Remove the FairPlay DRM from Your iTunes Songs

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Remove the FairPlay DRM from Your iTunes Songs

Posted 06/18/2007 at 4:40pm | by Roman Loyola

 

 

WHAT YOU NEED
> FairPlay-protected song bought from the iTunes Store
> Audio Hijack ($16, www.rogueamoeba.com)
> iMovie HD (part of iLife '06, $79, www.apple.com)

 

There’s a whole lotta talk going on about digital rights management (DRM) technology. In case you’ve been living in a cave, DRM is what Apple uses on music purchased from the iTunes Store to restrict who can play your songs. DRM helps prevent music piracy, but it also limits how you listen to your music. Every 99-cent song purchased through iTunes has Apple’s FairPlay DRM (artists who are signed with music label EMI have DRM-free songs available as “iTunes Plus” tracks for $1.29).

 

There are ways to remove FairPlay so you can play your songs on devices other than your Mac and iPod. You can burn your iTunes Store music to a CD, and then import the songs into your iTunes library, thereby creating FairPlay-free files. The problem is that you end up reprocessing music that’s already been processed for compression, which will affect your sound quality (you can rip your songs from the CD using the Apple Lossless Encoder to create FairPlay-free music, but your files will be a bit bigger then if you used a lossy compression scheme). Another method involved using JHymn (free, www.hymn-project.org), but Apple crippled JHymn with each iTunes update. JHymn development for the Mac (it’s an open-source application) seems to be in limbo.

 

But there are a couple of ways you may not have thought of. We’ll take a look at other ways to create FairPlay-free music from your iTunes-purchased songs. Since iTunes limits you to seven CD burns of any playlist that contains FairPlay-protected tracks, you might want to use one of these methods instead.

 

First method: Hijack your audio...

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Anonymous

August 01, 2007 at 2:43pm

The simpliest way I know of to convert these DRM songs is to first burn them to audio CD via iTunes. Then add them from the new CD to Roxio Toast's Export feature at the bottom of the "Audio" disc options (instead of burning them to disc-- again).

You get AIFF files which can then converted to whatever audio format you want via iTunes or another audio converter.

Works great!

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MacMongrel

June 18, 2007 at 9:56pm

I have to say I did appreciate the article because DRM is a pain in the neck.

There are two different, yet very similar ways to do it that seemed to work better for me.worked for me as well.

The first is similar to using Mac World's suggested program "Audio Hijack", I used WireTap Pro this application also records whatever is playing on your mac so don't turn up the volume while you are recording or you will get those little beeps in your final product.

The second option I used, which you might compare to MacWorld's suggestion of using iMovie HD - Is to drag your music from iTunes into Garage Bands user window. This will import the song into garage band and then you can export it from garage band back into iTunes. The difference really is that you dont have to add a movie or picture over it because it is primarily a music app.

These are simply other ways of doing the same old thing.

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