Saturday, December 30, 2006

HOWTO scrub iTunes' DRM off of your purchased music with QTFairUse

DRM sucks. A lot. Case in point: I just received a $25 dollar gift certificate from a loving relative who wanted me to buy some music. I summarily went to the iTunes Music Store and downloaded about twenty-five bucks worth of Cannibal Corpse songs. All was good, until I tried to play the songs on another music player. Surprise! The .m4p files are a iTunes-only, DRMed format. That is when I resolved to immediately blog about how to get around it (a mild form of protest, I know).

(Disclaimer: doing this may be violating the DMCA. But if you want to stick it to the man and protect your fair use rights, read on. Besides, the DCMA sucks, too.)

First, you're going to need Windows (sorry... I guess you could always use Wine or Virtualization inside Linux, but I don't have that set up yet -- I'm just dual-booting Ubuntu Edgy and Windows XP). Next, download QTFairUse which is a utility that will scrub the DRM from your music files. (There is also another utility for doing this called myFairTunes and an older one that doesn't work anymore called JHymn). Unzip the QTFairUse archive and launch the .exe file to start the program. Use the drag-and-drop interface to select which songs you want scrubbed and then click the button at the bottom to begin the conversion. You now have .m4a-format, DRM-free audio files!

UPDATE:
Neither of these programs work under Wine... neither are in the Wine Application DB... looks like I'll have to stick with Windows (ugh) for now...

QTFairUse throws a "ImportError: MemoryLoadLibrary failed loading win32api.pyd" when using the console version and an "ImportError: MemoryLoadLibrary failed loading win32gui.pyd" when using the GUI version

myFairTunes sets up fine but throws this error when I run the application under Wine: "install the Windows version of Mono to run .NET executables" ... searched Google and it seems like this is a long way from being fixed

UPDATE 2:
new links:
Be sure your computer is 'authorized' to play 'protected' files on iTunes or this won't work.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

One thing that you can do is, rather than using iTunes importer/exporter...to put your files on your music player... you should just locate the actual files and just snach them out of the folders. However, the catch is that iTunes always enscripts the name of it's files, hence the best method would to figure out a size of one of your media, and search for them in your finder, or windows search. Then when you put them in you player, it might have the descriptor to be able to decode iTune's code. You can do this to transfer music from other ipods as well, just take it out of the drive, import it on you player, wallah you've got he music. I've still got to figure out integraiting previous playlist.

Anonymous said...

One thing that you can do is, rather than using iTunes importer/exporter...to put your files on your music player... you should just locate the actual files and just snach them out of the folders. However, the catch is that iTunes always enscripts the name of it's files, hence the best method would to figure out a size of one of your media, and search for them in your finder, or windows search. Then when you put them in you player, it might have the descriptor to be able to decode iTune's code. You can do this to transfer music from other ipods as well, just take it out of the drive, import it on you player, wallah you've got he music. I've still got to figure out integraiting previous playlist.