Something to be aware of with the new iTunes and iPod firmware...

[scaredpoet]

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/43044

Take the above story with a grain of salt if you wish, but it would appear that the updates do more than just what is listed in the updates pages on the Apple website. Looks the real aim was to strengthen DRM.

While I'm all for legal music sharing, I still advocate the option of being able to strip that stuff f you choose. DRM isn't perfect, and often errs on the side od protecting content even when a hard disk crash or other hardware/software foulup means taht you have to transfer legitimately-obtained items beyond what DRM considers to be accetpable.

*sigh* Wish I had known this before I upgraded.

[baggss]

Based on that article I see ZERO impact, at least on me. Ok, so they don't want you stripping off the DRM, that seems fair. Never really had any problems with whole DRM thing anyways. Since 98% of my music comes from OTHER than iTMS I have no heartburn with it. Of corse if 98% of YOURS is from iTMS then I could see how you might have issues, just not sure what they would be. It's not like iTunes is going and looking at my library and trashing every song that doesn't have DRM on it or something. What I CAN see is crap like this pushing folks back into the illicit music trade and away from the sanctioned legal downloads.

[scaredpoet]

True, 99.9% of my stuff is in MP3 format, so I guess it wouldn't bother me so much. However, it does pretty much keep me away from using iTunes to purchase any of my music.

I upgrade my computer at least once a year, and that often includes increasing HD space and transferring stuff onto a new hard drive while wiping clean and donating the old one to someone else. I won't buy digital music if after a couple of upgrade cycles, I know I can't use it anymore. So I guess it's back to buying CDs for me.

[Spartan]

I have a question. I pay $5.95 a month for unlimited downloads from madeformusic.com. Will I still be able to download from there and put those songs on my ipod as I do now? PLz respond before I upgrade. Thank you.

[scaredpoet]

AFAIK, as long as you have them in MP3 format and don't convert them to AAC, you should be fine.

[BigFil]

Seems like something that will only affect people trying to file share illeagaly. While they only allow you to burn the song 7 times as opposed to 10, they also are allowing 5 computers to be used as opposed to 3. Not to mention there is now a way around the DRM without losing any sound quality. Everyone knows you could burn the track to CD then re-rip it in MP3 or AAC at a quality loss, but now you can do it with lossless compression.

[GraceMolloy]

5 bucks says there will be a new DRM remover out within 2 months.

[baggss]

I bet less than that....:D

[SocksRule]

what is DRM and why is it so bad?

[mdobilas]

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/drm.aspx

[Spartan]

so will i be able to still use my download service with my ipod?

[scaredpoet]

Originally posted by BigFil
Seems like something that will only affect people trying to file share illeagaly.

No offense, and not to start a political debate, but saying that is a lot like saying "If you oppose the Patriot Act, then you must be a terrorist."

While they only allow you to burn the song 7 times as opposed to 10, they also are allowing 5 computers to be used as opposed to 3.

This makes a difference, how? I guess within my lifetime, I'm limited to only 5 upgrades of my computer equipment before I must destroy all of my music files and start over, when in fact I've upgraded or replaced different parts of my computer that required a wipe of my hard drive 5 times within just the last 4 years, one of which was upgrading to a completely different computer. I guess people who demand that much of their equipment must be illegally filesharing, right?


Not to mention there is now a way around the DRM without losing any sound quality. Everyone knows you could burn the track to CD then re-rip it in MP3 or AAC at a quality loss, but now you can do it with lossless compression.

Oh, wonderful. Now, let's see... at my current collection of 2,828 tunes that I started collecting since about 1998, roughly 8.8 days of play... I could fish all of my CDs out of the basement and re-rip all of them in I guess about three days or so if I don't take any breaks. Thank goodness I *have* all my CDs, otherwise, I'd have to re-burn them all and then re-rip, and burning would add a couple days to that time.

Luckily I don't have to do all of that because my collection is in MP3, save for a few CDs that I tried ripping in Quicktime as AAC. But if I subscribed to the "only illegal filesharers would worry about DRM" line of thought, then I'd be a world of hurt.

[dekkerd]

Originally posted by BigFil
Seems like something that will only affect people trying to file share illeagaly. Not to mention there is now a way around the DRM without losing any sound quality. Everyone knows you could burn the track to CD then re-rip it in MP3 or AAC at a quality loss, but now you can do it with lossless compression.

Bzzt, wrong answer. Why should my RIGHT to fair use be infringed? My wifes MP3 player doesn't know AAC from AAA, neither does the Audiotron hooked to my home stereo. No loss of quality? If older hardware won't work with AAC, how will it work with something Apple just made up?

Now, before you all go off about TOS, yes, I understand it. Thats why my ITMS purchases have been very few. If I want something thats versitile, I still grab the CD. So, Apple, you are not getting a good portion of my money you would otherwise see.

[Cornman33]

This kind of sucks.. I'll have to make my iPod friends aware of this. This is just one of the things that pushed me towards buying an iRiver over an iPod.

[rreay]

Originally posted by scaredpoet
This makes a difference, how? I guess within my lifetime, I'm limited to only 5 upgrades of my computer equipment before I must destroy all of my music files and start over, when in fact I've upgraded or replaced different parts of my computer that required a wipe of my hard drive 5 times within just the last 4 years, one of which was upgrading to a completely different computer. I guess people who demand that much of their equipment must be illegally filesharing, right?


No, you're limited to five authorized computers at any one instant in time. You can deauthorize one machine and authorize another anytime you want. The limit is *NOT* 5 machines ever.

[HuffNPuff]

What concerns me is the only burn a CD 7 times. What's the scoop on that? Does that mean that after 7 times, I can no longer burn an AAC protected file to an audio CD?

[rreay]

Originally posted by HuffNPuff
Does that mean that after 7 times, I can no longer burn an AAC protected file to an audio CD?

Sorta. It means you can only burn a playlist 7 times. You can burn the files in that playlist as many times as you want, but you can only burn that specific playlist 7 times.

Once you hit the 7 limit you can rearrange the playlist or delete it and recreate it exactly the same and your count resets. I'm speculating, but I bet you can add a single track and then remove it and reburn the exact playlist again.

There is no limit to how many time you can burn any particular file. Burn it 1000 times if you want, you just can't do it with one playlist.

[baggss]

From the iTunes web page:

You can burn individual songs onto an unlimited number of CDs for your personal use, listen to songs on an unlimited number of iPods and play songs on up to five Macintosh computers or Windows PCs.

[BillClinton]

From what I've heard, rreay is not correct - they wanted to fix that loophole (Where you could alter your playlist slightly and burn burn burn) Now you can only burn that track so many times.

[honeybee1236]

After reading the article and soome of the responces, one person had a good point I have to admit that I never thought of, and that was - question guy.

[rreay]

Baggss just quoted the music store page, but I'll do it again.

From http://www.apple.com/itunes/burn.html:
"Mix up new tracks with your existing MP3 collection to make killer compilations. You can burn songs from the iTunes Music Store an unlimited number of times."

[jdcoffman]

You all are acting like a bunch of thugs who only own illegal music. What's the big deal here? I buy from the ITMS, and if I buy the music i don't want to share it. DRM stripping apps will be updated in a few days and you pirates will be happy once again. As for burning CDs, simple solution=Buy an iPod it can play all of your music and can hook into absolutely anything you would ever want it to fairly inexpensively.

5 computers is pretty generous if you ask me, not a very big percentage of homes have more than 5 computers in the household. in fact very few have more than 2, although the numbers are rising for the majority of people it will be fine. It's only us "geeks" who own lots of computers that will have problems but then your a "geek" and you can figure out another way to get around the issue all together.

iTunes is for everyone, not just a few, don't impose the geeks culture on the rest of the world, people always get around copy protection, macrovision=hacked, WMADRM=hacked, ITMS=hacked, DVDVideo=hacked.

Deal with the two weeks that you may not be able to send all of your friends ur new song, they can get it off of any other file sharing network, you don't have to corrupt the ITMS for your illicit usage.

(I run 3 PCs, and 1 mac with a new PB coming soon)

[HuffNPuff]

jdcoffman,

I'm a DJ and I rip my AAC files into CD and MP3 b/c Tradktor DJ Studio doesn't support the DRM files yet.

Also, I don't want to be making CDs of different mixes and then get a "Sorry, pal. You've burned this the maximum number of times".

Not everyone concerend about DRM is a pirate.

[baggss]

Originally posted by HuffNPuff
j

Not everyone concerend about DRM is a pirate.

True. However based on what I and someone else read and posted from the web page, this shouldn't be an issue for you really. Ok, so MAYBE you cant burn the same playlist all the time. So build a new one. I mean the site very clearly says you can burn a track to a CD as many times as you want.

[jdcoffman]

I also DJ, I use my iPod and powerbook as sources, no CDs required. I don't re-mix songs though i think that does an injustice to the original.

[HuffNPuff]

"I don't re-mix songs though i think that does an injustice to the original"

Wow. Won't even touch this one, man. To each his own, I guess.

[jkmiecik]

I'm glad everyone has donned their tinfoil hats.

A lot of people are having an incredibly adverse reaction to these new changes. As someone pointed out before, I will talk about iTunes TOS. No one is holding a gun to your head and making you use iTunes. There are many legal download music stores/sites out there. Walmart has one that's cheaper than iTunes is. A few others have already been discussed in the thread.

Still not satisifed? Like someone said before - m4p2mp4.exe still works just fine. MP4 files have no DRM and can be played in most music programs such as Acid DJ and WinAMP just like a normal MP3. If you still don't like MP4, there are *lossless* converters out there to go from MP4 to MP3. I might have just added fuel to the flamewar, and this is most likely going to get worse before it gets better. A real hotbed for this discussion is the technology news site slashdot.org (http://slashdot.org) and this is discussed ANY time a DRM article is posted. I think we should all just agree to disagree before things get worse.

[iric]

Of course the simple way around limited number of burns of a particular playlist is... copy the CD. Once you've burned it once you've got an uprotected CD from which you can make unlimited bit for bit copies. You could also rip it back to your harddrive uncompressed or compressed losslessly using FLAC, Monkey's Audio, or this new AAC Losless (or Even WMA lossless if you feel like screwing Apple).

I also think there will be updated DRM strippers in the immediate future.

However, I'm totally against DRM. And now that the labels are whining that $.99 is too cheap for a download, they should be $2.50, why would anyone continue to support this. No thanks. If I want to buy music I'll stick to the CD. If I want to sample music, I'll stick to P2P. Besides which, I live in Canada so iTunes music store is unavailable indefinitely and P2P file trading, for the time being, is officially legal.

[iric]

I should add, considering the price of filling a 40GB iPod with songs purchased from the music store is astronomical, what does Apple REALLY think is going on here? It's like they're winking to their users while bending over to the labels...

[jdcoffman]

No fears, it appears the new algorithm has already been cracked, end of this discussion here i guess.
http://www.ipodlounge.com/ipodnews.php?id=P3754

[baggss]

Originally posted by iric
I should add, considering the price of filling a 40GB iPod with songs purchased from the music store is astronomical, what does Apple REALLY think is going on here? It's like they're winking to their users while bending over to the labels...

Wait, you JUST figured that out? ;)

They figured out there was a market to be tapped and the figured out how to tap it. They know that illegal sharing isn't going away any time soon, so they set out to give the labels what they wanted and the public what it wanted. A relatively inexpensive and easy way to legally download music. I don't care WHAT anybody tells us, iTMS is NOT making a dent in illegal downloading and likely NEVER will. As long it helps sell MORE iPods, everyone wins...especially we Apple shareholders! ;)

[scaredpoet]

Originally posted by iric
I should add, considering the price of filling a 40GB iPod with songs purchased from the music store is astronomical, what does Apple REALLY think is going on here?

Well, we're using our iPods as external hard drives, and using that vastly huge amount of BLANK diskspace to store other data, of course! ;)

[nddl05]

Originally posted by jdcoffman
No fears, it appears the new algorithm has already been cracked, end of this discussion here i guess.
http://www.ipodlounge.com/ipodnews.php?id=P3754

why can't we have people like that working in the government?? Then things would actually get done!!

[Powercntrl]

Originally posted by jdcoffman
No fears, it appears the new algorithm has already been cracked, end of this discussion here i guess.
http://www.ipodlounge.com/ipodnews.php?id=P3754

Actually, that has nothing to do with the DRM... That was about a 3rd party script for accessing the iTunes music store's search and preview facilities over the 'net. Quite useless, IMHO, but the guy who wrote it seems proud of himself.

I've tried m4p2mp4.exe on several computers with iTunes 4.5, it no longer works. Here is something that does:

Requirements to extract your DRM key file:
1. Windows PC running older version of iTunes
2. VLC (Video Lan Player, an open-source media player)

Stuff you'll need on the PC running iTunes 4.5:
1. DeDRMS source
2. Monodevelop enviorment, installed
3. Microsoft .NET runtime (It's on Windows update)

Google will help in your quest to find the above.

Steps to get keys:

#1 Copy a "FairPlay Version 2" song to the PC with the older version of iTunes. Authenticate the machine with Apple to allow playback.

#2 Open the song in VLC.

#3 Look in the folder: \Documents and Settings\(YOUR USERNAME)\Application Data\drms for some tiny files with funny random names. Copy the contents of folder to a \Documents and Settings\(YOUR USERNAME)\Application Data\drms folder on your computer with the 4.5 version of iTunes.

You now have your keys. Now, it's time to patch DeDRMS and compile it on the computer with iTunes 4.5:

#1 Open the DeDRMS.cs source in Notepad. Remove this section of code:

if( Encoding.ASCII.GetString( adPRIV, 0, 4 ) != "itun" )
{
throw new Exception( "Decryption of 'priv' atom failed" );
}

Save the file.

#2 Compile with the command mcs -out:DeDRMS.exe *.cs

#3 Make a copy of your music to unprotect - DeDRMS overwrites the original file! Use the command DeDRMS (FILENAME).m4p, then rename the file to *.M4A. Unprotect your FairPlay Version 2 files to your heart's content, but please keep them to yourself. Don't be a pirate.

[jkmiecik]

Not sure why you can't get m4p2mp4.exe to work with the new iTunes files. I pulled down an iTunes song just now to test it, and it worked fine.

[Powercntrl]

Originally posted by jkmiecik
Not sure why you can't get m4p2mp4.exe to work with the new iTunes files. I pulled down an iTunes song just now to test it, and it worked fine.

Have you: Made sure it's a FairPlay version 2 song? Tried playing the output file?

m4p2mp4.exe appears to work but it generates output files that will not play. Upon attempting to play, Winamp responds: "Error - Input data buffer too small"

Before I upgraded iTunes, m4p2mp4.exe worked fine for me.

[mkko]

Originally posted by scaredpoet
AFAIK, as long as you have them in MP3 format and don't convert them to AAC, you should be fine.

Does this mean that iTunes would add the protection to the AAC -file, even if it were in MP3 format? I really tried to study about the DRM, but still I have no clue who puts the protection there...

Edit: And I meant that if the music was originally MP3 format and converted to AAC...

[jkmiecik]

Powercntrl: Yes, it's a new file. Yes, it plays.

[AndyH]

Originally posted by mkko
Does this mean that iTunes would add the protection to the AAC -file, even if it were in MP3 format? I really tried to study about the DRM, but still I have no clue who puts the protection there...

Edit: And I meant that if the music was originally MP3 format and converted to AAC...
Yes, I believe that Apple would have some sort of DRM on any music files sold through their iTunes Music Store, regardless of the file format of the songs (AAC, MP3, etc.)

[ipodtodd]

First off, I'd like to give a bit of clarification. It seems that some are confused as to which files are wrapped in Apple's DRM. The DRM restrictions only apply to Protected AAC files purchased from the iTunes music store. Any file you rip from a cd (or download illegally) in AAC format is completely open and you can do whatever you want with it.

I really don't see what all the fuss is about here. It seems to me that Apple's DRM package is much more generous than other services and I don't really see how it would infringe on anyone's ability to enjoy the music. You can put the songs on up to 5 computers at a time and on an infinite number of ipods. Why would you need more than that? If you upgrade to a new computer, just deauthorize your old one and you are back to a clean slate of 5 computers. And why does anyone need more than 7 copies of the exact same playlist on cd? If there's anything to be concerned with about the itms it's what happens when AAC becomes obsolete? (although this concern didn't stop any of us from buying cassette tapes in the 80's).

The only thing that defeating the drm accomplishes is to solidify the RIAA's belief that we are all pirates and convince them that legal online distribution of music doesn't work.

[Powercntrl]

The only thing that defeating the drm accomplishes is to solidify the RIAA's belief that we are all pirates and convince them that legal online distribution of music doesn't work.

The DRM gets in the way of format-shifting music I've legally purchased. DRM removal tools are just that: tools. You could use a hammer to build a house or bash in someone's skull. I choose to use DeDRMS so I can quickly convert my purchased songs to a format that will play on both my Xbox and my MuVo2. I don't make my unprotected tracks available to anyone. Would Apple (and the RIAA for that matter) prefer I NOT pay for my music?

I'm sure people that pirate music are much more interested in getting MP3s from P2P services than unprotecting music you still have to buy.

iTunes + a DRM crack has convinced me that downloadable music is something worth paying for. While I'm sure the RIAA prefers DRM over the honor system, what they didn't realize is: Ever since the dawn of P2P, buying music already is based on the honor system.

[jkmiecik]

I see 'at will' buying of CDs as before the dawn of P2P programs as we know it. For at least 2 years before Napster, I was using Audiogalaxy to search FTP servers for songs I wanted - and I never had a problem finding them. Internet-based distribution of songs has been going on since not too long after the conception of the 'net itself - the RIAA is just now starting to pay attention, and they're paying the late fees (lost sales, or so they say).

I agree with Powercntrl. Not everyone who cracks DRM is out to be a pirate. Personally, I like having my entire collection as one format. Powercntrl likes having his in a format that he can use cross-platform. Both of these, I think, are valid reasons.

[Dynasty]

I'm pretty new to the whole iPod scene. I haven't even boughten my ipod yet, waiting for best buy to get more mini's in. What is DRM anyway? Does this only inflict itunes, or does it make an effect on itunes and p2p songs? And do most of you get your music off of itunes or do you still get some off of p2p? Thanks

[jkmiecik]

Dynasty, please search around a little next time. That being said, I'll give you the quick and dirty answers.

DRM: Digital Rights Management. A way for artists/music labels to secure the files they distribute on the internet to combat piracy.

If you have MP3s from the songs you have obtained in not-so-legal manners, then you're fine. iPod supports MP3 format.

Your MP3 files will NOT be affected by iTunes DRM (I assume that's what you mean by 'inflict iTunes')

I doubt many people are going to admit to getting their music illegally, by the way...