WMA files from Puretracks.com?

by **sdumas** on Mon Mar 08, 2004 4:05 am

Hi everyone,

I just decided to be a good citizen and start buying my songs from Puretracks.com. It's a good idea, it's cheap and it's simple, but...

It seems that the files can only be played on Windows Media Player.

Is there a trick to play those songs from Winamp - as it is the only player available for Xlobby?

Thanks!

by **Colby** on Mon Mar 08, 2004 4:15 am

Okay so I wanted to help but Puretracks.com wont let me participate. It says its for Canadian residents only, and the store is FULL. How can an internet store be full?

What type of file are you buying? And does winamp support the file type? If not I know winamp has a lot of plugins to read odd file types. Sorry Im not much help.

by **sdumas** on Mon Mar 08, 2004 1:34 pm

They are simply WMA files, but it seems that they have some type of licence checking.

Even if my file has a winamp logo, when I click on it, it opens winamp and then displays me a message from Microsoft Media Player stating that my version should be upgraded... (it talks obviously about my version of Winamp - since it is thinking that it is the Microsoft Media Player...)

If I try to launch them form Winamp - same results.

I haven't tried winamp 5. I'll try that later.

They work just fine under Microsoft Media Player...

by **noviceboy** on Mon Mar 08, 2004 1:39 pm

I would guess that there is some Digital Rights Management code at work?

by **sdumas** on Mon Mar 08, 2004 9:54 pm

Anything else than Windows Media Player that "handles" Digital Rights Management?

by **noviceboy** on Tue Mar 09, 2004 8:27 am

Anything else than Windows Media Player that "handles" Digital Rights Management?

Well firstly it might not be DRM. However, it would not be unlikely that any music store wants to control( how many times played, whether it can be copied etc etc ) music sold via this technology that Msoft is pushing. And the answer to your questions is , only MPLAYER will processes such files correctly .

by **sdumas** on Tue Mar 09, 2004 5:57 pm

OK, I found a solution but it's not the most elegant thing in the world...

You can't play the Puretracks files directly in Winamp - they need to be transformed first.

I selected the "Copy to CD" option from Media Player. It created a regular CD with WAV files on it. I then ripped the CD using MusicGrabber (Exact Audio Copy crashes all the time on my system and never finds a "cd-rom" - BTW the Exact Audio Copy site has disappeared and many download sites do not carry it anymore - last version is .95B4). I then have WAV files that can be played by Winamp.

Many problem with this approach. You lose all tags. You can't obviously use CDDB. You have to retag/rename everything. It's time consuming. It uses lots of disk space (could be fixed by retransforming into MP3, but...)

If anyone has a better "automated" idea, it would be more than welcomed!