Burning through Virgin Digital's collection (The DRM saga Part 4)

First time visitor? Catch up (don't worry they're short): Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

This time I got a little unexpected help from one of my favorite pieces of software, VMware. Because of this, the method outlined here will:
- Take up a bit more hard drive space than previous methods
- Run from any operating system that runs VMware, like Linux!

If you would like to reformat your hard drive and install a fresh copy of Windows XP, you can skip to step 3 and also skip step 8.

1. Download and install VMware

2. Inside of VMware, install a fresh copy of Windows XP. The following steps take place inside of the VMware Windows XP installation.

3. Find an old Virtuosa 5.0 on your favorite P2P network and install that.
MD5 Hash of my installer: 6D11D11A80894B56BEBF84A8AA9844C5

4. If you want to convert to MP3, download the latest version of the LAME encoder to make the files encode much faster. Put the "lame_enc.dll" in your Virtuosa\Plugins\MpgL3 folder replacing the one that is already there. When I posted this, the latest version was lame3.97, and that is what I used.

5. Download and install Virgin Digital. Sign up for the 14 day trial and stay on for only $7.99/month. Please support this great service!

6. Load downloaded Virgin Digital protected WMAs into Virtuosa

7. Select all of your files in the "Music and Movie Database" and go to "File>Convert To"

-In the "File Format Conversion" window:
a. Choose an output format (MP3/WAV)
b. Choose an output directory
c. Click the check mark

8. If you're running VMware from Windows, use VMware's drag and drop features to drag your files out of VMware and onto your normal installation. If you're running it from Linux, get the files off of your virtual machine in one of hundreds of geekilicous ways. Then set a Snapshot of your virtual machine with Virgin Digital and Virtuosa all set up for each future conversions.

9. Enjoy your MP3s anywhere or burn WAVs to a CD!

[Update: March 25th, This method no longer works.]


22 Mar 05 | +Permalink+ | Comments (585) | TrackBack (1)