Forums | MacLife

684 Songs with DRM....$172.06 to strip the DRM.

First thought, damn, I spent a lot of money using iTunes. Second thought, It would be nice if they had bulk pricing for people who buy a lot of music. I'd sooner strip the DRM with something like Hymn then dish out that money.

For the people complaining about the cost to upgrade, there is a bandwidth cost to Apple (and at double the file size of your original 128kbps) and probably also licensing with the record labels.

Another thing - are you getting higher quality files? Will the bitrate jump from 128 to 160, 192, or even 256 perhaps? Or will they simply be 128kbps minus drm after all?

iTunes = 128 kbps & DRM
iTunes Plus = 256 kbps & No DRM

Well, I upgraded 60+ songs and I lost about 200MB of space.  On my 2gig iPod that was significant.  So that is another factor to consider.

Miles wrote:

mrreet2001 wrote:

just curious as to how / why you use the date added.

edit ... I know how to use it ... I just want to know how you implement it.

I usually go through a phase where I over-listen to a song when I add it to my iTunes library, so I have a Smart playlist based on and sorted by Date Added.  I have it exclude the song if the comment contains a certain word, so I personally don't really mind when I re-add a song to my library from a different source or something.

Pretty much this is how I listen to my music. New purchases go into my Do It! playlist (Don't ask about the name. It was at a loss for a better name.) and I play the hell out of the early songs while still shuffling through older stuff. I keep the new stuff at the top so I can find it without having to search for it. Because why should I have to look for a song I just added? Have it at the top where it belongs. I play through the newer stuff frequently and over time the playcounts start to even out. With the good stuff getting much higher playcounts. My music habit is very systematic and specific. Changing my dates just screws up my groove!

Aqua OS X wrote:

Apple could -easily- upgrade iTunes so that it would unprotect 128kbps files locally on your hard disk.. . . Someone, either the labels or Apple, is trying to make a buck.

I am sure it is technically possible to strip the DRM at the client level.

But there could be DMCA issues (in principle/theory, at least) if Apple develops/releases an app to remove DRM from iTunes songs. It sounds silly but Apple is trying to use the DMCA to stop PsyStar from selling Mac clones so it might be best for them not to do anything questionable themselves.

And Apple may realise it is just not a good idea to put iTunes DRM stripping technology in the wild. For the most part they have had good luck with their DRM and it doesn't seem there have been any serious or successful attempts to crack it for a while. I can understand wanting to keep it under wraps - you never know when it might be needed again.

Last edited by test (2009-01-08 6:42 am)

I you are right, even that compromise is a victory as far as the customers & Apple are concerned. Certainly not as good a victory as on might hope but a victory all the same. The customer now has an easy option for higher quality DRM-free music from Apple on most and eventually all of the store music selection allowing freedom from the iPod for those who choose to avoid it. Apple can also avoid the bad press and law suits that manditory DRM caused them.

Not really a waste of time to clarify. It typically avoids wasted time later and increases your understanding.

I hadn't really considered that iTunes must somehow decode DRM'd music but that is a good point. It seems like it should be possible to leverage the built in decoding technology to at least strip the DRM at the client level and leave us with 128K non-DRM songs. Obviously upgrading to a higher bit rate requires a download though. I assume this is why the upgrade is not free.

I'm sure profit is 99.9999999% of Apple's motivation, and rightly so - Apple is a for profit company. It has to cost Apple something to upgrade who knows how many songs/albums for who knows how many people world-wide. I have to believe we are talking about many terabytes of downloads here. It isn't like we are being force to upgrade our music so I don't think it is unreasonable to pay a fee. But I think 40 cents per song (in Canada) may be more than I can justify in one chunk, even though it only adds up to $49.01 for 14 songs and 11 albums at this point.

It doesn't really matter. Even if Apple upgraded everyone for free there would still be a lot of complaints about how slow the downloads are, how the internet has slowed to a crawl world-wide because of millions of people upgrading multi-gigbyte libraries, entire libraries disappearing, penises falling off, all the usual crapola.

Zetetic Apparatchik wrote:

Requiem. (Or: You're wrong.)

Huh, well there ya go. First I've heard of it and I don't feel like I missed anything. Kind of interesting though in a nostalgic sort of way I guess.

test wrote:

I hadn't really considered that iTunes must somehow decode DRM'd music but that is a good point. It seems like it should be possible to leverage the built in decoding technology to at least strip the DRM at the client level and leave us with 128K non-DRM songs. Obviously upgrading to a higher bit rate requires a download though. I assume this is why the upgrade is not free.

I'm sure profit is 99.9999999% of Apple's motivation, and rightly so - Apple is a for profit company. It has to cost Apple something to upgrade who knows how many songs/albums for who knows how many people world-wide. I have to believe we are talking about many terabytes of downloads here. It isn't like we are being force to upgrade our music so I don't think it is unreasonable to pay a fee. But I think 40 cents per song (in Canada) may be more than I can justify in one chunk, even though it only adds up to $49.01 for 14 songs and 11 albums at this point.

It doesn't really matter. Even if Apple upgraded everyone for free there would still be a lot of complaints about how slow the downloads are, how the internet has slowed to a crawl world-wide because of millions of people upgrading multi-gigbyte libraries, entire libraries disappearing, penises falling off, all the usual crapola.

While Apple is a profit company it seems unfair to recharge people for the upgrade. Everyone paying for the upgrades already purchased the original product. It's not like they purchased a piece of software expecting to have to upgrade later. These people bought music--and to pay to upgrade a song is ludicrous. Apple should strip the DRM free of charge and should never have released 128 kbs songs to begin with. Digital music should be of high digital quality. Apple is playing everyone like suckers here.