OK, this story kinda jumped out at me from Slashdot, which concerns one guy, his collection of music that he encoded using Windows Media Player and not being able to play HIS media files after he performed a re-install!
The Guardian"s "Ask Jack" column has this rather interesting letter from a concerned computer user...
- Thursday August 8, 2002
Catch WMP
I have been collecting music using Windows Media Player to copy from CDs. When I needed to reformat my hard drive, I copied all my files to CD-R, re-installed my operating system and copied them back, only to find my music would not play.
Rowan Burgess
- Rule #1 - DON"T encode your music to WMA format...
Rule #2 - If you don"t obey Rule #1, and are going to use WMA, at least turn OFF the bleedin" copy protection...
Rule #3 - Scrub Rules #1 & #2 and use a decent encoding mechanism, EAC or CDex (both FREE as in beer!)