Nokia Comes With Music DRM circumvented

Posted by Al Warmington on Thu 11 Dec 2008

Another DRM bites the dust

Nokia Comes with Music seems like a generous offer: as much free music as you can download for a whole year, and tracks that can be kept as long as you like without paying a repeat subscription. That’s not generous enough for some though, so software maker Tunebite has come up with a workaround that’ll unlock your tracks forever.

Nokia’s restrictions do not limit your ability to play back the tracks on your computer or Nokia phone after you’ve downloaded them. However, the DRM that is in place will prevent you copying them around willynilly, making backups or using them on unauthorised handsets and computers.

Tunebite removes the DRM, making it possible to move and copy tracks as much as you like. It does this not by hacking the DRM itself, but by playing and re-recording the songs silently in the background. It’s a fairly blunt way of doing things and because it’s using lossy encoding to record something that already uses a lossy format, you’re going to going to lose some of the quality. It may not be enough to notice of course.

So is this a fair practise? We, alongside 99% of anyone who’s ever shuddered at the term ‘Digital Rights Management’, are wholeheartedly against the idea of restricting where and when you can play your music. So arguably Tunebite is merely taking what’s yours and making it more useful. On the other hand, Comes With Music isn’t really that kind of deal. It’s not having an all-you-can-eat music buffet, but merely giving you the chance to enjoy as much music as you want for the period of your contract, and then throwing in a few extra months (as long as it takes for you to upgrade your PC and handset and lose it all again) pro bono. In a sense, it doesn’t feel like you’re actually paying for the individual tracks and it’s not clear how much, if any, of Comes With Music revenue gets back to the artists.

At £17.50, we doubt too many people are going to take up the chance to hang onto their Comes With Music downloads ad infinitum. If Nokia’s service is in any way successful then no doubt other companies will start offering similar and pretty soon you’ll have no idea what you’ve downloaded from where. In a hilarious irony too, Tunebite itself has been hacked and pirated and is showing up on Bit Torrent networks.

What does make it worth ponying up for is the fact that Tunebite can do more than just unDRM Comes With Music tracks. In fact, it’ll do it for just about anything – videos, music, audiobooks, movies - and it’s design means it can perform this task no matter which download service you’ve used.

Link: Tunebite (via ElectricPig)

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User Comments

By jimmystrong

12|12|2008 13:04

Well, I don't really see what the big deal is, nor does it come as a surprise to me that this service has that nasty drm. It's been years since this Tunebite software is on the market, way before this service appeared and I for one think it's by far the best solution used by those who wanna enjoy their legally bought music on any of their devices, rather than be tied down to the authorized few devices or even worse lose the music because the music stores stop their servers like it happened just this summer. The best part I think is that, among the softs that are on the market these days, this one does it all legally, as you said, by re recording your already legally purchased files and does not in any way mess with the drm.

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