Protected Media Conversion Technology

This article speaks about past and present DRM media conversion techniques. Digital rights management technologies have changed in the last 10 years driving media software development to significantly higher level.

As you know, DRM provides access management for digital media. It's widely used by hardware and software manufacturers, copyright holders and publishers to limit the playback, copying and unauthorized distribution of their media suppressing digital piracy. The use of DRM is still remains very controversial. The opponents criticize DRM saying it causes problems for paid legitimate consumers initially violating their digital rights. Anyway most digital media stores e.g. Apple iTunes, CinemaNow, Napster and Rhapsody still distribute songs, movies, TV shows and audio books locked with DRM protection.

Fortunately, there's a number of proved ways to legally convert purchased music to a number of unprotected commonly-used MP3, WMA and M4A formats. So to say, not to violate but bypass DRM media protection. I can name several conversion techniques implemented by different DRM conversion software. All you can hear or see can be recorded. The protected media converters provide the way to re-record your songs, audio books and movies automatically and without significant output quality loss.

The predecessor of up-to-date DRM conversion technology was the method for creating digital recordings from analog sources, the oldest and most lossy method. It's usually called "Analog Audio Loop" method. "Analog Loop" based software can also require the special cord to connect line-in and line-out. The output sound quality here seriously depends on the playback scheme used. Another nowadays conversion technology called "Virtual Burning" is used by NoteBurner software. It's likely burning protected songs manually to physical audio CD and ripping them. But NoteBurner software captures DRM-protected data using the virtual CD-RW device and then rips the "virtual" CD to unprotected audio format. This method isn't CPU or memory consuming and can be reliable for protected audio conversion on slow computers.

The most popular, effective and lossless DRM media conversion technology is "Virtual Audio Device" method. The software based on this technology installs virtual soundcard device and re-records the sound signal through virtual speakers. The most popular converters on the market using "Virtual Audio Device" scheme are SoundTaxi, Tunebite and MuvAudio. Technically this kind of software can do the unlimited number of conversions at the same time installing bigger number of virtual speakers. On practice, the number of parallel conversions is limited by computer performance only. For example SoundTaxi installs virtual soundcard with 16 speakers and can perform up to 16 simultaneous conversions on a fast computer with quad core processor and plenty of RAM. To learn more about DRM software, read the full converter comparison.

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