So my hard drive was dying, and I bought a new one. Installing a new hard drive gave me opportunity to do a fresh install of Windows. I installed a full version of XP Pro that I have rather than the OEM XP Home that came with the lappy.

iTunes gave me some trouble when I tried to play protected content. I had to authorize the computer, and everything plays just fine. The only problem with iTunes is that one of my five slots for authorized computers is filled with a nonexistent computer. I don’t expect I’ll ever have five computers at once, so the trouble will come if I fail to deauthorize a few more times when my hard drive crashes.

Windows Media Player is the worst. It just doesn’t play the songs. Who cares that I have the licenses backed up? WMP 11 doesn’t allow you to backup and restore licenses, so those files are now worthless.

Sony Connect is nearly as bad as WMP, but I haven’t reached the conclusion of the story, so it’s still possible that things will work out. Some time ago, I used the SonicStage Backup Utility to backup all the purchases from the Connect store. Safe, I considered myself. Ah, but when I tried to run the restore, I am told that I have to deauthorize the old computer. You’ll recall that the old computer is nonexistent. I thought it would be worth it to log in to the store anyhow, and see if I could do anything. Well, I can’t get to the store. When I click on that tab, I get an error that crashes the program. So who knows if I’ll ever be able to log into the store to deauthorize/authorize my computer.

Thankfully none of this is a real loss to me. I burned all these songs to audio cd, and then reripped them as plain vanilla mp3 files. So I have the music I bought (and, for the record, most of it wasn’t actually bought. I spent no money at the Sony store… it was all free gift cards I got with Sony products or other rewards programs. Most of the WMP songs were also obtained in some free prize fashion, but I know I bought at least a few tracks from WalMart’s music store. Three or four, maybe. I have bought several albums worth of songs from iTunes, but still most of the DRMed content I have with it is free downloads or gift certificate downloads. And I also used QTFairUse to rip off the DRM of most of what I bought).

But the fact that backing up my songs/licenses did absolutely nothing for me should be alarming. And bring attention to the failure of DRM. It’s supposed to keep people from stealing, but all it really does is give honest users a headache and probably make their purchases unplayable.

Everything I’ve downloaded from emusic plays just fine, by the way. They don’t DRM their stuff. And, if I had happened to have lost the data… I can still download every track that I’ve bought from them (unless their distribution deal with the label has changed, in which case they remove the songs from their store).