In order to back-up some DRM-protected WMA music files, I want to convert them to unprotected music files. These DRM-protected files are 192kbps WMA's, and I'd like to preserve as much sound quality as I can.

I would *assume* that converting them to 192kbps WMA's would be essentially the best, since it would probably be just stripping the DRM protection, and recording them as they were originally.

But maybe I'm wrong? Maybe it the conversion process doesn't work like that. Maybe converting them to a OGG 192kb or MP3 256kbps would be better?

By the way, I'm using Tunebite to do this, if that helps.

Thanks for the help!!

~john

Re-encoding WMA content to anything Lossy, lke WMA, OGG, MP3, etc. will impact the sound. If you don't notice the difference, it doesn't really matter. So, pick whatever you like. Tunebite is a just a cheesy recording tool that doesn't really 'strip DRM'... as a bonus, it's from a for-profit company that lies about it's use and legality.

If you purchased DRM protected WMA music files, you can also burn them to Audio CD using the application you bought them with. This doesn't even require Tunebite. The resulting Audio CD will be 100% unprotected and be a prefect audio representation of the WMA audio without further loss.

Unfortunately that is not the case. Encoding them to any lossy format would cause the track to get re-compressed meaning that even more data would be thrown away. Would you hear this decrease in quality? I don't know as I don't have your ears or equipment. You can always convert the files to a lossless format in order to preserve the quality but I don't know if you want to do that. If I remember back at a listening test conducted by guru, I think that the iTunes AAC encoder and OGG were better at transcoding than the Lame mp3 encoder. You might want to stick with one of those. I believe this test was conducted about a year ago so things could have easily changed since then.

Well it depends on how you go about it. There is software out there that can strip off the DRM from encrypted WMA and WMV files but it can be tricky to get set up properly. Do some searching over on the Doom9 forums and you'll find an excessively long forum thread about it.

If you don't explicitly use that method, then any converting would be a transcode of some sort. The only way to maintain the exact quality of your source when transcoding a lossy source is to store the DRM-free recording sing a lossless format, as any subsequent compression to another lossy format (even back to WMA in your case) would yield additional artifacts on top of what's already in the signal from that original compressed source.

MP3 or OGG at the high bitrates you mentioned shouldn't lose much quality but they still would have more artifacts than the original, albeit probably not noticeable. The only way to know if they'd be good enough for your purposes is to just go ahead and re-compress them at those settings, then sit down and listen to 'em yourself.

It makes no sense to transcode to a restricted format. Even without DRM you can't do much with WMA's.

I agree that you can use different methods to get your files DRM free, but I don't agree at all with the above.
I use Tunebite too and it works very well, especially with this new version that came out that has even more formats available. And it really rids your files of the protection.

As for what format you should use, unless you are a professional audio system, that makes the difference, there is no need to keep the lossless format. But it's a matter of personal taste after all.

From what I understood, keeping the files lossless from the WMAs would not be a problem using TAK. The discussion was from a long time ago, but I remember it being mentioned that TAK can compress lossy audio further than most other lossless systems (i.e. FLAC, Monkey's Audio, WavPack).