Here’s a familiar song. Yahoo! Music is calling it quits and taking their key servers down on September 30, 2008. If you’re one of the dozen people who bought DRM protected music through that service, well, it sucks to be you:
Once the Yahoo store goes down and the key servers go offline, existing tracks cannot be authorized to play on new computers. Instead, Yahoo recommends the old, lame, and lossy workaround of burning the files to CD, then reripping them onto the computer. Sure, you’ll lose a bunch of blank CDs, sound quality, and all the metadata, but that’s a small price to pay for the privilege of being able to listen to that music you lawfully acquired. Good thing you didn’t download it illegally or just buy it on CD!
There’s probably some software out there on the Interwebs that’ll rip that DRM out for you as well, but those are technically illegal for you to use under the DMCA. Still, it beats the hell out of the Yahoo! approved method of securing the files you legally purchased.
1- Can any one really tell the difference between CD music and pure e-music. You can? I don’t believe you.
2- holding them on CD? Isn’t this called back up, or do you keep stuff you paid for on a storage device that could at any point crash for no apparent reason.