« Eurotunnel TBM for sale on eBay?! | Main | Geek gear: retractable cables »
April 05, 2004
Removing Fairplay DRM from iTMS songs
Over at MacSlash:
Tired of the DRM wrapper in songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store? An anonymous U.S. citizen has created a tool called playfair that strips the FairPlay DRM from those songs. From the README: "So what will playfair do for you? The playfair program is quite simple. It takes one of the iTMS Protected AAC Audio Files, decodes it using a key obtained from your iPod or Microsoft Windows system and then writes the new, decoded version to disk as a regular AAC Audio File. It then optionally copies the metadata tags that describe the song, including the cover art, to the new file." Note that this is not a GUI application. You'll need to have Xcode installed and chant the "configure/make/make install" mantra to build fairplay, then use it from the command line.... MacSlash
For my everyday use, the Fairplay workaround from Aaron Swartz that I posted yesterday works great. It allows me to play my .m4p music on all of my systems, instead of being limited to 3.
For the long term though, I don't really want to depend on the iTunes infrastructure to still exist in 10 years time. Without a non-DRM version of all of those iTMS AACs I would end up buying all of this music again. The switch from tape to CD wasn't too bad, since I didn't have a large music collection back then, but I want to make sure I won't have to make that transition again in the future.
Posted by Kevin Railsback at April 5, 2004 10:26 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://mt.railsback.com/mt-tb.cgi/12