Digital Rights Management is starting to get beyond a joke.
I noticed today that Vista had updated to Windows Media Player 11 on my laptop. I also noticed there was no uninstall option, but that didn’t really bother me, since I don’t use WMP as my default player for media files anyway. But it wasn’t until I was trying to move MP3 files across to my new phone (the old one having decided abruptly to pass away without warning) that the true gravity of WMP11 hit me.
Vista positively refused to move files from my old media card. It claimed they’d “come from another computer, so were blocked for safety”. Safety? What the hell did that mean? Vista itself could play them, though I had to once again tell Media Player it couldn’t be my default for MP3 files, but no matter what I did, it would not allow them to be transferred to my phone.
Examining the files properties showed this extra attribute about being ‘from another computer’ but gave no details of where it had come from or how to turn it off. The properties didn’t describe the files as protected, but it still wouldn’t move them.
It’s at a time like this that I’m glad Microsoft doesn’t recognize all formats of music.
Using JetAudio, my favourite player, I converted the MP3 files into Ogg Vorbis files, a format Windows Media Player doesn’t recognize. Then I converted them back to MP3 files. Now because I’d (apparently) created the MP3 files on the laptop, it would quite happily copy them to my phone.
Again, I have to ask – Microsoft, what the HELL are you thinking?
I can understand not wanting piracy, but there are a lot of sites out there that allow the downloads of ringtones for a smartphone, and to classify those as not transferrable is simply wrong. Nobody gave you the right to come along, look at my music collection, and arbitrarily decide what I can and can’t copy from device to device.
Fortunately Microsoft don’t rule the digital world, not yet anyway, so there are other possible options. But it’s really bad form to do this to someone with no warning, and if it’s a sign of things to come then I’m going to be looking for Linux distros that work on this laptop