Buying DRM-Free Songs From the ITMS

mirko writes "Jon Johansen ("DVD Jon") has published a small program which allows the acquisition of DRM-free file from Apple's iTunes Music Store. He explains that his program works by bypassing iTunes which adds the DRM itself at the end of the transfer. His program, pymusique, is Windows-only compliant but it'd be easy to port it to other platforms."

More Details

[OctaneZ]

The site [nanocrew.net] is hammered, the Coral Cache [nyud.net] is working fine though.

Links for the lazy:
Source Code: pymusique-0.3.tar.gz [nyud.net]
Debian Package: pymusique_0.3-1_i386.deb [nyud.net]
Windows: pymusique-setup.exe [nyud.net]

Re:Wouldn't it be ironic

[harlows_monkeys]

I'm now tempted to join and buy music through them, because now[1] I can do what I want with it once I've bought it

You could do what you wanted before, with Hymn.

I love ITS but ...

[SamSeaborn]

I love ITS and the whole iTunes thing, but it does bug me that I can't easily make a CD of mp3 files that I can play in an mp3-compliant CD player (like in a car).

I'm using the songs legally, but to do what I want I have to burn the 99-cent songs to an audio-CD, then rip them back into iTunes as mp3s, *then* copy the mp3s to the CD.

Sam

Another little article

[ilithiiri]

from The Register: iTunes pyMusique [theregister.co.uk].

Hymn?

[sesshomaru]

I used Hymn [hymn-project.org] to remove DRM from some songs so I could move them to an older model Creative MP3 player. It seemed to work fine for me.

windows only?

[__aahlyu4518]

I thought pyMusique was working on Linux as well....

Re:I love ITS but ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey sam you do realize in itunes you can burn a cd as an mp3 you just have to change it in preferences

Re:Its computational cost

[Convergence]

From an Athlon XP 2500 running 'openssl speed aes':

The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes
aes-128 cbc 40374.59k 41316.13k 42083.38k 41993.47k 42237.07k
aes-192 cbc 35109.10k 36010.80k 36434.73k 36583.09k 36474.95k
aes-256 cbc 31374.07k 31896.19k 32164.51k 32317.72k 32333.49k

At 4mb per song, my desktop machine has a raw encryption rate more than suitable for a million songs a day.

Re:Why is this news or stuff that matters?

[khrtt]

You're right, this thing is not breaking DMCA. It's only breaking Apple's EULA. Besides, since the content that you pay for, that actually comes down the wire, is not encrypted, I doubt the HYMN is actually breaking DMCA either. Too bad IANAL.

Re:Why not?

[flanman]

The reason that nobody uses MP3 as a DRM'd format is that MP3 does not support DRM in its spec.

AAC+ (from Apple) and wma (from Microsoft) are designed to support DRM in their header information (as I recall)

On a side note, from a quality perspective AAC+ is also superior to MP3 at comparable bit rates. At a smaller file size.

Re:3..2..1

[Electroly]

There is a HUGE difference between what Apple does and what AllOfMP3 does. Apple uses Akamai to essentially mirror the raw data files. There's no computation here. Zero. AllOfMP3 has huge server farms devoted to encoding music on-the-fly. While it is conceivable that Apple would be able to do a similar thing with adding the DRM (which assuredly would be a lot less work than encoding), they'd have to invest a great deal of money in processing servers. I don't know how this would interact with Akamai's services -- it's conceivable that they would need processing servers at each Akamai border point, which could add up to expensive pretty quickly.

Why burn to a disc? (was Re:I love ITS but ...)

[Laebshade]

Why burn the files to a disc when you can just write it to a file? A lot of cd burning software comes with an option to 'burn' to an ISO (in Nero if you select 'virtual image recorder' as the burner).

Re:if you don't like the license agreement

[slim]

Yet more and more CDs are coming copy protected, and won't play on some CD players. You also can't rip them for use on your MP3 plater.

So don't buy those either: and if you do buy one by mistake, take it back to shop for a refund -- since it is not fit for the purpose you bought it for.

If we quietly work around stuff like this (with stuff like Hymn and ever-cleverer CD copy protection defeaters), then there's no incentive for the industry to get back to giving us the usable product we want to pay them for.

Re:Wouldn't it be ironic

[mecro]

You could do this before. The simple way to defeat the apple DRM is to burn your songs onto a Virtual Drive (daemon tools) or onto a real CD, then rerip them to a high quality mp3. With iTunes and a decent drive, it takes less than 5 minutes, and is completely DRM free.

Re:Why is this news or stuff that matters?

[Twanfox]

Fair use. I don't think this means what you think it means.

From Stanford's Copyright and Fair Use Overview [stanford.edu]

In its most general sense, a fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and "transformative" purpose such as to comment upon, criticize or parody a copyrighted work.

Actual text of the law [cornell.edu]

It goes on to describe what it means by transformative, etc. and even includes examples in later pages of fair use. This doesn't even technically qualify as Timeshifting, as came up with the Sony Betamax case.

No, what you are doing with stripping copyright protection is transforming the work as a whole and transcribing it into another form that is more portable. Think of it like scanning an entire novel into pdf format.

Re:Why is this news or stuff that matters?

[tweakt]

Argh! You just aren't getting it!

FREE as in _FREEDOM_. This doesn't not allow anyone to download music from iTunes without paying for it. What it does, is allow you the freedom to use the music how you'd like. For those of us who'd prefer to not be tied to only listening to this music on an iPod or with iTunes, (maybe a media PC in the living room?), this is GREAT news.

Nobody is advocating stealing anything from Apple.

Re:3..2..1

[cyngus]

There are ways they could reduce the server load and make it a bit more secure though - eg. blanket encrypt/drm everything on the server and have the client rip that off and apply the personalised drm. Then you'd have to go fishing around in the client for keys etc.

I don't see how they could "pre-encrypt" the files. If you did someone could just break this blanket encryption and then use this program to get the "pre-encypted" files and decode them. Adding a handshake is better, you could have iTunes present a certificate file as validation and then initiate transfer of an unencrypted file over a secure connection. However, this can be broken too. The only real solution is to custom-encrypt each file server-side. Not a fun solution if you're trying to keep costs down.

Re:Advice

[BobTheLawyer]

The results of DVD Jon's court case is irrelevant to the likes of you and me, unless we live in Norway.

Re:the DRM is the thingamajig

[Mwongozi]

You can't re-download a song for free if you accidentally delete it, you have to buy it again. It's not like this is a big secret, Apple warn you and suggest several ways of backing up your music.

Re:Why is this news or stuff that matters?

[AC5398]

Point 1: This isn't 'RIAA' music, this is Apple's music.

Point 2: This isn't making music 'free'. This stops DRM being added to music files downloaded from Apple. One can't download the files without paying for them.

Point 3: This isn't illegal. DRM isn't being circumvented, DRM isn't allowed to come into the picture at all.

Point 4: One can do the same damn thing by burning the music files to rewriteable cd's, then ripping them to mp3s. Surely you're not suggesting ripping cd's to mp3s is illegal.

Point 5: Using Bittorent, to download any damn file, is just asking for trouble. Once you start accessing p2p programs, you just know some freakin' legal accountant somewhere is keeping track of your activities, legal or otherwise, just waiting for an excuse, any excuse, to pounce.

Moot.

[baudilus]

FYI - In the iTunes burning options, you have a choice of burning a Music CD, a Data CD, or an mp3 CD.

Just thought you should know.

Re:It's a freedom you wouldn't notice much

[rworne]

Not really. There's been a steady creep towards more onerous DRM as time goes on from iTMS.

First was the restriction of streaming libraries to local subnets.
Second was reducing the number of CDs burned from a playlist from 10 to 7.
Third was changing from 5 concurrent listeners to 5 different listeners per day.
Fourth was the recent reports that iPhoto albums, iMovie movies and Keynote presentations that use iTMS songs refuse to play on other systems.

The only loosening of restrictions was changing the number of authorized computers to listen to a DRM'd file from three to five.

Re:Because there is nothing there.

[vitamine73]

They *have* music! just because it's not mainstream and you don't know the artists (many of which have international carreers btw! - all the ninjatunes [ninjatune.net] artists for example) doesn't mean it's crap.
You don't have to like the music they sell! But you can't say there's no music there either!

Re:Moot.

[graikor]

If you'd actually used the CD Burning engine of iTunes, you'd be aware that the mp3 CD option will only burn tracks that are already in mp3 format. Any purchased tunes (m4p) or tunes you've ripped in AAC format (m4a) will not appear on an iTunes mp3 CD, despite the fact they might be in the playlist you are burning - it might make sense to convert them, but iTunes will not do any temporary data conversion for this purpose*.

The data CD option will allow m4a tracks to be included, but since they are in AAC format, most mp3 CD players can't read them. You can change your preferred ripping format, and convert m4a songs to mp3 format pretty easily with a right-click menu, but protected files can't be altered.

*: The latest version of iTunes has a feature for the iPod Shuffle that allows conversion of high-bitrate files to lower-bitrate files during the transfer to the Shuffle, but I don't believe it changes the actual format for them.

Re:Wouldn't it be ironic

[JeffTL]

DMCA or any other copyright law doesn't matter here -- in fact, the illegality of this is in a body of law far more simple than intellectual property: contracts. When you get an iTunes Music Store account, you agree (in the Terms of Sale, an addendum to the Terms of Service), that: "You agree that you will not attempt to, or encourage or assist any other person to, circumvent or modify any software required for use of the Service or any of the Usage Rules." This looks to be circumventing the software. (IANAL and this is not legal advice)

Re:It's a freedom you wouldn't notice much

[xtracto]

I au contraire will advice you to go to allofmp3 [allofmp3.com] and buy your music in a lossless format (or a very good ogg) without DRM or any other thing.

Re:I don't

[poot_rootbeer]

I don't purchase from iTMS. However, I would strongly consider it if it would let me listen the music I bought on my own equipment without file format conversion hassles.

You'd still be downloading AAC-encoded files, just without DRM included.

I'd be VERY surprised if you owned any hardware that can play AAC, but not DRM'ed AAC, natively. You'd still need to subject yourself to those file conversion hassles.

Re:That's precisely what I'll be doing this evenin

[Alsee]

You are operating under the erroneous assumption that Apple supports DRM. The do not. Apple does not like DRM and Apple knows that the customers do not like DRM. There is no way in hell Apple is going to go to the RIAA and say that customers appear to be happy with DRM.

Apple wants to sell MP3s and Apple has been wanting to sell MP3s from the beginning.

-

Re:Napster is far better, and free

[Anonymous Coward]

Gregory K. Spath
528 South West Street
Carlisle, PA 17013
[e-mail]
7172458563

Re:Don't you guys realize...

[allgood2]

This has nothing to do with DRM. iTunes, the application, introduce Rendezvous music sharing, which works with any music that can be played by the iTunes app, including mp3, wav, aac, etc. Rendezvous initially had very little limits, anyone else with iTunes or a similarly enabled Rendezvous application could stream any music you marked for sharing.

This caused some pause in the Music Industry, but caused an even bigger ruckus in the Educational Market, since many a university bandwidth was being ate up by music streaming. Tons of Universities complained, I know most of the CSC at my campus block it if they have that level of control.

Apple then placed limits on it, very similar to the multi-user limits embedded in FileMaker (also owned by Apple), 5 simultaneous users. Then months ago, that limit was switched to 5 daily users.

Now I see no benefit in 5 daily users, unless they are trying to guarantee personal use vs office level radio station. I still believe 5 simultaneous users was more fair. But in all honesty, automated music streaming was a feature Apple added, not a right of your music.

You can still share and stream your music without the limits if you set up your own music server. Obviously more effort than clicking a checkbox in an application, but the same effort that was required before Apple put the checkbox in the iTunes preferences.

The limit applies to all music that you would use iTunes for, including non-DRM music. But has absolutely nothing to do with DRM, as opposed to application functionality.

Re:Don't you guys realize...

[mr_zorg]

You're assuming that the lossy AAC files you buy from iTunes started out as a CD. My understanding is this is NOT true. AFAIK, iTunes starts with the master tapes and encodes the files at "better than CD" quality. Lossy, yes, but theoretically less so that a 16bit/44.1KHz CD...

Re:Hey, ya know...

[Anonymous Coward]

you steal a car in the middle of the night, it's harder for the car lot security to catch you.

It really seems to me that this is based on what a lot of consumers consider their "right to steal"

First,

The crime here is copyright infringement. Legal fact. To constitute theft, you must deprive somebody else of property either physically (stealing a car), or intangible (hacking into a computer, downloading a file, then deleting it off the computer that was hacked into.

This isn't saying copyright infringement is right, but comparing taking something away from somebody and making a copy of something isn't right either.

Second,

Another missing of the point here. What this program does is it strips off (or denies the allowing of) DRM to files that were ALREADY "PURCHASED".

Re:Don't you guys realize...

[the_proton]

Can you stop talking crap now?

When iTunes 4.0 was released, introducing the Sharing feature 5 people could connect simultaneously and stream from your machine. There was also an option to connect to any IP address and use the iTunes sharing from that.

A huge number of sites sprang up listing people's computers with iTunes sharing running on it. Up to 5 people could connect to these machines and listen to music at once.

Shortly afterwards, Apple released iTunes 4.0.1 which sends all iTunes sharing data with a TTL of 1 to ensure that it stays on the local network and won't pass through a router.

There has always been a limit of 5 simultaneous users. There is no limit to 5 daily users and never has been. In fact, iTunes will automatically disconnect a user that's been idle for more than 30 minutes if a 6th user tries to connect: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=930 49 [apple.com]

- proton