Don't know if is a warez-related, but here's tunebite

This looks legal. The German c't magazine (heise.de) has a similar initiative.

Edit: But what this has got to do with the topic title is beyond me.

great...a program that charges me for transcoding files to mp3 I could use Windows Recorder for that (or whatever that programs is called that bundles with Windows)...considering that the quality is already not that good, it will get even worse when encoding the file again...even mp3 320kbps won't help...the quality will always be worse than the original file...'great solution'

Napster offers their songs in a Protected WMA format using the new WM10 DRM. This gives it time limitations. Using tunebite and Napster's free 14 day trial, you could theoretically copy all Napster's music to an unprotected format during the trial and not pay a dime.

There's other ways besides tunebite to do this though. One recent one being posted about is to use a plugin for Winamp called "output stacker" to bypass Winamp's protection against running output from protected WMA to WAV files. Winamp removed the Output Stacker plugin from their webpage because of this, but there's other ways around the restriction in Winamp as well.

None of these are "true" cracks, in that they don't produce a decrypted file, just a decoded one. But they're good enough for most people, sort of thing.

Edit: Just correcting my post. The method used by these tricks are "real-time" meaning that it has to play the song all the way through, it's just not using an actual audio output to do it. Some people worked out that you could do this with several songs simultaneously, however, so you can still convert as many songs as you have processor power to do it.

I cant seem to get it to work with my nVidia nForce2 Soundstorm chip with the latest drivers (september) from nVidias website..

The stereo mix doesnt get any audio, and the SPIDF just locks the program..

" tunebite runs in the background on your Windows PC. When you play back a piece of music, tunebite automatically re-records the song. This is legal and foolproof."

what is the diference between this and say totalrecorder? it looks like it is capturing the output and transcoding.

No difference, that's exactly what it's doing. Grab the decoded audio before it hits the soundcard, pipe it to lame_enc.dll, save an MP3 file somewhere.

Tunebite can talk to the player app (if it's one of the supported ones) and get the information for putting into an ID3 tag in the resulting MP3 as well as noticing the transisition to the next song, making it fairly simple to transcode a bunch of protected songs in bulk, but that's about the only reason to use the thing.

Stupid question here...

If you take an original wma file and decode it to a wav file and then encode it back to a wma file using the same encoding settings used for the original wma file, what are you losing sound-wise? If the first encode to wma pulled out audio content according to its compression scheme, does the second encode not pull the same audio content as well. I mean if it already missing, how can decode to wav and encode back to wma cause more data loss?

I understand going from wma to mp3 causing more artifacts since they use different compression schemes.

John

Search for "transcoding" and why it's bad. There's been a number of threads on the topic.

Basically it boils down to lossy audio encoding is a lot more complicated than "it removes some of the sound".

There is another program called Virtuosa that you can use to convert the files as fast as the encoder will do it on your machine. They recently changed the download on their website with a "fix" for this problem, but you can find an older version if you do a google search. It can be configured to use lame as well. I know transcoding is bad.

I also had the same question about decoding the wma to wav and then encoding back to wma at the same bitrate. Would this not reproduce the same file, minus drm?

No it would not reproduce the same file. It would still be a transcoded file.

Its quite simple:
You are taking the output of a lossy encoder, and you are encoding it again with another lossy encoder. It does not matter if the lossy encoders are the same or different, you "loose" information twice.

You could resample the output of the lossy encoder , say to a 44.1KHz 16 bit stereo wav file. This would not lose a lot of quality, but you are still losing some quality because of resampling, quantization noise, etc etc

Gonza

I just ripped a wav file from a CD. It is 38,535 KB.
I encoded it to alt-preset-standard mp3 using LAME 3.96.1. It is 6142 KB
I decoded the mp3 back to wav. It is 38,539 KB.
I encoded the second wav back to alt-preset-standard mp3 using LAME 3.96.1. It is now 5067 KB.

Original wav 38,535 KB
1st mp3 6,142 KB
1st mp3 back to wav 38,529 KB
2nd mp3 from 2nd wav 5,067 KB

I tried ABXing the two mp3 files 10 times. I was 3/10. I can't tell the difference... but maybe someone else can. However, the files did get smaller.

The song was the Band - Stage Fright.

John

edit: typo

well ;-) im not saying you or anywone will be able to tell the difference....In fact I am pretty new to all this, and no expert at all.

But information theory says your second file is certainly worse.