I need to know the best way to rip a copyrighted wma to wav or mp3. I seem to remember a thread about it but I can't find it. Steps or links would be appreciated.

I need to know the best way to rip a copyrighted wma to wav or mp3.

www.totalrecorder.com

How about a way to rip those "plays only on a CD player, not on a computer" CDs? OK, I know, formallly they are *not* CDs...

ok... I just ripped the wma to a cd with mp9 and then used eac to rip it to wav. That seems way to easy... So either copyright protection is an even bigger joke than I thought or EAC is even cooler than I thought. Ideas?

How about a way to rip those "plays only on a CD player, not on a computer" CDs?

Depends on the copy protection format used, there are several different ones. The various copy protection formats are discussed at www.cdrfaq.org if you're interested.

I, personally, have seen only one copy-protected CD, and the rip method is pretty straightforward.

They had tagged all the tracks as data tracks instead of audio tracks. They really were audio tracks, they just had the bit set that told the index they were data tracks. This makes most rippers just skip them and not bother ripping them, while many (not all) consumer CD players will dutifully try to play the tracks.

The solution is to rip the disc using one of the programs that will rip it in "Raw" mode, then edit the resulting cue sheet so that the tracks are audio tracks again, then burn a proper unprotected version from that cue sheet. Or, if your goal is to only rip the disc without using another physical CD, then you can feed the tracks and the cue sheet to a piece of CD-emulator software and tell your ripper to rip that.

Of course, that was a long time ago. I'm sure that some of the ripper packages will, by now, have gotten wise to this and let you override the "don't bother to rip data tracks" feature.

So either copyright protection is an even bigger joke than I thought or EAC is even cooler than I thought.

Yeah, when a piece of software lets you burn a copy-protected file to an un-copy-protected medium like an audio CD, then yeah, it's a bit of a joke isn't it?

(EAC isn't doing anything special there, by the way.)

The only issue is that you've just taken something that was already lossy-data-compressed (WMA), then added another layer of lossy data compression (MP3) to it. So you don't have an exact copy of the original at this point. Then again, the WMA file wasn't an exact copy of the original to begin with, and the differences (assuming that you used very high quality settings at each stage) are going to be very slight.

In reply to:

---

The various copy protection formats are discussed at www.cdrfaq.org if you're interested.

---

Great! Thanks! The most recent one I came across was "Life for rent" by Dido. It does contain a warning about it, and a pointer to a (completely useless) www.bmg-copycontrol.info/

How about a way to rip those "plays only on a CD player, not on a computer" CDs? OK, I know, formallly they are *not* CDs...

The FAQ covers most of what you need to know. Worst case, you just run an S/PDIF cable from a standalone CD player into your computer's sound card and just record the stuff directly. If your computer is lacking S/PDIF, you can buy USB adapters for $50-100.