WMA DRM Problem

[Lord Rog]

Recently one of my friends copied her cd collection to my PC so that she could put them on her new 20GB mp3 player. This process took a couple of days and after it was finished and the files copied I found that many of them wouldn't play on her mp3 player. After some investigation I determined that the problem was that she left the copy protection checkbox ticked in Windows media player resulting in protected WMAs which are not supported by the player (un-protected ones are though).

So now I have several thousand tracks on my hard drive and deleting them and ripping them again will take a long time. So I was hoping that someone here may have a solution, I tried Google but couldn't find anything (other than recording them as wavs and re-encoding them, which would take longer than ripping them again).
Thanks.

P.S I am asking this for a legitimate purpose (I will not even be keeping a copy of most it as our music tastes differ), however if the mods judge this post to be on unsafe legal grounds I'm sorry and request that you remove it.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Recently one of my friends copied her cd collection to my PC so that she could put them on her new 20GB mp3 player. This process took a couple of days and after it was finished and the files copied I found that many of them wouldn't play on her mp3 player. After some investigation I determined that the problem was that she left the copy protection checkbox ticked in Windows media player resulting in protected WMAs which are not supported by the player (un-protected ones are though).

So now I have several thousand tracks on my hard drive and deleting them and ripping them again will take a long time. So I was hoping that someone here may have a solution, I tried Google but couldn't find anything (other than recording them as wavs and re-encoding them, which would take longer than ripping them again).
Thanks.

P.S I am asking this for a legitimate purpose (I will not even be keeping a copy of most it as our music tastes differ), however if the mods judge this post to be on unsafe legal grounds I'm sorry and request that you remove it.

I'm not sure about your local laws, but in more than a few countries, it's technically illegal to reverse-engineer the DRM like that, which is why you're not having any luck finding results about it on Google. You would have to look "underground" which I am not advocating in any way, nor would I tell you how to do it if I knew.

I'm afraid that, in this particular instance, your best bet would be to bite the bullet and re-rip the tracks without the DRM enabled.

[Lord Rog]

OK thanks for that, i'll see if I can enlist some other computer owners to help this time though so it won't take so long.