DRM on iTunes? What DRM?

I’d been put off paying for music from the iTunes Music Store and it’s not because I’m a skanky music pirate or anything. Okay, I am a skanky music pirate who tends to only buy stuff he can’t get for free, but that’s not really an argument against paying for digital downloads. The problem I had was with the Digital Rights Management (DRM) system, called FairPlay they load onto each track which essentially limits the number of computers the track can be played on and prevents it being converted into another format such as mp3. It’s actually not as bad as some DRM systems but it’s still more restrictive than buying an actual CD. In short, when you pay for music from iTunes you don’t own it. You’ve licensed it to play only in iTunes on five different computers and, more critically in this day and age, only on the iPod. Should Apple go out of business and not be able to authorise any new computer you might buy, that music is then lost. If the tracks cost pennies then this wouldn’t be a problem but they’re charging about the same as HMV. So screw ‘em.

(Sidenote – while checking up on what the iTunes DRM actually is I came across this gem: “Sharing is intended for personal use only.”)

That said, I was pretty sure there was a way around this. You can burn a normal CD from your DRMed tracks and then rip it as unrestricted mp3s. All I needed was a reason to actually buy something from iTunes to check this out. Thankfully my good friends Dave and Anita sent me a £10 iTunes voucher for my birthday and eventually I found something I wanted. I signed up and downloaded the album, which was a painless and efficient process, and burned a normal CD, the sort that plays in most stereos, directly from the “Purchased Music” playlist the store created for me. This then appeared in the sidebar as a normal CD with all the track details intact. I imported it in mp3 format and sent a few tracks to Dave to see if he could play them. He could. The DRMed tracks were then moved off to a separate directory and my music collection remains DRM free. And the end result is I’m a lot more likely to buy stuff from iTunes now. All they need to do it add all those obscure and deleted albums I’m wanting and everyone will be happy, but that’s another post for another time.

Extra time: about five minutes. Extra cost: a 30p CDR. And people actually bother to crack this?