Yesterday I bought a song online for the first time in my life. Yeah, I know it sounds a little strange in these digital times, but I just never had a need for it until now.
Anyway, I wanted to buy a song and put in on a CD (yes, those old skool, round and shiny discs). So I bought the song, and downloaded it to my iMac. The first problem was that the song was in WMA format that my iMac couldn’t handle. I payed for the song… why are they giving me the song in a format that I can’t use because I’m not using Windows…?!
Luckily I’ve Parallels installed, so I fired it up to get Window running. When I played the song, it checked its DRM signature to make sure it wasn’t a pirate version. Then I found out that I couldn’t burn a CD from Parallels (don’t know why, it just didn’t and I didn’t have time to fix it). So I copied the song to another Windows computer next to me.
When I tried to burn the CD from the other PC I got an alert telling me that the song was already registered to another Windows system…. aarrggghhhh! So there I was, stuck with a song that I paid for, with a DRM security system that wouldn’t allow me to burn it onto a CD. After trying a couple of ways to get it working I gave up. I bought the song again (now from the PC), and burned it there.
Man, whoever came up with this security system certainly wasn’t thinking about the end user. No wonder the music industry is going down….
Tim Knip's profile
March 21st, 2008 at 4:38 pm
If you bought the song using iTunes (if available), you could burn it on a CD directly from iTunes.
But then again, you probably would have, it the song was available in a more open format…