(apple)mac geek

I recently bought an audiobook online which was a Digital Rights Managed (DRM) Windows Media Audio (.wma) file. DRM was invented so that users could not share digital media they’d bought with others. It works as such: when you open the file in Windows Media Player (WMP), WMP connects to the site you bought the audio from and asks you to login with your username and password (created when you bought the audio). Once you’ve done that it downloads a license file (into C:\Document and Settings\All Users\DRM (it’s a hidden folder) that allows you to play the file in future without re-downloading the license file.

DRM is around to stop gratuitous or illegal file sharing, ensuring that only the person who has actually paid for the files can listen to them. It’s a win for record industries and it’s a win for anti-piracy.

But it’s annoying for the end user.

Firstly, DRM’d .wma’s won’t play on a Mac, even on Windows Media Player.

Even though Microsoft makes Windows Media Player, their latest version for Mac (v9) can’t play these .wma’s. Yes, that’s right: Microsoft can’t play Microsoft files. *sigh* Dare I point out how stupid that is? Non-windows users cannot play these files (even with Microsoft software), an obviously counter-intuitive move from Microsoft (but not unexpected).

Secondly, I want control over the music I buy. If I’m on a Mac I don’t want to have to install Windows just so I can listen to some music. Also, I want to control what format the files I’ve paid for are in. My iPod can’t play .wma’s so I want to convert them to .mp3’s. But Windows Media Player won’t let me export my file to another format. This is unacceptable, so it’s time for a workaround.

There are some programs around which remove DRM, but I’m not going to pay $13 to listen to my $10 audiobook. A little searching revealed the following steps, which I’ll break down into some detail.

Firstly, find someone with a Windows computer (or, in my case, fire up Parallels Desktop and load up XP).

Then download drmdbg and drm2wmv_e from lockstockmods.net. Copy them to your Desktop (yes, this is all in Windows) – this seems to work best.

Double-click drmdbg to open it – it will open Windows Media Player (make sure you’ve closed WMP first before opening drmdbg). Then, in WMP, click File -> Open and browse to your protected wma file, and click “Open”. In a few seconds, a window will popup saying something like:

Then it will close WMP (if that window doesn’t pop up, scroll to the bottom of this post for a possible fix). A folder on your desktop called “drm2″ will have been created – this is good! What drmdbg has done is listened in to the internal operations of Windows Media Player, specifically when it fetches the license file and decrypts it. drmdbg grabs this decryption key and stores it in a keyfile in the drm2 folder. Now drm2wmv_e can use the keyfile to remove DRM protection.

So drag your protected wma file onto drm2wmv_e like this:

drm2wmv_e will start processing the file to remove the DRM protection.

A new file will be created in the same folder as your current protected file, of the same size but the the prefix “[NoDRM]-” and with no DRM protection. You can then open iTunes and import the file – iTunes will automatically convert it to whatever format you’ve specified under Preferences -> Advanced -> Importing

Hooray! Take a moment to bask in the glow of your monitor! The file is now in .aac format (I set my importing preferences to “Spoken Podcast”) which I can now play on my iPod, but I could’ve just as easily converted to mp3.

If you’d like to do this with another file, you have to set up your system to how it was initially. So remove the “drm2″ folder from your desktop, open WMP normally, find the DRM’d file in the media library and remove it (not from your computer, just from the library). Then close WMP, and you’re free to restart the process by double-clicking on drmdbg again.

* This process didn’t initially work for me. I fired up drmdbg, opened my wmv file…and nothing happened. If this is the case with you, try this: head over to http://services.wmdrm.windowsmedia.com/indivSite (using Internet Explorer, naturally) and click “Upgrade”. This upgrades the Windows Media Player security component and once I’d done that, the rest of the steps worked for me.

I’m also using WMP 9, so roll back to that if nothing else helps.

Thanks to LockStockMods for the tutorial, which I followed and expanded here.

Technorati Tags: DRM, Mac, Windows, WMA

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