Luigi Auriemma

Hey Luigi,

I was wondering if you ever looked into stripping the DRM protection from iTunes protected files, or if you might be interested in trying. It's a very popular topic online, and there have been many applications in the past (such as myTunes) that were able to strip the protection with little to no loss in quality. However, many of these applications no longer work with the latest version of itunes.

There are also other ways though, but they have their negative side effects. For example, you can burn the songs to a cd within itunes, and then rip them back onto your computer into mp3 format, but there is a loss in quality. Also, some songs purchased can simply be converted to mp3 within itunes... but they must have the .m4a extension. The extensions with .m4p can't be converted this way, nor can you make an "mp3 cd" out of them, just a regular cd that must be re-ripped (once again, there will be a loss of quality). Also, the majority of songs that I've purchased are .m4p anyway.

It would be interesting to see an application that can strip the protection from .m4p files, and convert the files to a format (such as mp3) with little or no loss in quality. I'm sure it can be done with a little reverse engineering on the itunes program... considering that the application can play the songs back for you.

Anyways, just thought I'd throw out the idea in case you might be interested. You would surely make a lot of itunes users happy if a program like this became reality :P.

although lossy there is ever the universal lame loopback recording from your same computer :)

I'm not updated about the status of the drm and the program which can decrypt them, anyway I imagine that fairplay and the others are probably no longer compatible.
Take a look to the following link, maybe they can help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairPlay
http://www.doubletwist.eu/

I did a little searching, and I found an application that actually strips the DRM without loss! It's called "Requiem", and you can find it on torrent sites such as the piratebay. The guy also has a freenet site up where he keeps everyone updated on the status of the program, as well as providing freenet download links for the latest versions. You probably wont find it on a centralized server considering that Apple is very mad about this, and has sent out many Cease and Desist letters to many websites that attempted to host it (such as hymn-project.org), forcing them to take it down.

But it comes with an awesome little java gui that makes it simple, and the full source code (in c++). I tried it out, and it simply strips the protection into the raw AAC format without any loss in quality. There is barely any change in file size too! From there, you can use the "convert to mp3" feature in itunes (that was disabled before since the file was a protected .m4p), or you can just leave it in the raw AAC format for any player that can handle aac.

But be aware, the raw AAC format still holds your full name, apple account name, and other info to track you down. But converting into mp3 will most likely remove all these traces, thought I am not 100% certain on this. However, my name did show up with the raw AAC, so beware.

I have not checked the AAC format so don't know if there is a way to strip these additional fields, anyway have you tried to fill your personal data with random bytes?

I may have been in error, since I was just posting what I read on another forum.... but I now don't think the actual format is "AAC". The actual file extension that requiem converts the file into is .m4a, and the .m4a can be played in programs such as winamp without trouble.

So the format to look at would probably be .m4a. However, I was able to fill my full name and email in with random bytes, and the file still plays fine. But I am not sure if there is other info that could link me (I wasn't able to see anything readable though).

Edit: It looks like m4a and mp4 are pretty much the same file format. Here is a quote from wikipedia:



.. looks like they use .m4a to determine that it's audio.