A Lesson In Crime: How To Liberate Your iTunes-Store Purchases

iTunes

A Lesson In Crime: How To Liberate Your iTunes-Store Purchases

Anyone who's ever purchased a track from the iTunes store knows that you only sort of own the song, thanks to Apple's stringent DRM restrictions (it stands for Digital Rights Management, which sounds like a terrible new Kool Keith album, but is actually how the biz tries to prevent widespread digital piracy). Under Apple's rules, users are limited by how many times they burn a certain playlists, or how many computers they can use, or how long they can listen to a song while standing in line at the zoo, etc. There's a lot of fine print.

Of course, this is like catnip to the geeky hackers of the world, who relish the opportunity to stick it to the man, especially if that man is Steve Jobs. Uncompatible Systems has a step-by-step guide to stripping your iTunes songs from all the add-ons (it even works with iTunes 7). The best part? You can do it using Apple's own products, meaning Jobs will now cry himself to sleep on his giant pillow stuffed with money.

"Using Apple Products To Remove Apple's DRM"

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11:13 AM on Tue Sep 19 2006
By Brian Raftery
174 views
5 comments

Comments

by AcilletaM at 10:34 AM on 09/19/06
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Wow, that is like the Rube Goldberg way of getting around burning the files to CD and then reimporting them (which is still all Apple tools so Jobs still cries a little).
by pete at 10:46 AM on 09/19/06
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This method is exactly the same as burning to a CD and re-ripping. You lose all kinds of audio quality.

Currently the only way to strip the DRM off iTunes music without loss is QTfairuse6 or myFairTunes6 (recently patched for iTuunes 7 compatibility).

http://hymn-project.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1555&postda...

DRM is bad people. Please don't buy iTunes tracks in the first place.
by a3ulafia at 11:39 AM on 09/19/06
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But if the creators of the DRM can't even keep it safe from themselves? I wonder how many other ways there are to clean ITMS files.
by PurduePaul at 11:55 AM on 09/19/06
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Deserves them right, you find a way to lock something, someone will pick that lock.

"Hack the World"
by mackro at 02:28 PM on 09/19/06
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You guys can throw me into the fire if you want, but I semi-regularly buy tunes from iTunes, mainly because I want to guarantee a non-defective mp3 download from an artist, and I want the artist to get paid -- middlemen be damned.

I do burn these tracks to CD-R, but I catalog these CD-Rs so that I minimize burning multiple songs again and again.

That said, you can get past ANY DRM issues from any operation system, hardware, software, whatever by finding a way to record the audio raw to another digital source, like a secondary computer, then use some freeware wave editing application to create the songs from the big wave dump, then convert these files to any compressed music file format you want.

Is it more time? Sure. It's just as painful as the "good ol' days" when you had to actually wait the entire length of the songs to make cassette mixes. Heresy, I know.