htrdlnc said:
Maybe this has been here before, maybe not. Someone one another board has said that this program "SOund Taxi" removes the DRM protection from sound files. If this is true then can you use this to get more songs onto the hard drive??
Just asking.
The problem with getting the files on to the hard drive is not necessarily the DRM, it's the drive itself.
First it's locked, which we already know how to overcome. It's not free, the service that we used is $50 for one unlock and unless you go in and disable the security features of the drive then it will relock when you put it back into the unit. But we got that far.
Second is the format. It's not MP3, but that AT3 or whatever is avaialbe and someone could write a program to convert any audio file to the AT3 format. So it's not a drag and drop thing, there would be a conversion that would need to take place.
The last problem is the directory structure of the hard drive itself. It's layed out so there can be 1000 albums loaded. It also seems to put a lot of "extra" files around. When you just convert the MP3 to At3 and move it to the hard drive, the Z1 won't see it. When you rip the CD to the hard drive, not only does it convert the file, but it adds extra files as kind of a table of contents or play list if you will. We would need to create a program to look at the layout of the MP3's on a hard drive, convert the files to the Z1's format and then also create the necessary extra files and load them all in the right place.
Is this possible, I think so, but since we are having trouble getting the Z1 to run off a different drive than stock, I think work stalled on this application.