I just don't download for several reasons:

Little music is available for download in Lossless format (Music Giants is the main provider I know of)
I have heard stories about problems with DRM (Digital Right Management) where licenses get lost, corrupted, you can't move music to another machine, various vendors schemes are not compatable (Apple & Microsoft) etc.
CDs that have been around a while can be cheaper than paying for download
I like having the media for backup, listening on my car's CD player or at a friends

Hi MLZ,

First welcome to the forum. Second, beware of the sharks. I'm not quite sure but I have a funny feeling about Mr J. Action. You see I have my doubts about anyone without a track record on the forum and who directs you to less than straight up web site, i.e. "nomoredrm". Just to let you know, we had issues with this web site before, so most of us here are rather weary.

It's not that many of us do not hate DRM. I for one am one of the most vocal opponents of DRM on this forum but I never direct the other forum members to illegal sites or advice any illegal activities, as much as I might like to.

My own personal methods for dealing with DRM are rather simple - if a product has any type of DRM on it I don't buy it. I'm still upset over the introduction of digital to begin with and I consider it just punishment that the public now has the ability to make perfect digital copies. The music and movie businesses should have stuck with analog if they didn't want us to make all these copies. Never heard them crying when people were trading tapes. Too bad!!! What goes around comes around. Deal with it.

No 180 gram vinyl has any DRM on it and you can't make a perfect copy of it and I buy plenty of those. Plus they sound great.

I do not think I tried to direct anyone to a hacker site, and would never do so.

I just stated that I only buy CDs and refuse to buy licensed music from a download store for the reasons stated. I have ripped all my CDs (475+) to WMA Lossless and play them through my SilverStone EB01 USB soundcard to my 2-channel system or a Roku SoundBridge 1001 (in hindsight, I wish I had bought a SqueezeBox) to my 5.1 rig.

I think it was the initial poster who mentioned the URL of the site to crack DRM.

And on another matter, I really like your postings / recomendations / reviews on the Jazz pages - even if they are causing me to spend a bit expanding my CD collection. Thanks.

Thanks for the feedback/kind words about my jazz posts. I'll try to post a few more in the next few weeks.

However, here seems to be some miss understanding regarding the just who I was referring to when I was speaking about the illegal web sites. I most certainly was not referring to you, MLZ but rather to the original poster, jackAction. Sorry for the confusion.

I'm also glad to see that we seem to agree on the issue of DRM - the less the better and none would be best of all.

What troubles me most about DRM is that it just doesn't fit very well with the concept of convergence. Everything I've read up to date about DRM nightmares and headaches flies in the face of the smooth and seamless integration of formats and technologies that is needed for the success of convergence. And yet both the software and hardware companies keep trying to ram convergence down the consumer's throats. Caveat emptor.

I believe it's not illegal to strip DRM from downloaded music.
This can be done in itunes by burning a CD and then reloading it to Itunes
I never buy itunes because of drm and the lossy format but my son buys hiphop there.
I like some of it and want to stream it to my Transporter so I have to go to the cumbersome burning process.
This leads be to believe that software to strip drm might not be illegal.

Do we have any intellectual prop. attorneys on the forum that would like to give an opinion?

As it stands now, it appears it is illegal to circumvent it, regardless of method, unless I'm misunderstanding:

http://www.eff.org/IP/DRM/

Interesting link, thanks for that.

Itunes and Apple allow their DRM downloads to be burned to a CD. I think they even show how in tutorials.

It makes for an interesting legal question. If one is allowed to burn a CD but that strips DRM is a crime commited?

Hi Jeff,

Great link. Reading through all the items on the linked page "The Customer Is Always Wrong: A User's Guide to DRM in Online Music" is really a gas. The whole thing is truly a mess but they leave out the best part: all of this nonsense pertains to music encoded in highly compressed file formats plus the buyer has no idea how that music was encoded in the first place, i.e. what algorithm and setting were used in the encoding processing, which is very important in determining the sound quality of the compressed file.

Things get even more confusing when one delves into the area of movies and DVDs since I believe that even copying a prerecorded DVD onto one's hard drive is technically illegal in the good old USA or at least the software which allows you to do so is illegal. And yet Stereophile's sister publication "Home Theater" is always writing about media servers and convergence or to put it another way, aiding and abetting the criminal element or in this case, the consumer.

Hence my new motto: DRM is so much FUN!!!

Dig Ralph's Motto!

Looks like Steve Jobs is kinda on your side.

why not, he makes his money on you having the most music available to you, DRM gets in the way.

not too surprising

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/

you can share a cd with friends and that in a sense is sharing a key to unlock content. It is time-consuming and expensive comparatively speaking to distribute the exact same content (uncompressed PCM audio), so the more space-efficient mp3 / mp4a formats, with the associated copy protection schemes that we love to hate, will be with us for a while.