Recovering Your DRM Content From Zune Marketplace After A Reinstall...
I recently reinstalled my home PC - moved from XP Pro to Vista Ultimate! All is well (still battling early beta nVidia 8800 drivers, but...) but I had a heck of time trying to get all the DRM music I had purchased from the Zune Marketplace to play once I reinstalled everything.
Of course, after it's all said and done...it wasn't all that hard - just had to do everything in the right order. :-)
By the way, if you have a "Zune Pass" then I'm not sure if this method still applies. I don't have a subscription - I just purchase the songs that I want and haven't quite bought into the 'all you can eat' subscription. While I think it's a great idea, especially for those who 'experiment' with a lot of music, it just doesn't work for me yet.
At any rate, before reinstalling I went out to the "my music" folder and backed up my ZUNE folder which was where the Zune software downloaded all the songs that I had purchased and saved it to a safe location. Turns out, I didn't really need to do this.
What messed me up was that before I even started the Zune software for the first time after installing Vista, I had already copied that backup folder of all my music into the appropriate location so that that Zune could find it. Well, it did - but it never would pull down the DRM information from the Marketplace.
So, I deleted the ZUNE folder off my hard drive and then went through the UI and sorted by all protected content and deleted it - choosing the "delete from library and computer' option.
Then, I went to the OPTIONS -> ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT screen and chose the RESTORE LIBRARY option. From there, I started the scan and the Marketplace showed me all the content I had purchased and could then re-download (yes, total PITA) everything that I had rights to.
I said OK and within 15 minutes or so all my DRM content that I had previously purchased was now in my playlist...except this time I could actually listen to them.
Currently, there's no option in the Zune software to allow you backup your DRM locally to restore to a new machine. Ideally, you should be able to save this ZUNE folder and recover it to a new machine (like iTunes, which works great - as long as the machine you are restoring to has been authorized) without having to re-download all your content. Hopefully, we'll make some inroads here - but for the time being if you are in a similar situation - this is your only option.
Good Luck!
