Zune question

A friend of mine is having some truble with the songs she downloaded from the Zune marketplace.

Apparently, she was at a friend's house the first time she installed the program. In the process, of course she had to register her acount online. one part of the registration, is to connect the Zune to the computer and tell it to "make this computer the home computer" or something like that. Well, she did this and then continued to buy songs on the Zune market place and save them to her Zune. When she went home, she did the same thing, only when the Zune made HER computer the main computer, it erased the songs from the Zune. Now when ever she goes to the marketplace to redownload the songs, it has it recorded that, "yes you did purchase these and download them," but she cannot redownload the songs. If anyone has an answer to this problem of redownloading songs from a different computer than that in which the origonal download was made, I would appretiate it, and so would she. Thanks.

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Welcome to the wonderful world of DRM (digital rights management), the whole point of which is to make it impossible to 'share' music like this and lock it to a device.

From a technical point of view I doubt that there is anything you can do about it, other than contacting Microsoft and convincing them to help you out...

Or wait till the next fimware release the DRM / Zune thing is well documented - www.zunescene.com

There's no wonder illegal music downloads are so popular.

Legally downloading music is much more of a ballache. If I download a song I want to play it on any of my PCs. I might even want to burn it to a CD so I can listen to it in the car.

Why do people have the right to take our money then stop us from legally using what we've paid for?

</rant>

I agree with GfK, I'd hate to buy a song / album only to be restricted to one device I can hear it on.

Imagine buying a DVD film, watching it, then a few month later you buy a new DVD player. Upon watching the film again you're told "No!, buy it again for this DVD player".

My biggest pet peeve is that the music industry want it *both* ways: first of all they claim that they aren't actually selling you the CD with songs, but that they are merely licensing them to you so they are 'entitled' to restrict how you use them. Yet at the same time, if your CD/DVD/whatever physical media breaks, you're not entitled to a low-cost replacement media.

Why not? the cost of pressing the CD are next to nothing, and they just claimed that I didn't buy the CD, but merely licensed its content.

As far as DRM is concerned -- it really does look like a practical joke on everyone, doesn't it? all it does is ensure that someone who pirates content has a significantly better user experience than a legitimate customer who actually buys the content. Pirates aren't hindered by these restrictions, but paying customers are. The real reason isn't to fight piracy -- it's to force people to pay over and over again for the same songs just because they want to be able to listen to them in their car / at their computer / wherever as well...

Well I have an account with MSN Music. I have about 200 songs that I bought which i can't play on my new PC. When i tried to play them on my new PC it told me that I had run out of credits for the songs.

Basically MSN Music gives you credits for each song you buy. You get a total of 3 credits per song.

If you format your PC you will have to use a credit in order to get the music to play on your system again.

Because Windows is the best operating system in the world, I had to format my computer 4 times in a 12 month period due to OS failures and crashing. As you might have guest I have run out of credits.

I now have a ton of Music that i bought from MSN that I can never play again, ever. UNLESS, I buy further credits costing 50p per song or convince MS that I legitimately formatted my PC or ran out of credits because of OS problems.

I tried telling them that I formatted and they told me it was highly unlikely that I would have needed to format my PC 4 times in 12 months. They told me they would do me a discount on each song and let me buy the credits for 47p.

Naturally I told them that they could shove there Music businness so far up their jacksies that everytime they went toilet it would play the top 20.

If no one believes this I would happily give my account details to a trusting person for them to log in to MSN MUsic and have a loiok for themselves.

I must say though that I'm quite enjoying my new friend mp3 p2p friend. :)

Amon: You're supposed to back up your licenses before formatting your PC. Of course few people actually know about that (or even know how), so the end result in many cases is exactly what you ran into. :-?

Heh, I did backup my licenses. It didn't make a difference. When i tried to load the license file in MediaPlayer it would load it but still require me to use up a credit to play the song. :/

I will NEVER buy Zune or Ipod if it's that hard to actually listen the music!

My prediction:
The first group to use a technology like Pandora Internet Radio to create an easier - optionally automatic - music download system that works without a PC will win hands down :)

Download via a particular PC -> Audio player is a horrible way to do things, and it is very strange that nobody is interested in avoiding it.

So, what are peoples recommendations for a nice DRM free MP3 player. Something that can play .ogg's + .wma's would be nice.

The Creative Zen MP3 players are excellent. Support for tons of formats, etc.

Zen M is good, but if you find they have a new one coming about, I would wait. The current one comes with a case and all, but definitely could use a nicer screen. (The current one is scratchy and a tad dark).

There's also the Zen Vision, which has a huge screen and doesn't have the idiotic "touch strip" interface. ...And "Zen Portable Media Center"... which I think is either the successor or the predecessor of Zen Vision. I'm not paying much attention, so can't be sure.

Err... here, this clears it up.
Now all it needs is a homebrew community and a touch screen!

Just keep in mind that there are several flavors of .WMA, some of which do have DRM embedded in them which means that that whatever device place them will impose restrictions on those songs...

If you're interested in DRM-free music, it's safer to steer clear of WMA altogether whenever you have a choice.

Priceless. Sorry about your troubles, but that litterally made me LOL.

I like iRiver. Their products that is, not their website. I don't particularly care for their website.

I had a 20 min phone argument with steam about this sort of thing.
Half life said you needed access to the internet, which I do. It DID NOT SAY you need internet access on the computer you want to run it on did they? (Clue No). Only reason I got the internet was to play Half life2

So in other words: There's nothing I can tell her that will help except, "contact microsoft"?

Well you could try "You should have bought an iPod like everyone else". :o>

Everybody knows that Zune sucks because it puts EVERYTHING into a DRM-container, even media that originally was without DRM.

The iPod does NOT do that; my girl friend's iPod Video plays all mp3s that we stored on it and also all sorts of movies (which we had to convert from DivX or XVid to H.264 first). No DRM got added to those files. So you don't have that kind of CRAP with Apple, as long as you do not buy from the iTunes Music Store. And even if you use iTunes to rip a CD, it won't DRM-CRAP to it. So if you just use the hardware and stick with the supported formats, the baby plays everything without hassle.

For the Zune... The magazines where full about CRAP in Zune before the toy even hit the shelves, so nobody can now say they didn't know it would harrass its customers. Sorry.

And best of all -- it's only "unique" feature (other than locking down all your files, even in the case of previously unlocked MP3's) is that you can 'squirt' (what marketing genius thought up that name? a tune to any of the three other zune owners in North America... those tunes then automatically expire after either three days or three plays, whichever comes first. Except now the large music companies have announced that they will lock down part of their library to prohibit even that, so about half the tunes out there are going to be 'unsquirtable'.

in short, like Flameduck said: "You should have bought an iPod like everyone else"

I see... thanks everyone.

>Because Windows is the best operating system in the world,
>I had to format my computer 4 times in a 12 month period
>due to OS failures and crashing.

Check your memory and replace if needed.

Andy