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It looks like Apple made some changes to its DRM (Digital Rights Management) policies used by their iTunes Music Store this week. Of course yesterday, June 15th, they introduce localized versions of iTunes for the UK, France and Germany. Well after accessing the store to get the free song of the week, I tried to play one of my 200 purchased songs and I get an error, “You are not authorized to play this song purchased by…” I checked my authorization, de-authorized my computer and did it again but I got the same error. Now, I don’t keep my songs in the protected AAC format. I like to have flexibility so I use Fairplay or Hymm to strip the DRM from my music. I have used this software for the longest time now. I don’t give the music to other people or am a pirate I just like to have more flexibility with my music like the ability to play it in other players or mess with the songs to make remixes. I will tell you now, I have never given purchased music to others and never will.
What I don’t understand is, this is not a new version of iTunes. I do have keychain access to ask me when a program wants to access my keychain. It does get annoying but it helps me keep tabs on what my system is doing. Something that only happens after updating the iTunes version occurred which is “The Application iTunes would like to Access your keychain”. I can accept or decline. Naturally I accepted and I think Apple say Hymm had stripped my music of its DRM and locked it on me. All this does is piss me off. I called Apple and they just laughed at me so I did the second best thing; I rounded up all 200 of my purchased songs, put them in Toast and with a simple Command+K command, turned them all into AIFFs. From there, I re-imported the eight Gigabytes of uncompressed songs back into iTunes, added ID3 Tags, and album art then re-encoded back into AAC codec.
This took me about four hours to do and I just left my iBook on all night encoding music but now I am back up and running and playing my music with no problems. I hate Apple forced me to do this, but trust me; the DRM is not as secure as they say it is. If it is digital it can be broken or stolen or changed to the end user’s liking. Let me know if any of you have experienced the same problems. I have to add one final thing, the sound quality is about a fifth of its previous state but at least it plays. Trust me, from now on I only buy exclusive iTunes tracks and the rest will be on CD. When I buy a CD it is mine and I can encode it any way I want. Don’t forget kids, if Apple decides to stop selling music and does not allow you to authorize your music, you will have a lot of music that won’t play. It is in the Agreement you click ok when you first sign up for the iTMS. Apple is not the only company that does this but trust me, CD is still the better way to go.