How to break iTunes for lawful purposes (copying for back-up, transcoding into different devices)

A lot of people complain about the DRM found on music bought at the iTunes Music Store. This is quite natural, since iTunes is by far the biggest supplier of music files, and the only legal place to buy files that play on iPods. iTunes only allows you to upload the files to a few iPods, burn them to a few CDs, and play them on a few computers. And you can only upload files to YOUR iPods; If someone else's iPod is set to play music from their account, the only way to put music from YOUR account into their iPod is to re-set that iPod to your account (which requires erasing all the music in it). And if you want to get music DOWN from an iPod, then this is basically impossible.

But at leasy Apple was kind enough to give us DRM that is easily broken (i.e. barely strong enough so that the major record labels would allow Apple to sell their music as downloadable files - Apple would use no DRM at all if the record companies let them, or so they say). You can burn your iTunes-purchased song to CD, then rip the CD. Yes, this wastes CDs, takes a while, and can only be done with about 20 songs at a time. You then have to find all the playlists that include each song, and replace each iTunes-purchased song by each CD-ripped song in each playlist. In other words, it's a big hassle. Plus, you lose sound quality: The CD is a lossless copy of the iTunes file (which is AAC-encoded), but once the CD track is encoded into MP3 (or back into AAC), it is compressed again, so quality is lost. Unless you import the CD as WAV files, which are way too big, and would reduce the number of songs your iPod can hold (and increase the hard disk space used by your song collection) by a factor of 10.

So, what to do?

Well, if you have a Mac, you have two other options, both of them also lossy. One is to put the iTunes-purchased song into an otherwise-empty iMovie movie, and then save it as an MP3. This has to be done one song at a time, although there are programs like FairGame that do it automatically for many songs (i.e. you tell the program what files to convert, and it converts all of them using the iMovie converting engine, instead of having you do it one at a time). It's not lossless (unless you save the files as .WAVs), and is (in my opinion) even bigger a hassle than burning and ripping CDs. (You still have to replace each iTunes-purchased song in all the playlists where it appears, etc). The other option is a free program called DrmDumpster. It burns your songs into CDs and then rips them... and if you have a re-writable CD in there (CD-RW), it then erases the CD and burns more songs and rips them, and erases the CD again and burns more songs and rips them, etc. So you don't have to sit there and baby-sit the computer and keep inserting new CDs - it burns all your purchased songs and rips them, using the same CD over and over, all by itself. Again, it's not lossless, but if you have a Mac, it's the best option.

What if you have a Windows computer? (I guess that can include Macs now). What if you want lossless conversion? Even better, what if you want a program that converts all your songs, and then looks through your library and replaces all playlist occurrences of each iTunes-purchased song it converted? That would be ideal. Lucky for us, that exists. Two programs out there do just that. (And they're free!)

One such program is QTFairUse. All you have to do is open it, adjust the settings if you want (To get lossless compression, set it to output AAC files instead of MP3s), pick a back-up folder (After it's done making non-DRM'ed versions of your iTunes-purchased files, it replaces those files in your library/playlists by the non-DRM'ed versions, and removes the DRM'ed files from your library folders... so where should it dump them?), and start the conversion. It will open up iTunes, use it to play the files (at up to 10x their speed, so it should take about 20 seconds per song), record the files' AAC stream as they play (i.e. the information that is encrypted by the DRM but that has to be decrypted by iTunes to play the files), and save a non-DRM'ed copy of each file. After all that, it will go through your library/playlists, replace each DRM'ed song with the corresponding non-DRM'ed copy it just made, and finally dump all the old DRM'ed files into the folder you specified. Nothing could be easier. Heck, you don't even need to INSTALL the program, just download the .zip file and open up the .exe inside it and the program runs! (Well, it does have a few minor problems: It sometimes refuses to convert certain files, and it sometimes creates files that are only 2 seconds long. If you have the latest version of this program and the right version of iTunes, though, that should not happen. You can read about this program's bugs, and how to solve all the problems you may encounter, here and here).

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"FOR DUMMIES":

How to use QTFairUse to losslessly remove all the DRM from your iTunes collection

(and automatically substitute your old DRM'ed files by the new non-DRM'ed ones)

• 1) Go to hymn-project.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1553
• 2) Right-click on the link to hymn-project.org/download/QTFairUse6-2.5.zip
• 3) Choose "Save Target As" (Internet Explorer) or "Save Link As" (FireFox)
• 4) Specify the directory to which it will be saved. Say, your desktop, your C: drive, the "My Documents" folder, wherever. Click "Save".
• 5) Double-click on the .ZIP file that just appeared on your desktop (or wherever you saved it to). See all the little icons? Hit Ctrl+A and then Ctrl+C (this will highlight all the icons and copy them)
• 6) Go to your desktop. Right-click on empty space (on the background image). Hover your mouse over New, and click on Folder. Type QTFU and press Enter, then press Enter again. You are now in a new folder you created for QTFairUse.
• 7) Hit Ctrl+V. That will paste those icons from the .ZIP file into your new folder.
• 8) Double-click on the QTFairUse6 executable (its icon looks like a window, with a grey frame and a blue bar on top). The program will open.
• 9) If you wish, on the text field near bottom, specify which folder you want your old DRM'ed files to be dumped into after they are replaced by the new non-DRM'ed files this program creates. By default, the program will create a folder called "backups" inside the same folder where the QTFairUse6 executable file is (which, if you followed my instructions, is the QTFU folder on the desktop). The default is fine for now. (After the program runs, you can move the files from there to the backup directory/device of your choice, if you want).
• 10) Click "Start Conversion".
• 11) The program will ask you if you want it to create the backups folder. Click on "Yes".
• 12) The program will run. It will start iTunes, minimize it, convert your protected songs (about 20 seconds for each song), fix your library/playlists (substitute every appearance of each DRM'ed file in your playlists by its new non-DRM'ed equivalent), and dump the DRM'ed files in that backups folder. A window will pop up to say it "finished conversion", and you can press OK.
• 13) That's it, you can close the QTFairUse window. You can verify that all your DRM'ed songs are in the backups folder, and if you want, you can move them to the backup location of your choice (like burn a data CD, put them in an external hard drive, however it is you back up your files). You can verify that your purchased iTunes songs are now unprotected (go to itunes, click on "Purchased" on the left, and view the filetypes by right-clicking on "Name" at the top of your list of songs and then checking "Kind". All the files should have "AAC audio file" as their Kind. Files that have not been converted (i.e. files that you purchase from iTunes) have "Protected AAC audio file" as their Kind. (Files that have "Protected MMPEG-4 video file" as their Kind are videos purchased from iTunes. No, QTFairUse will not un-DRM those videos. You need TuneBite for that).
• 14) Next time you buy more music from the iTunes Music Store and want to un-DRM it, repeat steps 8-13 (or repeat all the steps, if for some reason you erased the QTFU folder or its contents after the conversion).

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The other such program is MyFairTunes. Theoretically, it does exactly what QTFairUse does, as described in the previous paragraph. But I was never able to get it to work for me. I could get it to output nice perfect non-DRM'ed AAC files, but it did not put the old DRM'ed files into the folder I specified, and did not update my library/playlists. So I can't recommend it as enthusiastically. But some people love it, and apparently for some people it does all the stuff that QTFairUse did for me.

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What about iTunes-purchased videos? I have not tried it, but I hear that the only way to break the DRM on videos you buy at the iTunes Music Store (such as movies, music videos, and TV shows) is to use TuneBite. When I have used it myself, I will write about it here, but there seems to be plenty of information online about it. Essentially, it "watches" the movies you bought (if your computer is slow, it will go slower than real time, to make sure it captures every frame and synchs the sound properly), and records them into a new file that is not DRM'ed. I presume you can change the settings so as to choose the format and properties (resolution, framerate, bitrate, compression algorithm) of the new file, but I won't know for sure until I try it.

And one last thing: What about downloading music from an iPod onto a computer? (This is something you're not supposed to be able to do, but many people keep their music collections in their iPods, not on their hard drives, which is understandable. And I guess not everyone is as disciplined about organizing and/or backing up their HD as I am). Well, I have never done this myself either, but I hear the following programs allow you to do it: ephPod, iLinkPod, iPodAgent, iGadget, PodWorks, SharePod, AnaPod, TuneTransfer, CopyPod, and PodUtil, among others. A search on Google for relevant keywords will bring up even more programs and tutorials for getting music off an iPod.