Hmmm. Just came across this on Ionut's blog:

Hymn
http://www.hymn-project.org/
"The purpose of the Hymn Project is to allow you to exercise your fair-use rights under copyright law. The various software provided on this web site allows you to free your iTunes Music Store purchases (protected AAC / .m4p) from their DRM restrictions with no loss of sound quality. These songs can then be played outside of the iTunes environment, even on operating systems not supported by iTunes and on hardware not supported by Apple."

(Via http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/07/lets-kill-ipod-and-itunes.html)

I have experience with SoundTaxi and it works great for removing DRM. Does it's job perfectly. I was using WMAs...

This program looks suspiciously like a program that uses the "analog hole" to unprotect DRM'ed music. There are way too many formats for it to be doing what JHymn did.

If you want to buy it, go ahead. Otherwise, just play the music and record the output from your speakers in your sound card... Or better yet, burn a CD and rip it. You'll probably get better quality.

piqued, not picked.

Works fine for me! That's for sure (I'm iTunes subscriber)

[quote]Or better yet, burn a CD and rip it. You'll probably get better quality.[/quote]Don't you potentially lose sound wuality in doing this? (Unless the original DRM's files are very, very high quality.)

I'm also skeptical that it removes DRM from so many formats. I agree, rather, with Dave, it just pipes the audio through a channel and records that to an mp3 file. Either Dave's or Jim's suggestions are equally as good and infinitely cheaper.

"Don't you potentially lose sound wuality in doing this? (Unless the original DRM's files are very, very high quality."
Yes, burning a CD then ripping it will lose quality when you re-encode to MP3. However, if this software uses the "analog hole" to remove DRM. Meaning that you play the song and while you are playing it, you record it digitally into your computer. If that is the case, then you will lose a lot more quality. First you have a digital recording of an analog playback, then you compress using MP3 and lose more.

"Either Dave's or Jim's suggestions are equally as good and infinitely cheaper."
Unfortunately, burning CD's are not "infinitely cheaper". It costs the CD or CD's that you burn.

Also, I have attempted to "rip" audio CD's in the past. The results can be rather poor if the computer isn't a powerhouse. When recording hours of audio, even at lower sampling rates, will produce very large files. I found that the software I was using would cause stutters to occur in the final recording. I never could figure out what was going on.

Bottom line here is that this company is defeating DRM. This, thanks to the DMCA, is quite illegal. It's only a matter of time before they get shutdown.

Download.com has three reviews, all of which are enough to put anyone off!
http://www.download.com/SoundTaxi/3640-2140_4-10534432.html

Wow. Thanks Steve.

Hmm, I wonder if this program is the RIAA's attempt at getting back at all the people that are just trying to use their music the way they want to.

Look, what's written there (http://www.download.com/SoundTaxi/3640-2140_4-10534432.html)

"The version here is rather old. I tried this one (crashed), then came to original site, downloaded from there (version 1.1.4) and it works fine!"

Version 1.O stopped all my startup programmes (firewall, antivirus, antitrojan, memoptimizer, a.s.o.). Angry because of that.
Glad I made a restore point before installing it. Thanks for that advice.
Bad soft! At least, this version...

This actually works quite well, you just have to make sure you ONLY download from the Soundtaxi site, as the versions on the various download sites are old and buggy.

I'm not entirely sure how this works, but I do think it's some variation of the analog hole. It's playing the file at a few times the original speed, and recording it digitally and slowing it back down to 1x. I THINK it is installing its own soundcard, then playing the files into the soundcard, and recording whatever goes into the soundcard.

The sound quality is actually surprisingly good... I'm using it with Urge's subscription plan (192kbps WMA), and it does a good job of converting them to MP3 and I can cancel my subscription and keep the music.

Josh

I'm using SoundTaxi v1.2 it works, the output seems OK to me. I didn't have any corruption issues or crashes with this version. I also had no trouble with the key/license I purchased. The registration is two step...enter the license key, click a button, recieve an authorization key.

It's a bit slow (on my 3.2GHz Pentium Extreme Editions with 4GB RAM). It does seem to use the 'analog hole'. It aquires a license using Windows Media Player (or maybe its using Windows Media Connect?). Then SoundTaxi creates the MP3 (or other format you select).

Speed seems to be about half as long as the song takes to play so it's not quite playing and re-recording, but then again, it's certainly not removing the DRM either so it may not be blatantly illegal. I have NOT timed the conversion, it's a gut feel on my part.

MCM

An other handy tool seems to be:
http://www.technorati.com/tags/FairUse4WM

I didn't use it, so I can't tell, but just read about it...

Only Windows Media it seems.

Art, better use fairuse fast because microsoft jst issued a press release saying they're going to push down a new patch very soon.

Link:
http://www.informationweek.com/software/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=192500523

;-) Don't need, I buy CD's ...