Face the Music
After Creative Labs told me I couldn’t play copy protected music files, I wrote back to suggest that they update their website to indicate such.
A different support person responded today and said, contrary to what I was first told, it can play DRM files if I had the latest drivers. Cool. That night, I downloaded two drivers (one for the player, one for the computer) and installed them.
After a painfully slow reboot I plugged in my player and, after a bit of futzing, got it to appear again as a removable hard drive. I dragged the George Shearing track back onto the player. And it, once again, complained that it was copy protected and skipped it. Drats.
I then used the new version of the MediaSource software that came with the player to download the file. That did the trick: deep in the bowels of the player it now knows I have rights to that song and will play it. Just copying the file by hand didn’t enable any rights. Conveniently the player shows up as a portable device within the other music software (MusicMatch Jukebox, Windows Media Player) as well. Yeah, the stars have aligned.
Too bad it is the isn’t the track I originally intended to purchase.