How to Bypass Microsoft's Zune Music Sharing DRM



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Microsoft has in its wisdom decided to make it so that every song that you send from one Zune to another becomes unplayable after either three plays or three days. It's called the Zune Wi-Fi sharing feature, but it's really an anti-sharing restriction. This is a major inconvenience especially if you want to share your own music (say, if you're a band looking to virally spread your songs).

To bypass this DRM restriction, you need to enable hard drive mode for your Zune and rename your music files to JPG's, which the Zune does not implement DRM for.

First change the registry settings to enable hard drive mode, making sure that the Zune is disconnected and software isn't running. Two ways: one easy and one hard. The hard way:

• Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\ControlSet001\Enum\USB\
• Search for “PortableDeviceNameSpace”. This should be contained in the Vid_####&Pid_####\########_-_########_-_########_-_########\Device Parameters within the above …\USB\ The ##’s listed here will be numbers and letters specific to your Zune
• Change the following values:
• EnableLegacySupport to 1
• PortableDeviceNameSpaceExcludeFromShell to 0
• ShowInShell to 1

The easy way: download this app,
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, which will automate the registry changes.

Then rename whatever files you want to send to have a ".jpg" extension. You also need a real JPG file.

Now, take your Zune and send the folder containing these files to your buddy along with a real photo. If you only send a fake photo, an error is thrown. The last step is to have your friend sync the Zune with their computer, open the "containing folder" where the files were downloaded, and rename the files back to their correct extension