If you can play a song file on your PC but your portable player or other hardware rejects it, here is one way to help insure that your fair use rights are not violated. It is a "lossy" process but better than nothing, and it's free. If you cannot play the file on your PC at all this will not work. http://www.mpex.net/software/download/messer.html It's a German site but the app is the english version. It records the digital audio stream off the output end of your soundcard just before D/A conversion so it works from ANY source. It saves files to .wav or you can compress to .mp3 "on the fly". If you can hear it, you can record it. Keep in mind if you click around while it's running any system sounds (clicks, beeps, everything you hear...) is recorded. It takes some configuration and tweaking (to be honest this one is prolly a bit deep for the novice) but once that's done it works pretty well (at least for me). Don't forget to enable the mixer output of your soundcard. Fair use is dead! Long live fair use!
