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FairUse – Strip playforsure and Janus WMP 10/11 DRM from Audio and Video

Published on April 19th, 2007
Category: Audio and Video, Hacks, Utilities
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In two of my previous posts, I wrote stripping the FairPlay DRM from iTunes files with hymn and QTFairPlay. Last year, something happened that was even more groundbreaking than the FairPlay exploit. Another talented group of people cracked the Windows Media Player DRM!

Why is this so important? The WMP DRM, also known as Janus, is “The DRM.” Most companies utilize it to protect their multimedia content from easy piracy. This is the DRM behind “playforsure” and “To Go” technologies found in many portable audio players. This does not just disrupt the peace of the music industry. It shakes the ground of the motion picture industry! Online music stores like Napster and MusicMatch to online rental sites like CinemaNow and MovieLink have been affected. With the unlimited “buffet-type” music subscription plans like with Rhapsody, you can download the multi-million song database, convert the files to MP3, and distribute them online! With online movie rental sites, you can download flicks for a mere 2 dollars, strip the DRM, and torrent it!
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Music Brainz – Automatic Mass MP3 ID3 Tagging

Published on April 12th, 2007
Category: Audio and Video, Cool Stuff, Entertainment, Utilities
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The landscape of the music entertainment industry has never been the same since the late 1990s. A new form of audiophile music distribution using MP3s, Napster, Winamp, CD Ripping, and CD Burning contributed to this change. Unfortunately, with this new music revolution, we also had to deal with the byproducts of unlabeled files. One of my pet peeves is when I see an audio file mislabeled -or worse – not labeled at all. I can’t stand it when some of my MP3s are generically tagged as “Track 4” by “Unknown Artist.” I even have to make sure that the album graphics cover, in addition to the track information, shows while it is playing on my computer and portable multimedia player.

Whether or not your music was legally or illegally obtained by file sharing, CD ripping, or iTunes purchasing, it is still vulnerable to the danger of not having a label. Usually, the number of unlabeled files slowly accumulates. Then, it becomes a pain to actually hand edit each and every unlabeled file.
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JDiskReport – Discover What Files and Folders Take Up the Most the Disk Space

Published on March 28th, 2007
Category: Utilities
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I’m undergoing a disk space crisis! My home server’s free disk space is starting to near the 1 GB mark. To top that off, my laptop the regularly shows the “Low Disk Space” alert. For my home computer, this catastrophe was likely caused by a mixture of downloading Linux *.ISO files, editing video, and following a ridged backup schedule. But, for the life of me, I couldn’t understand how I could use all 40 GB of disk space on my notebook computer. I mean, I only use it for work. Plus, every time I need to save something, I just transfer the files over my home network or the Internet to my server in my room. So, there shouldn’t be any reason for the “Low Disk Space” bubble warning to appear at anytime! But that ominous warning has become as commonplace as a pop-up advertisement.
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