How to protect your music through encryption
Protecting music from fraudulent uses and from copyright infringements is a must for many authors and distributors: actually you can already use your own or third-party encryption/decryption schemas and load decrypted song's data through the
LoadSoundFromMemory method; Audio DJ Studio for .NET comes now with a proprietary solution that allows encrypting songs, for safe redistribution purposes, using our CryptSound™ application. Once encrypted, no available player will be able to playback these songs while applications developed using Audio DJ Studio for .NET will be able to load encrypted songs through the
LoadEncryptedSound method.
For security reasons, the CryptSound™ application is actually not installed with our trial version setup package: if you need to test its encryption capabilities, please,
contact us and we will ask you to upload inside our FTP server one of your songs; at this point we will send you back the encrypted song with a dedicated
decryption key that will have to be passed to the
LoadEncryptedSound method: as a fast testing start, we have provided a small sample also, called
SecureSongs.exe, that will give you the possibility to test the encrypted song directly on your PC without the need to create a test application from scratch.
The CryptSound™ application has two working modes:
With its own user interface
Launching the application without any command line parameter will display the user interface as shown on the screenshot below:
As you can see, this user interface is very straightforward and intuitive; the complete sequence of operations is the following:
- fill the "List of files to encrypt" list using the "Add file..." and/or "Add directory..." buttons
- remove any unwanted file selecting its pathname inside the list and pressing the "Remove file" button.
- select the destination directory for encrypted output files: if not specified, the encrypted output file will be placed inside the same folder of the input file, with the same filename and extension changed with the string contained inside the "Encrypted files extension" edit box
- optionally change the default extension for encrypted output files filling the "Encrypted files extension" edit box
- fill the "Encryption key" edit box with your own key (from 16 to 32 characters) or, in alternative, let the application generate a unique key for you pressing the "Generate new key" button
- press the "Start encryption" button and wait for the "Encryption completed" message.
From the command line for use with batch files
Launching the application from the command line requires the following syntax:
CryptSound "InputFileFullPathname" -k="EncryptionKey" [-o="OutputFileFullPathname"]
were:
"InputFileFullPathname" : Full pathname for the input file
"EncryptionKey" : The key used to encrypt the file: must be from 16 to 32 characters long
"OutputFileFullPathname" : (Optional parameter) Full pathname for the output file; if not specified, the output file will be placed inside the same folder of the input file, with the same filename and the extension changed into ".bin"
below two examples of use:
CryptSound "c:\mp3_sounds\myfile.mp3" -k="ABSF1SHR46KFL0JVH6E8JFG49KMD3H28"
The sample above will encrypt the "c:\mp3_sounds\myfile.mp3" file using the "ABSF1SHR46KFL0JVH6E8JFG49KMD3H28" encryption key and the output will be placed inside the "c:\mp3_sounds\myfile.bin" file
CryptSound "c:\mp3_sounds\myfile.mp3" -k="ABSF1SHR46KFL0JVH6E8JFG49KMD3H28" -o="c:\mp3_sounds\encrypted\myfile.zzz"
The sample above will encrypt the "c:\mp3_sounds\myfile.mp3" file using the "ABSF1SHR46KFL0JVH6E8JFG49KMD3H28" encryption key and the output will be placed inside the "c:\mp3_sounds\encrypted\myfile.zzz" file
