Napster songs onto iPod

June 27, 2006 11:47 AM

How do you get songs purchased on Napster into the iPod?

My girlfriend's dad bought a bunch of songs (over a 100 I think) on Napster, but wants to play them on his iPod. I believe there is some kind of DRM on these songs, I'm not sure which kind.

An idea I had was burning them as a CD, and then ripping them, but I doubt the artist's information would be retained. Help?

posted by jasmeet to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

If you're using iTunes on a Mac, the artist info will be retained. I would think that would also be true for iTunes on Windows, but I don't use Windows so I couldn't say.
posted by cribcage at 11:50 AM on June 27, 2006

Response by poster: I'm not even sure how songs purchased by napster work. Does napster have a player for them, like itunes is for itunes music store purchases? Will napster songs open and play fine in iTunes?
posted by jasmeet at 11:53 AM on June 27, 2006

Napster PDL (permanent download licensed) tracks are DRM'd wma files, playable in any direct-show capable media player, once they've been authenticated. Itunes, partly because it was written by apple, is not direct-show capable. Mostly it's not fully compatible with drm'd wma files out of spite/fear-of-competition.

You will have to burn the PDLs to CD, then re-rip them with your preferred ripper. Unless you can find a cd-text burning application, your track information will be lost.
posted by nomisxid at 12:04 PM on June 27, 2006

http://www.tunebite.com

Will work with napster files.
posted by Dreamghost at 12:34 PM on June 27, 2006

Yeah, Tunebite is probably the way to go. It's a pain in the as but best way to use download services with an iPod.
posted by Heminator at 12:35 PM on June 27, 2006

Replay Music will stream-rip the tracks (in real time, unfortunately) and automatically tag them. It takes a while and there is a miniscule loss of audio quality. But you keep the correct song metadata.

Otherwise, burn to CD then rip them into iTunes as MP3s or unprotected AACs. Unless you do it album by album as complete sets of recordings, you will lose the tags with this method.
posted by skylar at 2:15 PM on June 27, 2006

Not relevant to this question, but if anyone needs to do the opposite (remove DRM from iTunes songs): jHymn
posted by blag at 2:44 PM on June 27, 2006

Careful with the jHymn advice. It's excellent software, but Apple changed the DRM with iTunes 6 and any ITMS purchases you make with that version can't have the DRM removed by jHymn. Apparently you can find iTunes 5 various places on the web, but I understand you need to come up with an alternative iTunes ID as well, since the DRM is tied to your ID.

I also think iPods with the latest firmware won't work with earlier versions of iTunes, at least not once they're used once with iTunes 6.
posted by lhauser at 8:31 PM on June 27, 2006

Don't burn them to a cd; not with Windows Media Player 9, at least. It noticably degrades the quality (deliberately, IIRC). Better to use some audio program to record your sound card's output. (I like GoldWave, myself.)

Disclaimer: I haven't tried Windows Media Player 10; don't know if it does the same. Also, I couldn't get the burn function within Napster itself to work, so I had to use WMP on its own. Perhaps it's more well-behaved if you do it through Napster.
posted by equalpants at 10:58 PM on June 27, 2006

Muvaudio ($20 shareware) will convert these to DRM-free files that can be loaded on an iPod or other device that's incompatible with the DRM'ed WMA files that Napster, Yahoo! and the like send out.
posted by toxic at 11:19 PM on June 27, 2006

lhauser writes 'Careful with the jHymn advice ...'

I stand corrected. Thanks for the clarification.
posted by blag at 3:42 AM on June 28, 2006