DRM and converting problems of own recordings

[dikkebucht]

hi everyone.

i used a hi-md recorder to record interviews in Hi-SP and Hi-LP format. i've been traveling trough central america. i backed a lot of recordings on a computer somewhere in guatemala and backed up to a hard disk.

now, i have some problems, and although the info here is abundant i can't find my solution...

can't play back my ATRACS on different computers (probably unintencionally use of DRM??), the famous 0000010d error.

but i can't convert them either to another format (not with SonicStage, probably again DRM)

himdrenderer gives me a

ERROR:[1830-3-0]: Failed to connect to a Sony OMG/OMA filter

is this due to DRM too?

i used sonicstage 4.3 and himdrenderer 0.54

does this mean that even though all of these recordings are mine i will only be able to play them on that specific computer in guatemala ( ............... i´m from Europe.. ) ??

so i´m either looking for a way to strip DRM of mi own files, or to convert to another format/codec so i can use different programs.........or i miss the point at all in my guessings and it´s a different problem.......

hope someone has a solucion!!!!

tnx!!!!

[Strungup]

That is a Sonic Stage issue , With Macintosh you use MD Transfer 2.0 and anything imported comes in as a .wav file , (Larger files yes , but completely transferable to editing software ) and immediately convertable to mp3 , ogg, whatever .

Edited August 26, 2007 by Guitarfxr

[raintheory]

See here: http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=16088

Edited August 27, 2007 by raintheory

[dikkebucht]

See here: http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=16088

thanx for the replies, but the problem is that i have all these recordings saved on a external harddisk in atrac files. i can't save everything again this time directly to wave because i don't have the recordings on disk anymore. i have a lot of atrac files which won't play on any computer and and which i can't convert to wav in sonicstage because it doesn't allow me to do that. same problem with himdrenderer...........

??

really don't know what to do here.... tnx!!

[greenmachine]

Unfortunately all uploaded ATRAC files are DRM'd by default and can only be used / converted by the PC / Windows installation where they have been originally uploaded to as far as I know.

[alexis]

Well, I think I may know a solution: you may manually extract the DRM key from the DRM'd oma files and add them manually to your library's maclist and add dummy library entries to these keys. This should trick SonicStage into thinking that these files were recorded by it, so it would allow playback and conversion. This is file surgery however and may take excessive time and care to perform, as know no tool capable of doing this automatically. I think any good Hex editor would be sufficient for the job.

Maybe some of our programming-talented fellows here would care to write a small Windows/Mac utility performing these tasks? I am a programmer myself, but I am not versed into Windows programming (more board computers of military aircraft). I think however that such a "oma ripping utility" would be highly useful for the Hi-MD community.

I'll try to ge-gather the information I once collected about these topics, but it should easily be possible to find it again googling for "MACLIST" or "OMA FILE FORMAT" or "HMA FILE FORMAT".

[Strungup]

Well, I think I may know a solution: you may manually extract the DRM key from the DRM'd oma files and add them manually to your library's maclist and add dummy library entries to these keys. This should trick SonicStage into thinking that these files were recorded by it, so it would allow playback and conversion. This is file surgery however and may take excessive time and care to perform, as know no tool capable of doing this automatically. I think any good Hex editor would be sufficient for the job.

Maybe some of our programming-talented fellows here would care to write a small Windows/Mac utility performing these tasks? I am a programmer myself, but I am not versed into Windows programming (more board computers of military aircraft). I think however that such a "oma ripping utility" would be highly useful for the Hi-MD community.

I'll try to ge-gather the information I once collected about these topics, but it should easily be possible to find it again googling for "MACLIST" or "OMA FILE FORMAT" or "HMA FILE FORMAT".

Storm ,... that is a Smashingly good idea , from all the troubles I have read this is one of the particulates that keep getting in peoples eyes.

I am not a programmer but issues like this makes me wish I was.

[A440]

Until someone breaks Sony's encryption, which no one has been able to do in the lifetime of minidisc--there have been hex editor attempts before, which can be found by searching these forums--the only entity that can possibly help you with those files is Sony. Contact them and explain. They may be able to un-encrypt what has been encrypted. But don't get your hopes up. They may help, they may not, and/or it may be expensive.

http://www.sonymediaservices.com/

In future, you can make files portable by using the File Conversion Tool, in the link raintheory posted, on everything that you have uploaded. I am in the habit of uploading and then immediately running File Conversion Tool with "Add Copyright Protection" unchecked. It removes the DRM and gives you .oma files (ATRAC) that can be played in any SonicStage or converted by HiMDRenderer.

If your hard disc can be reconnected to the original computer, and will still play the files on that computer, you can still run File Conversion. Otherwise, they're locked.

[alexis]

Look at this post from this topic.

[A440]

storm shadow, I would personally be overjoyed if someone could finally do this. Maybe you're the one with sophisticated enough skillz.

The particular post you reference was the high point of optimism that the DRM could be defeated at the time. However, in that post there's this:

"Any "hack" or utility that wants to copy OMA data, restriction-free, from HiMD (or to transfer OMG/OMA files from PC to PC) will have to factor in all of this.. plus maybe more that I haven't come across yet."

And then there were 6 months of dead ends in the thread after that.

No one would be more delighted than I would if .hma files could be decoded. I've got 8 hours of music messed up by one hardware glitch, sitting in a useless .hma file on a disc. But ATRAC isn't the iPhone--there's not a worldwide incentive to crack it. Please, prove me wrong...

[alexis]

storm shadow, I would personally be overjoyed if someone could finally do this. Maybe you're the one with sophisticated enough skillz.

...

No one would be more delighted than I would if .hma files could be decoded. I've got 8 hours of music messed up by one hardware glitch, sitting in a useless .hma file on a disc. But ATRAC isn't the iPhone--there's not a worldwide incentive to crack it. Please, prove me wrong...

Well, I could try to program some stuff that does the trick described in the post I mentioned (which does not unlock an OMA file, but merely makes it playable on a foreign machine), but all I would produce is a command-line program written in Ada (fortunately, this would be available for Windows, Macintosh and Linux). Let's see if I can do it, but really I can't promise anything.

[alexis]

This one is interesting too.

[a_mastermind]

hi everyone.

i used a hi-md recorder to record interviews in Hi-SP and Hi-LP format. i've been traveling trough central america. i backed a lot of recordings on a computer somewhere in guatemala and backed up to a hard disk.

now, i have some problems, and although the info here is abundant i can't find my solution...

can't play back my ATRACS on different computers (probably unintencionally use of DRM??), the famous 0000010d error.

but i can't convert them either to another format (not with SonicStage, probably again DRM)

himdrenderer gives me a

ERROR:[1830-3-0]: Failed to connect to a Sony OMG/OMA filter

is this due to DRM too?

i used sonicstage 4.3 and himdrenderer 0.54

does this mean that even though all of these recordings are mine i will only be able to play them on that specific computer in guatemala ( ............... i´m from Europe.. ) ??

so i´m either looking for a way to strip DRM of mi own files, or to convert to another format/codec so i can use different programs.........or i miss the point at all in my guessings and it´s a different problem.......

hope someone has a solucion!!!!

tnx!!!!

Let me join you with this trouble, that I have stumbled upon a year ago on my laptop. I had plenty of interviews recorded via mic, but I was silly to just transfer those on hard drive without converting into wav. Then one day, my hard drive crashed. Most of stored data (including *.oma tracks) I was able to retrieve and back up on a different hard drive. After replacing a hard drive and re-installing OS (Genuine WinXP Home from recovery CD) and Sonic Stage software I now get these error messages:

1) When I try to open a file

2) When I try to convert it to WAV.

Edited October 2, 2007 by a_mastermind

[marcnet]

The information from those posts was only useful for re-creating an OMA file from the data on a HI-MD disk. And then, only those tracks that have been downloaded from PC could be recreated. Recorded tracks have no MAC/Key in the HMA file, so no valid OMA file could be created from them.