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Old 2009.11.20, 06:36 PM   #6
Glathannus
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Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: United States
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I don't know how to read much Kanji, and I was able to navigate the site. I cheated by looking at the URL names and the Page Source, because the registration fields where you input your information, all had English names in the code but not in the frontend/interface. Getting past the Japanese isn't the hardest part though.

A few warnings:

1.) You have to be a Windows user.

2.) You need a credit card which has no problems doing transactions with Japan.

3.) You need to use Internet Explorer to conduct the purchase.

4a.) The music is DRMed so it can only be played on the Windows installation you purchased the music from, and only in Windows Media Player.

4b.) If you are running Windows Media Player 9 or some instances of 10, the DRM can be broken - then you can move/play the songs anywhere, and not just in Windows Media Player. If you are running Window Media Player 11 or later, or you are not running Windows at all, then I recommend you set up a VMware install of Windows XP - preferably with Service Pack 2 or earlier, and update it as little as you have to. Then conduct your online purchase via the Virtual Machine, then decrypt the songs (via FairUse4WM), use dBpowerAMP to convert the songs to FLAC or Apple Lossless if WMA-Lossless isn't compatible with your favorite player, then move the songs out of the Virtual Machine into your native operating system. You might also want to use another WMP-related tool which tells you the decryption keys (if you are a legitimate licenseholder with your own keys buried somewhere within the local Windows install), and you email those keys to yourself in-case you experience a hard drive crash and have to redownload everything.

5.) The music is in 96kHz/24bit, which is beyond the capabilities of 99.99% of portable players, but dBpowerAMP or foobar2000 can convert it to 44.1kHz/16bit for you.

I should have conducted my purchases via a Virtual Machine, should have harvested my keys, and made backups of both. I have backups of my unDRMed files though, but that's much higher-maintenance, and once I lose those, I lose everything. I no longer have my keys (after wiping Windows). pariscombo has mentioned you can retrieve your previously-purchased keys from e-Onkyo once or twice, but after all these years and various changes to the system, e-Onkyo no longer acknowledges me as having done any previous business with them.

I'm afraid there's no alternatives. e-Onkyo has the only HF Instrumentals available for purchase, and they also have an unadulterated version of the audio from the HF DVD (everything is 96kHz/24bit but there's no cross-fading between the tracks), and an unadulterated version of the audio from the Senkou Shoujo DVD (everything is 96kHz/24bit, but Put Your Camera Down is the only credit roll they include). I also particularly like a lot of the classical music they offer, all of which sounds noticeably great in 96kHz/24bit (it's a higher audio resolution - like a picture having more pixels in it).
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