How to get past iTune's stupid DRM?

[freaky]

I just had to download a bunch of songs for a family member's wake and wasted about 6 CDs so I could burn then import them into iTunes. Does anyone know of an easier way of doing this and especially not have to waste good disks?

There used to be an app called FreeTunes but I guess Apple made him take it down because I cannot find it anywhere.

[Mikuro]

I think it's now called Hymn. I'm not sure where it's hosted at this point, but I think it's still out there somewhere. But on Macs, it won't work unless you have an iPod. (At least, not the last time I heard of it, which was many months ago.)

If you don't want to waste discs, you could always use RWs.

You could also use Audio Hijack Pro to record the audio as iTunes plays the tracks. But this is time-consuming and imprecise. The CD method is better.

[fryke]

But of course even the CD method loses quality, because _any_ re-encoding always loses quality, whether you scale up or down (and you're scaling up to CD and down again to MP3 or AAC by going through Audio CD).

This forum won't help you to find ways to hack the DRM out of the files directly (see board rules...). The way through an Audio CD is obvious and works quite well despite its obvious flaw of a slight quality loss. I, too, would say a CD-RW is the way to go, although it's gonna take some time since CD-RWs are often written to more slowly and need to be erased as well between sessions.

[Mikuro]

Originally Posted by fryke

But of course even the CD method loses quality, because _any_ re-encoding always loses quality, whether you scale up or down (and you're scaling up to CD and down again to MP3 or AAC by going through Audio CD).

Are you sure about that? CD compression is lossless, so that part shouldn't lose any quality, unless the source is at a higher resolution than CD audio (like encoding a 32-bit photo into "lossless" 8-bit gif format; ugh). Are Apple's AACs technologically superior to CD audio in any way? I know they're both 44.1KHz, but I don't know about the precision.

In any case, you'll certainly lose quality whenever you encode into a codec like mp3 since it's a lossy codec.

[ksv]

You lose audio quality when converting to "lossy" formats (MP3, AAC, Ogg), but not to lossless formats (AIFF, WAVE, Apple Lossless, FLAC etc.).
That is, you will lose audio quality if you burn a CD with from AAC files and convert them back to AAC, but not if you convert back to AIFF or Apple Lossless.

Removing the DRM without any conversion is naturally the best solution, but it doesn't always work flawlessly. The app is called JHymn: http://hymn-project.org/jhymndoc/

[bharoche]

Easy answer: www.allofmp3.com

The software referred to above -- http://www.hymn-project.org/jhymndoc -- doesn't work with iTunes 6 so you'd need to open a second iTunes account and download using iTunes 5, then strip out the DRM. This isn't an option, though, for videos I believe.