Twokinds ARCHIVE Forums

First, I would like to say, this is in no way in promotion of music piracy, and if the subject comes up posts regarding it will be deleted. This is intended to show you how to free up music for better use.

Ever bought a file from iTunes and wanted to play it in another player, like FOOBAR2000, but got pesky errors when trying to do so? That's because of this pesky little thing called DRM. DRM, or Digital Rights Management(that names makes the constitution cringe. :<), is basically an encryption on music bought through online services such as the iTunes Music Store, etc. DRM makes it so that you cannot play that music in any players that do not support your DRM format. In the case of the iTMS, iTunes is the only application that will play your music, and the iPod is the only mp3 player that you can put it on. Many people find this ridiculous, but still prefer buying music online because they can get one track at a time, and sometimes albums at cheaper rates, therefore it makes sense to remove the DRM, freeing your music to be put on any mp3 player, or played through any media player.

I've found about 3 good programs to do this thus far. The first, myFairTunes, is an application for removing iTunes DRM. It has a Graphical user interface, and is pretty straightforward, though not as stable as some. QTFairUse6 is another targeted at iTunes. It's interface it command line based and is subsequently less user friendly, though it is more stable than myFairTunes. The third, FairUse4WM, is for any of Microsoft's PlaysForSure services. I can't really say much about this one since I've never used it personally, though I have heard from multiple sources that it works well. Hopefully this will be helpful, though just don't use this to pirate music. This is to free up your music for other, legal uses.

Thanks DK, information like this is always useful. I've never been fond of DRM, wether it's in music or ebooks. So this is a good solution to the problem. It is certainly not wrong to do what you will with a file that you own, so long as it isn't being copied for other people. Thanks.

No problem. I've been very annoyed with DRM lately and figured it couldn't hurt to tell others about ways around it. :D

Well, I agree with you. Also, there is another way, though a bit lower tech.

1. Get Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
2. Open audacity, and near the top, there is a drop down box from which you can select your input device. Select "wave" as your input(note: while this is selected you cannot use a microphone, you must change it back to use your microphone).
3. Close any noisy programs, or mute them. If not you will have annoying beeps, or whatever sound is coming from them(for example MSN beeps).
4. Open whatever file you want to get the music from. this can be any file you can play, a video on YouTube, whatever.
5. Make sure your file is stopped at the beginning, now press record on audacity, then press play on your file.
6. Wait 'till the song/audio/video is finished, then press stop on audacity.
7. Select any blank space at the beginning of your audio in audacity, and press delete. Do the same with the end.
8. Now click file > export to mp3(if you cant do this, save your project by file > save as, then find a copy of "lame mp3 encoder/decoder" and there is a way to make sure audacity knows where it is... Winamp uses lame enc so theres one way to get it). Also you can export as wave or OGG if you want, experiment!
9. You're done. you now have a mp3 that can be played by anything playing mp3, and its a way of taking a copy of any source of audio, including streaming audio! (note: you may want to experiment in audacity, default settings are mono, and you probably want stereo) :wink:

Simple once you get used to it, and is a general usage thing, meaning it can be used for anything! You can also use audacity to record from a take player if you want, but you have to set the input to whatever input you use...

The audacity trick has been done in so many different variations it's hard to keep up with them all. The problem with it is, you lose quality. Doing that, you take an AAC compressed file and then condense it into an mp3, and that cuts off quality(and for many people, it's noticeable). Besides, the listed programs are much simpler and easier to use. Aslo, they can unlock files in batches. If you have a huge library of music it would be a pain to convert each one by hand.

yes true, but i believe you can encode it as a super-high quality file, thus losing no quality. also, this is more usefull for getting music out of music videos on youtube... :wink: still its very usefull..

then again, i dont have any drm music to try this out on, all mine is from those flash mp3 players(easy to get those files), and videos and such... :lol:

In theory yes, but you'd also increase the filesize. Plus, unless the music has been released into public domain ripping it out of a YouTube video is technically illegal.

perhaps... well, still theres alot of public music out there.. also you could encode it as a high quality ogg(which is sort of the .png of music) and you can get smallish filesize and super quality... so ya lol :P

I would just like to point out that FairUse4WM DOSE NOT work with Windows Media Player 11. So if you have upgraded to the latest WMP, or have Vista, you are SOL. It is possible to downgrade to WMP 10, but only in XP and not Vista. I suggest searching teh interwebs for guides on how to down grade. Its not that hard, just don't feel like typing it out right now =)

Neat little set of programs, but I can't be arsed to use iTunes or the infamous iPod. I've got my little Rio Nitro - a mere half gig of storage but I've yet to fill it - and it only ran me fifty bucks.

Even so, I might take a sniff.