Ouch: Nokia’s Comes With Music DRM Gets Sidestepped
A sad day for Nokia's Comes With Music service.
Here’s three fun facts for today:
-Nokia’s Comes with Music service uses Microsoft’s DRM.
-An application called Tunebite can strip Microsoft’s DRM from Comes with Music files.
-Comes With Music comes with unlimited music downloads.
D’oh!
Yep, the fate of Nokia’s highly-trumpeted music downloading service is (potentially) in the hands of a little application called Tunebite. The software silently “plays back” a DRM’ed music file, re-records it, and spits it back out in whatever format you choose, DRM-free. According to the product page, it’s done at 54x speed so waiting doesn’t seem like an issue. What might be an issue, however, is the price: the software actually costs $26.90 USD.
In case you haven’t been following Nokia’s developments in the music industry, Comes with Music is an unlimited music service that comes with the purchase of certain Nokia cell phones (right now only the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic). Of course, there’s some caveats, such as the service being free/unlimited only for the first year (and no one seems to know what happens after that). But either way, it’s a radical new change from traditional music sales, and especially on mobile devices.
The big question now seems to be – how much will this really affect the Comes With Music bottom line? An article on Yahoo! Finance raises an interesting point: a typical user probably won’t know or care enough to purchase the software and run through the necessary hoops (ie re-encoding songs) to get the DRM-free music. And the smarter “superusers” probably wouldn’t even bother getting the service, since they’d be able to get their music for free through easier methods.
Well actually, this Tunebite it’s an universal converter, so it works for other files, not only for the drm’ed ones.I’ve been using it to convert between various formats so I could use my files on the devices I needed.I don’t find it that expensive,cause it’s legal,it doesn’t crack the drm’ed files, it just re records them at high speed so u should be on the safe side when using it.