In the spotlight: HOWTO: Move your iTunes music while preserving library data (when you don't let iTunes manage your music library)
Sep
4

QTFairUse 6 and myTunes: strip DRM from those iTMS purchases

First, a short introduction and a necessary reference to Hymn—Hymn is an app that strips the DRM (Apple calls it FairPlay) of the tracks you bought from the iTMS—only drawback? You need iTunes 5 for it work.

iTunes 6 users can now have a look at Igor Skochinsky’s QTFairUse6 [via]—a tool that’s supposed to do the same job. If “a snake” is the only thing that comes on your mind when you hear the word “Python” though, don’t mess with this and wait for someone to come up with a proper GUI frontend for it.

Speaking of GUI frontends…

myTunes in action

There’s myTunes, based loosely on QTFU6 and released a mere 4 days after it. It’s a plain-looking app, but it should prove to be a bit more user-friendly than the QTFU6 script.

Launch iTunes (versions supported: 6.0.5.x), then myTunes and click the “Enable” button. Start playing audio files through iTunes and their DRM-free counterparts are created in the folder you selected.

Thing is, as you can tell, that the DRM-stripping is performed in real time, meaning you have to let those tunes play in their entirety if you want out of FairPlay. Also, myTunes produces raw AAC files (and as a result all metadata is lost)—so you’ll have to run a program from the command line to reconstruct the files (and you’ll have to re-enter the metadata manually). Engadget has posted a guide on using the program.

UPDATE: myTunes has been renamed to myFairtunes6 and among several improvements (version 0.2.b), it now strips DRM while maintaing the file’s metadata. [via]

Before leaving the site, have a look at our most popular entries:


...more noteworthy entries here.



Add your comment

  • "link":http://example.com/link
  • *bold*bold
  • _italics_italics