Windows – Digital Music Rights – content usage rights

audiogroove-musicvlc-media-playerwindows media player

I recorded all of my CD's by burning them onto my PC with Windows Media Player. I have all of the .wma files and they cannot be opened by any media source I've tried, be it Groove Music or VLC or Windows Media Player.

I'm told by;

VLC PLayer – Could not demux ASF stream:
DRM protected streams are not supported.
VLC can't recognize the input's format:

Windows Media Player – encountered a problem while playing the file.

Groove Music says – Try playing this with a different player. This application doesn't have content usage rights.

I've looked and looked for a solution and I can't find what I'm looking for. I'm quite a novice regarding digital music, and I really want to play my cd's.

Best Answer

In WMP's Options, on the Rip Music tab, there's a checkbox called Copy protect music. I assume that this checkbox is/was ticked on your system, causing WMP to add DRM protection to all .wma files that are ripped from CD. As a result, these files can't be played anymore when the required DRM licenses aren't present anymore, for example, after switching to a new PC.

The only solution is to untick Copy protect music and rip the CDs again.

Related Solutions

Windows – Load M3U in Windows Media Player

It seems that WMP doesn't know how to handle such M3U files, even though they are valid according to the M3U specification. However, you can instead right-click the folder in Explorer and select Play with Windows Media Player.

How to save asf/asx/mms audio file to disk (previous suggestions don’t work)

At long last, I worked out how to do it using ffmpeg. The process was: open the http...asx file in a text-editor, copy the mms...asf URL, and replace mms with rtsp. Then pass the URL to ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -rtsp_transport tcp \
-i rtsp://copper.jolf.jp/1242/sugawara/130106sugawara.asf myFile.mp3

This downloads it and converts to an mp3. It works on Ubuntu 16.04 using ffmpeg version 2.8.11-0ubuntu0.16.04.1. Other platforms and versions are probably OK too.

Slowness

Each second of the file/stream takes one second to download, so it is very slow.

Near the end, ffmpeg pauses for several minutes and then continues and finishes properly. With the file/stream above, the downloading always takes 4 minutes and 12 seconds longer than the duration of the file. (Can anyone explain this or how to avoid it?)

I thought it might be possible to avoid the pause by using -stimeout 10000 ("set socket TCP I/O timeout in microseconds"), but that made no difference. You can do -t -27:00 ("stop writing the output after its duration reaches duration") but that doesn't solve the problem.

Here is a way to find the duration of the file without having to stream it:

ffprobe -rtsp_transport tcp \
rtsp://copper.jolf.jp/1242/sugawara/130106sugawara.asf

Other notes

For the reason why -rtsp_transport tcp is necessary, see here.

I recommend using -hide_banner to make the ffmpeg output shorter.

If you want to just save the file without converting, use -codec copy.

At some point I did these commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mc3man/gstffmpeg-keep 
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg

But I don't know whether that was necessary. The advice I was following is here; see also here.

I tried libav, which is similar to ffmpeg and has many of the same options. But it was harder to use and doesn't work with the options above.

Why did other solutions not work?

First it was necessary to find the mms URL and replace mms with rtsp.

I think the reason VLC and other applications didn't work was that the file/stream uses a proprietary Windows Media Audio codec that is not available in those applications.

When you stream it in Windows Media Player, the properties say the audio codec is Windows Media Audio V8, but when you use ffmpeg it says it is using the wmav2 codec. It seems that the ffmpeg developers reverse-engineered version 2 and not version 8, but the two versions are compatible.