Let’s all crack our iTunes Music.

THIEF! SOUNDS LIKE YOU NEED A LESSON IN RESPECTING COPYRIGHTS!

That says nothing about stealing music…

It is called fair use! I want to be able to do what I want with my legally purchased music (as long as it is for personal use)

The challange is somewhat spotty, you want to be able to rip protected audio from a cd, or burn protected AAC files to a MP3 CD?

I think Ben wants to be able to get your iTunes protected music, and be able to burn a virtual CD that contains the raw WAV DRM free files that you can save.

So, burn Protected AAC files, but have them read as DRM Free WAV files?

No, when iTunes uses the burn feature to normal CD’s – It converts the Protected AAC file to a WAV file that standard CD player understands.

Instead of writing the WAVS to a CD, they would be written to a virtual CD, or directory.

So… basically you just want a virtual drive instead of using say a CD-RW, burning the disc, ripping it back to the computer and then just erasing the disc and reusing it.

Yes, that is correct. But, I can’t think of a way to make iTunes burn to a virtual drive instead of the real one . . .

Hence the challenge!

So, what is the objective to this, I know a program that removes the DRM from songs without re-encoding it . . .

Go on… For 4.6.1?

Dylan, are you talking about jHYMN?

Which doesn’t work with iTunes 6 yet.

Well, I never got to use it as it required .NET 1.1, so not 100% sure it it works with the current version, but the older version of iTunes uses different DRM, so if your music was bought with 4.6, Im 99.5647% sure that it can remove the DRM, its the new versions Im shaky about . . .

BUT, this looks promising:
http://www.ztekware.com/

“Work as CDRW, let you burn music files to Virtual CDRW, support Window Media Player, MusicMatch”

But, It doesn’t continue on . . .

No, Im talking about iOpener . . .

Hmmm, anything for a Mac?

Nope, but has Smash used 6.x to buy music?

daeken (Cody Brocious) is one of the only people still working to break the itunes 6 DRM. DVD Jon can’t do it anymore because he now lives in san francisco (i think) and it’d be a legal hassle to crack it. It’ll break, hopefully sooner than later – but right now using cd burning is the only way to exploit DRM from any version of itunes further than 5.0.1.

Personally, AAC 128kbps doesn’t cut it for me so flac files from torrents keep me happy hahaha

I’d gladly use itunes 4.5….if I didn’t have an iPod con video :(

By the way, are CD-RWs too time consuming for you? is half your library DRMed?

I believe some DVD’s have Audio CD capibilites.

The challenge is a little weird indeed. I understand why you would want a copy of your DRM PURCHASED music “tracks”, i.e. playing these songs on a non-ipod mobile device or on a unix/linux machine. The problem that really arises is taking lossy medium and enlarging the size to have a lossless copy of you lossy medium (did I lose everybody yet?) To take a lossy AAC and make it more lossy by re-ripping it into an mp3 seems, well dumb (even for a podcast). You can do this w/o a cdrw, but it’s a little time consuming. Play the song in real-time, use Audio Hijack or Wiretap to “hijack” or “tap” the audio and save it as aiff/wav/ALE. If you want a cd disk image use can then use the lossless/lossy copy with Toast. Time consuming yes, but why would you want to back up a song that you wouldn’t want to hear all the way through hmmmmm?

I think the real challenge is to able to read the “protected” AAC frame by frame, then re-rip a “non-protected” AAC frame by frame copy. I’m no programmer, but I do use a product called MP3 trimmer to do the pretty much the same thing for “unprotected” mp3s. Why would I want to do this? It strips out all the non-audio data for a very “clean” mp3. Now take that model and reverse engineer quicktime/itunes to figure out how to read the DRM.

I’ll shut-up now, but I agree with juicy. 128 kbps sounds like crap. If you’re gonna go lossy, you gotta go as lossy as possible (320 kbps). Buy more storage, it gets cheaper & cheaper. I really think it’s only a matter of time before its so cheap, lossless will be the way most people go. ITMS will offer DRM ALE songs for a higher price first, then in a few years they’ll stop using AAC. Lets see if I have to eat my words.

yeah rawk you’re onto something on that last part – ALAC is the future of itunes… the problem is the DRM. See most people keep a library of lossless files and batch recode them to the newest lossy format for their portable device etc. (i personally keep all ALAC files on my ipod, even though battery life sucks)

If ALAC was sold in itunes it’d be DRMed and people couldn’t recode those huge things into whatever lossy format of their choice. But I also think at one point iTMS will be forced into selling lossless files – funny how everyone thought it was comming back in april 2004 when the format was first unveiled – some of us are still waiting patiently…

I personally am still for a legal solution for my lossless needs – i’ll find one

ALAC = Apple Lossless Audio Codec

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Removing the DRM using jhymn works much like rawk said, (called a lossless conversion) where the drm is removed but the original audio is untouched. Many sit a twidle their thumbs while they wait for the few people still working on the new itunes 6 DRM to finish their work, but yes the lack of significant progress is a major downer.

But, there is a flaw in the iTunes Music Store that goes unnoticed. If you have never bought music from a 6.0.x version, your music is “jhymn-able”, along with your music store account. Go, download 4.9, and just buy you music, then jhymn it, and enjoy the freedom this comuntry was founded on.

I’ve been using Noteburner and it works really nicely. Creates a virtual CD-ROM but only when you launch the program. iTunes sees it and writes to it. Noteburner encodes the mp3 to the directory I specified and voila. Keeps the track info too.

Costs 30 bucks, but I thought that was worth it to stop wasting CD-R’s.

There only seems to be a windows version, but you could ask them about a mac one.

http://www.noteburner.com/