I have moved a large library from one computer with Windows 98ME on it, to another computer with Windows XP Home on it. The old computer was scrapped. (the hard drive was moved from me to the new xp home computer.) Before moving, I "backed up licenses" on the ME machine. After the transfer, I scanned for media then went into tools and restored the licenses. That day I checked many files and didn't notice any problems with licenses. A few days later though, all of the licensed files do not work. The problem here being that there were 11,000+ songs on this system, many of which were recorded with protection turned on. At the least there are 1000's of songs (I have not counted them..) that need the license fixed. These files are all legitimately owned and I do not want to spend the next 6-12 months "without a life" re-recording these CD's to my computer. How can I either remove DRM-1 from the files or fix the licenses? (I can't play the files, so I can't remove them the "legal" way..) I legitimately own this music and this is extremely frustrating...!
that would not work because you have to be able to use the music that you cannot use. In either case I did solve the problem.. the issue was that when I upgraded from ME to XP Home on a computer with new cpu/mb etc, I had assumed that XP home had an equivalent or higher Windows Media Player on it. Wrong! ME had the latest 9.0, XP Home came with 8.0. I simply updated the WMP on XP to 9.0 then restored the license as transfered from the ME machine and all the music files were operational again. This was a few weeks ago. After restoring the license, WMP requested that I backup a new license and I clicked Yes to make sure there were no further issues. I'm a bit put out that the backwards compatibility is so weak for this.. I'm advising people to NOT use DRM on their future CD reads. It's just too potentially disasterous if something fails. I'd also advise to begin transfering DRM files into non-DRM format so you can avoid trouble in the future. Does anyone know of a program that I can run incrementally in the evenings or 24/7 in the background to gradually change the entire library out of DRM? Regards, Roger
