Digital Home Thoughts: I Took FairUse4WM For a Spin...

I was curious about FairUse4WM when we posted about it a couple of weeks ago, but I never quite got around to using it. I grabbed it from Download.com today (wow, is it THAT legit?) and I ran it on some files I bought from MSN Music. Frankly, I was amazed at how well it worked. What I normally do with DRM'd music is burn it to a CD, then re-rip it. At first I thought the quality loss of a double-encode would be horrible, but it honestly sounded fine to my ears. So that's what I've done with over 300 MSN Music tracks over the past year. I had four Ryan Starr songs I bought from the Rockstar: Supernova TV show, and a quick couple of clicks and I had songs that were free of DRM. Amazing! Although my preference would be to have all my music in MP3 format (I'm Type "A" that way) I'll settle for having some WMA's mixed in there if it means keeping them in the original format with all the metadata, embedded album art, etc.

The problem I ran into though is that I can't find the folder of DRM'd songs - my original downloads from MSN Music. I could have sworn that I kept them, but after searching all over my LAN, I can't find them anywhere...which probably means I deleted them. Drat! I guess I'll have to live with the MP3s. All future DRM'd music is going through this tool though - until Microsoft "fixes" things.