All,

I have an Alpine 9831. I went to the wal-mart website and purchased some of those 88 cent songs, burned them to a cd, tried to play them in my Alpine and received the PROTECT error. I went to my owner's manual which gives this description of the error:

"A copy-protected WMA file was played back. You can only play back non-copy-protected files."

Looking on the wal-mart web site under trouble-shooting, they mention that the player needs to support Digital Rights Management (DRM) encryption.

Now did I do something wrong, or is this Alpine lacking DRM and therefore incompatible with online purchased music, or something else? I know it's a copy-protected song, but I paid for it and I thought I would be able to listen to it on a burned cd in my car.

Any ideas?

Thanks

 

I'm not sure what the answer is, But I would send an email for Alpine customer service for clarification.


Mitch

 

You didn't do anything wrong. The Alpine is lacking DRM and won't play purchased music (no matter where you purchase it from).

However, all is not lost.

The DRM in the song file should allow you to burn it to a music CD at least once (important, create a MUSIC CD, don't just burn the WMA directly to a data CD).

Once it is in a music CD format the DRM is gone, because the format on a music CD (basically a WAV file) has no facility to encode DRM in it.

You can now play the songs in your car.

If you want to put 100+ songs on a CD, take the music CD you just created and rip it to MP3 (or WMA if you prefer). Do this for any copy-protected songs you have and then burn them as a batch to a CD that you can play in the car.

I had to do this with some free tracks that I got from Napster when I originally signed up.

Yes, it's a pain, but we can't have people stealing music otherwise the record executives may have to downgrade from their Ferrari to a lowly Porsche.

 

Thanks for the replies. I will definitely contact Alpine about this and try to do what you said Craig, although I'm not 100% I know what you are saying. I should be able to figure it out.

Thanks,

Jerry

 

Feel free to PM me (or add to this thread) if you have any questions.