Converting DRM Protected WMA to MP3 - Other Processes
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The process is broadly similar in all of them: put your new audio CD in your CD drive and tell your software to rip it. Sticking with Media Player for the time being, this option is easily selectable by clicking the "Rip" tab. This, unsurprisingly, opens the Rip window, and you can simply click the Rip Music button to get started.
However, it’s worth taking a moment to set your ripping options. To do this, click Media Player’s tools menu and choose options. Selecting the Rip Music tab provides options for where you want to put your ripped audio files and what format to rip to. The location is a matter of choice – the default My Documents is good for many people, but others might prefer to rip straight onto their USB-connected MP3 player if it shows up as a hard drive in Windows. Other people will have external hard drives on which they store their music. Once you’ve decided on a suitable location, clicking on the File Name button opens a dialog in which you can tell Windows precisely how you want it to name your ripped tracks.
When considering the Rip settings, the first thing to decide is which format to rip to. The choices will depend on what software you are using and what audio codecs are installed on your computer. (Codecs are pieces of software designed to encode and decode digital data.) Media Player typically offers a choice of WMA and MP3. Since we started out with WMA files, it probably makes sense to rip to an alternate format, so MP3 is the obvious choice here.
It is also necessary to decide on an Audio Quality setting. The thing to weigh up here is that, due to the compression involved in encoding audio to WMA and MP3, better quality results in bigger files. It’s also worth bearing in mind that you started out with compressed WMA files. Burning these to CD hasn’t miraculously restored these to full quality, so there’s little point in ripping to a quality level vastly greater than the one you started with. Choosing the quality setting is simply a matter of moving the slider to the desired point on the scale. In this example we’re ripping to MP3 at a quality setting of 192Kbps, which is a decent all-around setting.
Now it’s time to hit the Rip Music button. When you do so, Media player will ask you if you want to include copy protection in your ripped files. Whether you do so is up to you, but your files will be compatible with a wider range of devices if you choose not to. You must also confirm that you understand the copyright implications of ripping your music. However, since you started with licensed files this shouldn’t be an issue. So click OK and let the ripping commence. Once the process has finished, you should find the newly created MP3 files in your chosen directory. In part two of this article I’ll go on to take a look at the audio recording method of WMA to MP3 conversion.
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