For my pleasure, I play the music untouched. Now, when I want to share my music, sometimes I can't because the music they want is music I bought at the iTunes store, which is protected music(M4P). The only way to best remove the protection , is to burn that copy-protected music into an audio disc using iTunes. When I do that, iTunes removes the protection so it can be played in a regular CD player. I can share my music using CD's but that would cost me many CD's and each CD is limited to 700MB. Using the virtual drive, I can create a playlist as large as I want, "burn it" to the virtual CD-RW, which then converts it to MP3. If I was to simply copy and paste that protected that music, when they try to play in on their computer it would ask to authorize that computer. An iTunes store account has a limit to authorize 5 computers, that would not work because I've shared protected music with more that 5 people. The virtual drive is to only to give me a final product of unprotected music without using physical CDs. Hope that clears it up a a little more, or you can go to www.noteburner.com to see what the product is for.