While reading an article in the Economist about France's iTunes law, I started thinking about the current state of affairs for 'liberating' DRM'd music (DMCA aside for the moment) - burn to a CD and then rip it back off with your choice of compression. The goal of France's law (although most likely not the outcome) is to make DRM music more like a CD - it'll work on anyone's player, regardless of manufacture.

This made me think about CD's and virtual CD's (such as mounted Nero Drive Images).

My thought was this: with sufficiently clever programming, would it be possible to present a virtual CD-R to the a DRM-honoring application - thereby allowing it to 'burn' to the virtual device. Then, at the other end (and most usefully, simultaneously) a software compressor would take the bits back off. This would speed things up (creating in essence REALLY fast CD-R devices for presentation to the burning software), and, in theory allow for quick scrubbing of DRM.

Mind you this is a theoretical question, I do not use DRM music of any kind, but am interested if there's any specific technical reasons which would prevent this sort of bit streaming and re-compressing.

I'm interested in anyone's thoughts. If this post is deemed to piratical for the board administrator's tastes, I completely understand if it is removed. I'm simply curious about the subject.

-Zeke

Certainly possible. Not much better than the total recorder option. Unfortunatly, you're adding another layer of audio compression. You could use lossless compression, but then you've increased the size of the file by a factor of 10.

Matthew

Virtual CDR is a GREAT idea! Wow.

What's the "Total Recorder" solution? Something like Messer which records real-time audio passing through the sound card directly to MP3? That can "rip DRM" only as fast as playback speed; akin to taping a song off the radio.

A virtual CDR + Ripper could "rip DRM" as fast as the slower of the two, likely the writing end, something like 16x.

I wonder if the CD needs to be finalized before ripping can begin. That would smash the "simultaneous" idea.

What if you did virtual-DVD-Audio with some specification that allowed 4.7gig of 44.1kHz,16bit,stereo audio. That would allow ripping of 548 minutes of audio in one step, instead of 74 minutes at a time.

A virtual CD-R or virtual audio device may well be the best you can do, but it introduces the problem of doubling up your compression artifacts. Every time you compress, you reduce quality. The ideal solution is something like jhymn, which doesn't work with current iTunes 6 builds. With iTunes 5.x, all it did was strip off the DRM crap, converting the m4p files to m4a, retaining all the sonic quality (or lack thereof) from the original.

Dan, a fewt things about this idea seemed to set it apart from other DRM cleansing techniques like jhymn or DVD John's early efforts. First, it would be program agnostic - it's not tied to a specific DRM technique, and second is potential speed - you'd be limited by the re-encode speed, not write speed. Third, it would not require (at least in the US) illegal manipulation of DRM'd files (thanks to the DCMA - which I hope will eventually struck down as a violation of fair use); you're simply virtualizing an already allowed output medium.

That it could operate on long file lists without human intervention would be a plus as well (at least for DRM hosting software that allows multiple-CD burns from one long list).

It would seem to be (because of the requisite loss in quality) a very fair analog to home casette recording.

-Zeke