Jan 23 2006
I have had it with Protected WMA
First I tried Napster, it was okay but their client sucked especially when syncing to my Treo as it would always hang up, then I tried Yahoo Music, the interface for their store was pathetic, unless you knew exactly what you were looking for then you were SOL and finally I tried Real Rhapsody.
I was happy with Rhapsody up until this morning as it offered the most iTunes like experience but this morning I went to listen to the songs I had synced to my Treo only to be told that no valid license could be located and I would need to sync again to update the licenses, WTF? I was listening to the songs fine yesterday so all I can guess is that after I synced with my Powerbook last night it invalidated all the licenses for some reason.
All in all the experience offered by the iTunes + iPod competitors is nowhere near up to par and I aI may just ahve to give up my dream of having (legal) music on my Treo and instead jerry rig something onto my iTunes to get my purchased songs over to my Treo. Why do I want to use my Treo? Well I’m being nice and letting the girlfriend use my iPod and the Treo works especially well for when I am doing my training rides as incoming calls will interrupt my music so I don’t miss any calls.
If you want an iTunes solution, you can use JHymn (http://www.hymn-project.org/jhymndoc/). It downloads the keys from apple for your music and decrypts the songs. It may not be WMA, but that’s all I could think of.
That doesn’t work with iTunes 6 yet though and unfortunately I have already upgraded. I don’t care about it being WMA, I just want a format that I can play on my Treo, I wish Apple would license their DRM already…