Most of the tracks purchased online are protected by DRM (Digital Rights Management), which restricts the consumers from doing reasonable things with the music they own. Hence you need to convert those media files to a common audio format as MP3, no matter your songs are DRM protected or not. An MP3 file can be played on almost all media players or devices nowadays, so if you convert DRM protected music to MP3 successfully, you will get the real freedom.

Inconvenience after buying DRM music

There are many online music stores nowaday, such as iTunes Store, Napster music store, Wal-mart Music Downloads, and Sony Connect. Many people like to purchase music from them. However, there are a lot of inconvenience if you don't find some method to escape from their various DRM protection technology. For example, you may be not able to use DRMed songs in other portable digital devices, like PSP, Zune, Mobile Phone, even you're the legal owner of those songs and those devices; the maximun authrized computers limitation may make you unable to access your songs in the future once they forget to deauthorize some computers; the maximun play times will make the purchased song useless in the future. In a word, the DRM protection affects the freedom of legal owners.

How to bypass DRM restriction

There are many methods to bypass DRM control on audio content.

One simple method is to record the music in real time when playing DRM music. However, this needs a lot of time. Second method, burn the audio file to a CD and then rip it into DRM-free files. This is only possible when the software that plays these DRM-restricted audio files allows CD-burning. However, burning needs physical discs and it may do harm to the CD writer after burning many times.

Perhaps inspired by the second method, some software products are designed to simplify and automate this burn-rip process by allowing the user to burn music to a CD-RW disc or to a Virtual CD-RW drive, then automatically ripping and encoding the music, and automatically repeating this process until all selected music has been converted, rather than forcing the user to do this one CD (72-80 minutes worth of music) at a time. TunePat is one of such virtual converting software products; and may be the best one.

 

TunePat DRM Music Converter