i imported music from a CD and the music is protected. my burning program for my minidisk player doesnt let me burn it to a minidisk. i was wandering if there was a way to remove that protection once the music files have already been imported onto my hard drive?
What software did you use for "importing"? It sounds like not the CD is protected but the files on your HDD. (let me guess - WMA files "imported" with Windows Media Player?)
IIRC there is a tool to remove protection from some older type of WMA files, google for something like "WMA DRM removal" or similar.
To avoid such problems in future, either disable using protection when extracting CDs with WMA (the option is burried somewhere in the comfiguration menus) or - much better - use some free audio ripper like Exact Audio Copy (EAC) (setup guide available at afterdawn guides section) or CDEx. If you want to transfer the extracted audio to minidic, you don't want to use a lossy compressed format for intermediate storage on hard disc like WMA or MP3. If you have much storage space and/or don't need the files to stay permanently on your hard drive, use plain .wav, otherwise lossless compression like flac or monkey's audio. If you have a space problem that forces you to use lossy compression, use Ogg Vorbis (< 128kbps bitrates), musepack (mpc) (> 128kbps bitrates) or wavpack lossy (> 250kpbs bitrates, very good for transcoding to minidisk without quality loss). If you have or are planning to use standalone hardware capable of mp3 playback, use lame with some of the settings recommended in the sticky thread here - all software you need for what I mentioned is available for free from afterdawn software section and/or from http://www.rarewares.org .
The reason for all this trouble is that transcoding from one lossy format (WMA) to an other (ATRAC used on minidisc) results in transcoding artifacts. Using the software I mentioned above, you can reduce these artifacts (how much depends on codec/bitrate used for HDD storage).
