Got a friend that has a Win 8 tower, ripped more than 250+ CDs using WMPlayer in WMA format (not my choice – I would have done it in MP3, but he just used the default settings in WMP). Everything worked fine, until he decided he wanted a new laptop as his primary machine and he wanted his music on it.
He bought his new laptop, a Win8.1 system, and tried to do a Windows Easy Transfer using a portable USB hard drive, and the transfer failed when he tried putting the data on the new laptop (corrupt file). So he just copied all his documents and music from his tower to the portable drive, and then re-copied them from the portable drive to the new laptop drive. (thats 2 copies – the first one to the portable drive, and the second to the new laptop)
Now the vast majority of his WMA files on the new laptop wont play, when he tries, he got a very confusing message about IE not being up to date, but the URL references DRM issues. I understand totally MS’s desire to protect the content, but this guy owns his music, and is just moving it from one system to another. We cant go back to the old Tower, its been recovered and data blown away. We do have the corrupt Easy Transfer file and the first copy on the portable drive.
As I understand DRM, it allows only 1 copy of a Music file. But this guy owns the music – isnt there a way around this? What if he wants to make an archive copy of the music AND put it on an iPod or MP3 Player/smart phone? Is this not possible either?
Short of re-ripping every CD, is there a way around this situation? Hes not pirating the music, hes just upgraded his system. This has to have been seen before, with some sort or workaround. I actually think that this is a MS issue, especially since they are pushing us to get off old OSes in favor of Win 8 and 10, and that usually means new hardware. but I doubt that they will take any responsibility for it, or recommend a solution, even though if Easy Transfer had worked, this might have never happened.
What do you experts say? do you know of a workaround – hopefully one that can be applied to the entire Music directory in a single swoop, instead of file-by-file? Again, its not pirating, its just a simple system upgrade.
