DRM, why are you still here?

I've just discovered Spotify. Yepp, I'm slow. But I don't like the idea of paying for listening to music. I'm renting a jukebox for $9.99 a month... The good thing that it's not just streaming but with the premium account (the one you're paying for) you can save the songs on your hard drive, Android device, iPhone etc. So you can listen to them using the Spotify application on your device.

So these songs are saved on my storage device you say? I wanna have them! But oh no, they are encrypted!

While there're libraries to despotify them I'm not in the mood right now to set up a virtual box on my desktop machine running linux and compiling a bunch of C code and spend a day or two until I get my first DRM free OGG file out from Spotify.

Since I was born in the 80's I remember buying a new 90-120 min chrome tape every week, staying up late on Thursday (I think the show aired on Thursdays) to listen to Danubius, Radio 1 etc. and tape Hot Mix.

With DRM and modern technology we can go back to there somehow, the only difference is that our music never leaves the digital word, so I don't have to worry about amplifier or radio noise, tape noise (remember Dolby C?) etc. I could just set my Audacity to record from stereo mix and hit the record button and then hit the play button in the Spotify player. There's no high dubbing in this case, so yeah it takes the whole hour to record an album, and then I need to split it up and export as MP3 and I don't have ID3 tags yet, but I'd own the music.

And did I crack DRM? Yes and no. I didn't crack it, but it couldn't fulfill its destiny either. So why is this still around? Shouldn't artist just earn their money by touring? If you're good enough I want to see you live, too! And certain artists cannot give back the sound of their studio recorded songs live. Just remember the humiliating live appearance of Jamie Foxx and Will.I.Am on American Idol... Live performance will unveil if you're fake...

So a step by step guide (on Windows 7):

1. Get Audacity and Spotify
2. Search for the songs on Spotify and save the playlist and mark them as available offline
3. The 'device' Stereo mix in your recording devices are not shown directly because it's disabled by default, so right click on the sound icon on the taskbar, select Recording devices. Right click anywhere in the window and select Show disabled devices, enable Stereo mix.
4. Open Audacity, click on Edit/Preferences. Under Audio I/O, Recording select Stereo mix
5. Left click on the sound icon on the taskbar, click mixer and mute all other applications except for Spotify
6. Hit the record button in Audacity
7. Hit the play button in Spotify
8. Wait for your playlist to finish
9. Stop recording in Audacity, click on the wave track, hit Ctrl+A, select Analyze/Silence finder
10. Review the found silence labels, and you can replace the default 'S' with the song name
11. Hit File/Export multiple and select MP3 as export format
12. Fill out the ID3 tags as you want
13. Done

DRM, you rock!