protected Music Converter. On Mac OS X, iMovie is the perfect solution to removing DRM protection from iTunes music. Besides, freewares like FairGame is also a pretty good choice. So this article is dedicated to introducing several methods of removing the nasty DRM from iTunes music on Windows and Mac OS X. It is divided into the following four parts:

Part 1. Remove DRM from iTunes music on Windows with burn-and-rip method

->Insert a CD-R or CD-RW disc into your CD-ROM drive. You’d better use CD-RW disc as it can be used for more than once.
->Burn your playlist to make an audio CD. You cannot select the “MP3 CD” option since it requires the protected music files be converted to unprotected MP3 files.
->After the audio CD is successfully burned, insert the disc into your CD-ROM drive again. Then you can use iTunes to import the music tracks on the burned disc to MP3 files.

Part 2. Remove DRM from iTunes music on Windows with TuneClone

Note: If you are using iTunes 8.0 or above, please skip to this tutorial using TuneClone and iTunes 8:
http://itunesm4ptomp3.wordpress.com/2008/09/16/convert-itunes8-music-to-mp3/

->Download TuneClone from http://www.tuneclone.com and install it.

It is fully compatible with Windows XP and Vista. A virtual CD Burner will be installed. This virtual CD-RW will be used to convert music files.

->Set the default CD Burner to TuneClon CD-RW at iTunes.

Click menu “Edit”, select menu item “Preferences…”, and then select “Advanced Tab”. In order to keep the artist and title information of the music, the “Include CD Text” option should be checked.

->Create a playlist, and then add the files you want to convert into the playlist.

->Click “Burn Disc” button at the bottom right of the main screen of iTunes.

While the burning gets started, TuneClone will automatically convert the music file to MP3, WMA or WAV. You can open the manager screen to show all the converted music files.

The most important step is to choose the cd burner. Then the software can convert the music files automatically. It is exceedingly easy when you want to batch convert lots of files.

Apart from TuneClone, you can also use other DRM Stripper tools to help you remove DRM from iTunes music. Here is the detailed review for other four DRM Removal software tools (on Windows OS) for your reference.

Part 3. Remove DRM from iTunes music on Mac OS X with iMovie

In the iMovie window, select the ‘Media’ tab located between ‘Themes’ and ‘Editing’. You will notice that the top right portion of the interface now offers a media browser. Select the ‘Audio’ tab and locate the playlist which contains purchased music, or search by artist/title.

Select the DRM-laden song and drag the file from the media browser into the iMovie timeline where it says “Drag audio here to build your project.”

In order to export the song, iMovie requires that a visual image be associated with the audio track – “iMovie thinks that it is going to be exporting a movie”. Simply drag a blank image (or any other image) to the track above the previously imported audio file. Once iMovie has processed the image, select the ‘Share…’ sub menu item from found inside ‘Share’ in iMovie’s menu bar.

Ensure that ‘Expert Settings’ is selected in the “Compress movie for:” drop-down menu. Selecting ‘Expert Settings’ mode will provide the options to export the file as an audio file. Select the ‘Share’ button.

In the Save as… dialogue, select “Sound to AIFF” in the Export drop-down menu, Choose an appropriate directory for iMovie to export to, title the file, and select ‘Save’. Depending on your machine configuration, iMovie will compress and export the movie project as an audio file in 15-40 seconds.

Locate the exported AIFF audio file and drag to your iTunes Library. Right-click on the file and select “Convert Selection to AAC”. Once completed, ‘Get Info’ on the new file, edit meta data, add album art, and trash the originally purchased and AIFF audio files from your iTunes library.

Part 4. Remove DRM from iTunes music on Mac OS X with FairGame

FairGame is freeware to remove DRM protection from iTunes music on Mac OS X. It will convert the DRMed songs you bought on the iTunes Store to an unprotected format (using iTunes default encoder) and keep all the original metadata, lyrics and artwork. FairGame doesn’t do lossless DRM stripping. It re-encodes protected AAC files purchased in iTMS into unprotected AAC file using Apple’s iMovie software.

What you MUST DO (only once) to get FairGame to work:

• enable “Access for assistive devices” in the “Universal Access” system preference
• select “Place clip in Movie Timeline” in the “Import” preference of iMovie HD

Then you can simply:

• select some songs in iTunes
• click on the “Process songs” button

Don’t touch anything and wait until it’s done…(FairGame is scripting iMovie’s interface to process the songs, don’t interfere)

You may also have interest in:

How to convert DRM protected iTunes M4P music songs to MP3
How to transfer iTunes M4P music playlist to Zune WMA MP3
How to share iTunes DRM locked music with Facebook friends
How to convert iTunes M4P to BlackBerry
How to transfer iTunes DRMed music to Sony PSP
How to import iTunes M4P to Windows Movie Maker project