Ms to turn off PlaysForSure licensing servers

Ironic the name they used. Let the *censored* commence hitting the fan:

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/04/m ... gives.html

Microsoft will be switching off its PlaysForSure licensing servers on August 31st 2008. What does this mean? It means that if you bought music from the MSN Music store, you're going to be shafted by your lackadaisical attitude to DRM.

Technically, tracks will continue to play forever on licensed machines (of which you can have up to five), but if you upgrade your OS, buy a new computer or just make enough hardware changes to your existing machine, you're screwed come September..

This is why DRM is bad, I've been harping about this for years now as many others have. First of all the consumer has no idea what they are getting themselves into when they buy one of these files. The music industry claims they need DRM to protect copyrights. That very well may be one of the reasons but that is not the real reason IMO. For years one of the major parts of the music and video industries business model has been to sell you the same content over and over. I've multiple copies of albums myself, LP, cassette and finally CD. With the advent of digital music there is no longer a need for this. This FYI is one of the reasons the music industry is "losing" money. People like me no longer need to buy 2 extra cassesttes because we wore them out.

Enter DRM, DRM will give music life allowing them to continue with the decades old practice of selling you the same content numerous times.

That's why I like limewire.

To each his own Bill but I don't advocate outright piracy, if everyone took the road of downloading music for free the only thing we'd have left to listen too is handful of die hard artists. A lot of artists do it for the love of it but they have to eat too. I've been a victim of copyright theft myself and it's not a very good feeling. No different than if someone came in your house and stole something from you. What I do advocate is a fair price and reasonable licensing agreements.

losing the ability to move your music around simply because the company you purchased it from decides it's no longer profitable to maintain the servers is not reasonable.

I know piracy isn't right but the only music I listen to on a regular basis is from the 60's and 70's. Most of the artists are dead or senile. Besides, I bought the music in album, casette and cd over the years. The medium keeps changing. How many times must I pay for the same thing? Of course I'm just kidding but limewire did give me the ability to get just the songs that I like from each artist instead of buying the whole CD. The quality from limewire isn't all that great but it's good enough for my ipod. I really need to learn how to put my CD's on my PC so I can put them on my ipod. Those things were a neat little invention.

Try mediamonkey, rip them as mp3 at 320kbps, that will give you files that will be almost indistinguishable from the originals even on a high end house stereo.

It's been while since I did mine so i can't give you the specifics but that software will also tag the files correctly, there is meta data that can be embedded in an audio file. What it does is examine the files then it searches an online database to find a match. It will insert the song titles, artists, album and a whole lot of other stuff. You can also adjust the way it names songs... lots of options.

http://www.mediamonkey.com/

You can "rip" cd's from windows media player. Its pretty easy.

Actually that's why I suggested media monkey, I consider myself pretty technically savy but i get lost using that piece of *censored*.

If you want a really simple lightweight player I've been using Foobar, It will rip discs. not sure if it does the meta tag lookup.

http://www.foobar2000.org/