Money, Money and More Money!!

So I had purchased this MP3 player from the internet.

I had thought about the IPOD and the Zune. Both expensive.

While working out these days I see all kinds of music players on the arms of fellow YMCA'ers.
I thought there has GOT to be a way to put music on those non specific machines.

Bzzzz!

Wrong! Not an easy way, at least.

Walmart.com is BAD for songs. Any songs you BUY WILL BE DRM PROTECTED. Meaning you can not use them on any other system. Even though you PURCHASED IT!

Rhapsody.com is also bad for songs. Any songs you will BUY will be in .RAX format, also is DRM protected. Great.

So far Zero for two.

Ok. Enter in the google search for WMA converter to MP3 and Convert DRM protected music.
I found many websites willing to sell my a DRM converter for the low price of $14.99. I was able to find a very helpful website called SWITCH that helped me convert some WMA's to MP3's but was useless since I needed to remove the DRM protection. I tried another one called tunebite (I think) but it only let me do a 60 second download??? Who wants sixty seconds of music? That really helps... Not! So, I tried looking up NERO.com, again "pay me". No thanks!

Mind you I PAID FOR THE MUSIC ALREADY. Why do I need so much grief to play MY music on my son's IPOD?

Ok. So I was VERY tempted to download one of the DRM protectors that I saw, but it was the principal of the deal. I had already paid for the music. They didn't need anymore money.

It took SO LONG to download the tunebite software and so many of those VISTA flags kept popping up I am thinking with have a good chance of having some spy ware on our computer somewhere now. I will fix that later.

Ok. On with the story, I finally decided to see if I could convert my I tunes to MP3's.
I stubble on this wonderful site that describes how you convert a song to MP3 format by burning it to a disc and importing it back as a Mp3, Now I will have 2 of the same song, but at least one will be in the correct format. Sheeesh.

Needless to say 3.2 hours later, I have downloaded 1 song on two the Mp3 player.

Yippeee!