Newbie -- Am I on the Right Track?

2003-12-23 18:36:24

Hi all --

I'm pretty much a total novice, and I've spent some time trying to get up to speed here at HA before I begin what's going to be a mammouth project. But first I want to see if people think I'm going about this in a way that makes sense.

I have approximately 1500 CD's that I want to rip to a 250 GB external hard drive (on PC.) I'm going to do my 200 or so absolute favorites in FLAC and the rest as MP3s (using EAC, LAME, and RazorLame.) And I'll probably use Winamp 5 as my player -- with plug-ins for FLAC and iTunes. (I tried using Foobar, but the interface made absolutely no sense to me at all.)

As for acquiring new music, I was thinking of using iTunes -- but I'm a bit concerned because a song I dl'ed the other day isn't playing back very well on Winamp. (But it plays back fine when I use iTunes.) Does anyone have any ideas what the problem might be?

Any thoughts/comments/suggestions are more than welcome!

Thanks so much....

Newbie -- Am I on the Right Track?

Reply #1 – 2003-12-23 19:19:12

I believe that tracks from iTunes are encrypted using DRM so that they cannot be played in other pieces of software that don't support the DRM.

Newbie -- Am I on the Right Track?

Reply #2 – 2003-12-23 19:52:55

This leads to a more general question ... for which I did a lot of web research without any satisfying answer.

I'm trying to understand the relationships between formats, players and DRM. Altough formats and players can interoperate today, it is not clear at all how is DRM (or not) independant  from players.



For exemple :

Can I use other DRM than M$'s DRM with WMP ?
Can I use Helix DRM to encode WMA to play in WMP ?
Can I implement some DRM other than Apple/Fairplay to protect AAC and allow the songs to be transferred to an ipod (and how could I do this) ?

etc. .... More generally speaking I would like to know what are the possible combinations of formats/DRM/players, taking into account technical interoperability, licenses schemes, .. and other criterias

(Please forgive my english)
Thanks

Newbie -- Am I on the Right Track?

Reply #3 – 2003-12-23 20:11:54

You may want to try www.allofmp3.com for downloading music. $0.01 per song, and the option to select your format and quality level (LAME --aps, Musepack, Vorbis, AAC, etc...). Excellent site, and to date the only online music service I have ever signed up for.

Edit: I also don't see why you need razorlame to encode your rips into mp3... EAC and LAME should be just fine. Aside from this, your plan sounds very reasonable, and I'm sure you'll be able to fit all your music onto that hard drive.