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General discussion

Copying Protected Music From 1 computer to another help!!!!!

Aug 4, 2005 7:31PM PDT

I have 2 laptops both on a network and i want to transfer all my protected music onto 1 of the laptops but when i do that it says the liscence for this piece of music is on another computer!!! i dunno what to do because i have literally hundreds of pounds worth of proected music and i cant listen to it on my new laptop which is the latest sony vaio

Discussion is locked

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Depends on the service.
Aug 4, 2005 9:27PM PDT

Apple has it's method, others has their own way. You have to ask the service you used to buy the music on how to move.

Bob

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I solve this problem by
Oct 15, 2005 1:05PM PDT

This is probably not the most conventional method, and with a lot of music it can be very tedious, but i buy songs on iTunes occassionally. They are all protected. The problem I run into is thay can only burned a certain number of times. However if it is burned as a regular audio file(i.e. not mp3, m4p, acc, etc.) then copy it back to the computer, it will be a brand new file and not protected.

just a suggestion, i'm sure not the best way

Nick

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Confused
Jan 28, 2006 9:50PM PST

What I am gathering is if you copy say a protected wma file to a cd or dvd then its no longer protected and can be transfered to another computer or music device.

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But...
Jan 30, 2006 6:52AM PST

If you burn a protected WMA file to a CD (so it goes back to WAV format), there will no longer be any digital rights management (DRM)--you can do whatever you want with it.

BUT you must consider that this is a compressed audio file you're burning to the CD. When it goes back to WAV format, you have a larger file, but none of the sound quality lost during the initial compression returns. When you rip it back into the computer, you're compressing it even further, resulting in a major loss of sound quality. Unless you rip it back to your computer as WAV or a lossless format, which you probably won't want to do since you'd be stuck with a huge file.

So, if none of that made sense, this is the conclusion: this works, but you lose a lot of sound quality.

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You lost sound quality before you started. That's why I
Jan 30, 2006 9:37AM PST

don't download much anymore. You're probably right by the way. A second compression makes the situation worse. That's probably why they let you do it.

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Which service are you using?
Feb 1, 2006 8:39AM PST

And how many files do you have? No matter what service it is, you should be able to authorize your files on up to AT LEAST three computers (iTunes is five), so if you don't mind your old computer being one of those, all you need to do is redownload your files to your new system. You should be able to do this without having to pay again. There may be a way to do this en masse, again depending on the service. If you don't want your old computer to be one of your authorized computers, you'll need to deauthorize it. Usually, this option is in the preferences section of the music store interface, or you can contact their customer service to ask them the best way to do it.

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Burning CD's from downloaded music
Feb 3, 2006 7:27PM PST

You'll have to excuse me but I am new to all this downloading music and burning CD's. Here is my question. I downloaded some music from itunes and it is on my computer. However, I cannot burn a CD using these. I get a message saying it is protected. I understand that it is but in previous messages here I see that other people have burned CD's using their downloads. Can you help?
Thanks

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Hmm...you should be able to burn them
Feb 8, 2006 7:58AM PST

I have never had this problem with iTunes before...you might try contacting their customer support. You should be able to burn each track at least five times per playlist. It sounds like there migh be a bug in there somewhere.