Wanna unDRM those iTunes? Use iMovie

Apple may be playing a cat-and-mouse game trying to shut down Hymn, but supposedly there's an easier way to strip out the FairPlay digital rights management copy protections that Apple puts into songs purchased from their iTunes Music Store, and it doesn't require installing any sketchy semi-legal software either. We haven't tried this out yet ourselves (we don't have a Mac on hand at the moment), but apparently Apple already gives every Mac owner everything they need in the form of their iMovie software. Macnews.de reports that you can use iMovie's "Share" feature to export any song downloaded from the iTunes Music Store and save it as an unprotected AAC or WAV file. Anyone tried this out yet?

UPDATE: This doesn't actually strip out the DRM, it just re-encodes the files, something which is considerably less exciting (and results in a loss of sound quality). Anyway…

[Via Digital Media Thoughts]

[MK @ Dec 19th 2005 12:03AM]

I've used this technique. Works fine, though imovie is very slow software on a 600 MHz ibook.... Not a technique I'd want to use on a regular basis. But then, if I'm going to pay CD prices for music, I'm going to go buy an actual CD.

[Brian Kenyon @ Dec 19th 2005 12:03AM]

Wouldn't the quality actually be the same? Its just transcoding or ripping to an uncompressed format.

Hackers will always get around DRM and until MTV and the radio stations stop playing music it will always show up on the P2Ps...

[Guy Kuo @ Dec 19th 2005 12:03AM]

I've also done this, but the sound level of the music came out quite different from the original music file. It was much louder and appeared to clip. I went back to simply burning to CD and reripping. There is more loss due to decompression/recompression, but the results were much more acceptable.

[MIchael @ Dec 19th 2005 12:03AM]

You can also burn a cd w/ your itunes program then just convert the song to mp3 format and it'll ditch the aac as well. It won't work if you burn with toast, make sure you burn using itunes.

[Tyrone @ Dec 19th 2005 12:03AM]

To remove DRM from any audio file just plug the 1/8" audio out cable from your *quality* soundcard into one of MANY MP3 players that record/encode audio into MP3 on the fly. A bit of a pain in the ass- but it'd work for any DRM'ed file.

[Adam Rice @ Dec 19th 2005 12:03AM]

This is what Fairtunes (http://fairtunes.cjb.net/) does for you.

I wonder about the quality hit: you're making a round trip from AAC to AIFF to AAC (presumably at the same bitrate) again. On the face of it, the quality hit should be minor; if the original recording is AIFF and it is ripped to AAC by the same encoder we use at home (which isn't necessarily so), then the 2nd-gen AAC file might be a bit-perfect copy of the first-gen AAC file...right?

[Joseph Holmes @ Dec 19th 2005 12:03AM]

Please, it's not that complicated!

Burn a CD from iTunes. No loss of quality -- the AAC files are converted to AIFF which is a lossless format. (AAC is lossy, but the resulting AIFF files have no LESS quality than the original iTunes AAC files.) Now you can copy those files onto your Mac -- or any other computer -- and do what you want with them. It's just like any other CD you burn.

The iMovie trick does the same thing.

This has been true from the beginning. There's really no need for weird utilities.

[Jebarooney @ Dec 19th 2005 12:03AM]

Thing is, it wouldn't be just like any other CD you burn. The problem with Joseph's recommendation is that you will actually lose quality when you re-encode the AIFF files as AAC. It's like taking a grainy photocopy of an image(AAC), making a perfect replica of the photocopy(AIFF), and then taking another photocopy of that(AAC again). It'll be slightly more compressed and more information will be missing from the audio.

[Niko @ Dec 19th 2005 12:03AM]

Just burn your iTunes purchased songs to a music CD, and rip them back as an MP3. I've purchased songs from Napster that "will not" play on the iPod that I've burned to a CD and ripped back as an MP3 - on the iPod it goes!

[Brian @ Jan 4th 2006 9:30AM]

How much audio quality do you really lose? I mean we're already talking about 128kbs ACC file anyway, and to me when I burn them to a music CD w/ Itunes it sounds like its a whole lot better (the CD) than being played as an ACC file anyway. So I can't imagine reripping it loses that much sound quality.. does anyone know specifics?