MyTunes
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MyTunes for iPhone gives your music an impressive kick
SRS Labs has just released MyTunes, a free iPhone app that rather dramatically enhances music playback on your iDevices. Instead of using the stock player provided by Apple, you launch the MyTunes app, select your playlists, albums or artists, and you're away. The sound of most tracks transforms in an often spectacular fashion. Matt Yaney of SRS told me the app uses a variety of proprietary techniques to eliminate the degradation provided by MP3 encoding and produce a more natural and immersive experience, usually lost by the recording and compression process. I have to agree. Listening to a variety of Rock, New Age, Jazz and Classical improved every track I tried. Bass was firmer, percussion was much sharper, and the position of instruments across the sound stage are more precise. The changes just aren't a matter of boosting high and low frequencies, there is a good deal of sophisticated audio processing taking place. I found the effects most pronounced on music that was recorded live with acoustic instruments, but as I said, just about every genre of music sounded better. This app is a bit of a breakthrough for SRS Labs, because the only previous way to get this technology was with a hardware dongle on the SRS Wow! product. I've compared the 2 systems, and found the audio quality quite close. The SRS Wow! does have an actual hardware DAC (digital audio converter) but I was hard pressed to hear the difference when listening to MyTunes. There are a few caveats. The MyTunes app won't work with any music that has DRM, and it won't work on any videos you have. Since the app only connects to your iTunes library, it won't enhance Pandora, Spotify or any online streaming services. If you want even more features there is a US$4.99 in-app purchase that provides additional custom controls for audio enhancement, more EQ settings, volume leveling, and an simpler interface to use when driving. I didn't find the extra features all that compelling, but SRS Labs will let you sample them for ten minutes to see if they are worthwhile for you. If you listen to a lot of music on your iDevice, and most of us do, I wouldn't hesitate to download MyTunes. The basic app is free. It takes a little effort to explore all the features provided, but if you try it I think it will have a permanent place on your iPhone or iPod touch. The app also will work on an iPad, but MyTunes is not universal, and a separate iPad app is coming later this year. Give the app a listen and report your impressions in comments, and check the gallery out for some screen shots. %Gallery-136073%
myTunes now myFairTunes6, tons of features added
Oh, just in case you're interested: new version of myTunes (now myFairTunes6 to avoid confusion with the previous myTunes), v.0.2b, which allows for a simple media library browser, play/stop track iTunes DRM stripping from the app, conversion with metadata, and a teaser about a new version with 6x DRM stripping. Well, aren't we feeling a bit cocky now, hm? Still, nicely done.[Thanks, Pete]
myTunes brings a GUI to stripping iTMS DRM
These crazy hackers are moving fast these days, but Engadget has stayed in stride by providing a walk-through of myTunes, a GUI front-end to QTFairUse (sadly, Windows only - for now), that python code they mentioned earlier this week (not to be confused with any other products by the name of 'myTunes').A big downer for this app, however, is the way it works its DRM-be-gone magic: it can only work on tracks as they're played in real time. Even then, you're left with a file (sans any metadata like ratings or ID3 tags) which needs to be re-constructed into a playable AAC file with a second tool, though that process seems to take mere seconds per track. Engadget recommends letting the stripping process run overnight, so you can get a good 8 hours or so of unshackled music from each batch. Check out their walk-through for more instructions and ideas on how to optimize this process.myTunes might not be pretty yet, but it sounds like the developer(s) have a polishing roadmap in place, including simplifying this to a one-step process. For now, it still is the only method we know of for setting your iTMS purchases free.
myTunes: the simplified iTunes DRM stripper for Windows
Earlier this week we told you about the first tool we've yet heard of that strips the FairPlay DRM from the iTunes Music Store v6 tracks you bought, called QTFairUse. Unfortunately, because this tool was still very raw and in Python, so it didn't seem entirely there yet for the rest of us; well, today we're one step closer with myTunes, a small (50KB), simple, graphical Windows app designed to strip the DRM off your iTunes tracks lickety split. Based on the QTFairUse Python code (and not that of the original myTunes from way back in the day), this app unfortunately only strips DRM in real time, meaning that while it automates the process as you churn through your playlist, it also requires you to play through your library song by song (compared to FairUse4WM, which strips PlaysForSure DRM en masse). Also, after the FairPlay has been stripped, you still have to use another tool to reconstruct your track from your raw AAC file (which also means you have no metadata). In other words, even though this tool simplifies a lot of the process, it's still also a huge pain to use, so you'd better be prepared to bust out some shell scripting until the next version of myTunes is released (when they intend to automatically add the headers and metadata, making it a one step process). But it did most definitely work, click on to get an idea of what you're in for with this early version of myTunes.[Thanks, Pete]
