Note that this is all contingent upon using Windows Media Player and WMA-format for ripping/encoding. Sticking to good old MP3 and third-party software will dodge these problems.

But yes, yes that does suck.

Who uses Windows Media Player or the WMA format? Yuck on both counts even without the DRM "feature".

Just to clarify even further - this affects nobody in reality since every windoze owner I've ever met uses Winamp.

I was instantly turned off to using Media Player for tunes, when I read that you have to pay more money to rip >96kbps mp3s. This recent crap seals the deal. I've used QCD with its fancy skins and such, but Winamp still rules because it is a) free, b) uses low mem, and c) easy and convenient.

Also, as stated in the article, you can turn off the copy protection before encoding. But if you did leave the copy protection on, the files should become usable again by checking for a license online unless you encoded the files with an older version of WMP and then upgraded, in which case there's a utility for updating the files. Or, you could just use WinAMP =)

This will likely look like flamebait, but some Mac users seem to constantly confuse the platform with the applications.

The fact is, the only lock-in in Windows is are Win32 APIs (which developpers seem to enjoy, since it's the most popular platform by orders of magnitude,) upon which you can run tens of thousands of applications. Speaking as someone with a 70Gb+ mp3 collection ripped from CDs and streams or downloaded, I'm glad I'm a Windows XP user.

I never needed Windows Media Player for encoding, metatagging, collection management, or playback, but I was able to choose from an unmatched choice of third-party tools for all these tasks.

Edited by author 08-12-2002 12:07 PM
Everyone has already made my points, but I'll re-state them simply to stand up and be counted. :)

1. Few people are using WMP to rip music.
2. This is not an OS issue; it's an application issue.
3. There's a workaround.