Thanks for the info a440, what you said is helpful. Although I had one of the first MD players way back, I'm a newbie to most of this stuff. Sorry, what I meant to ask is can you record the DRM'd music in realtime if you play it through the sound card optical out? In other words could you bypass the DRM by using the optical out of the PC? From my understanding of what you said, there is negligible difference between the quality of the track if you take off the DRM wrapper and record the resulting wav in realtime to your MD or you transfer the resulting wav (or converted mp3/wma) through SonicStage. Thanks again.