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Hymn is what PlayFair once was.

Always remember to convert your purchases to m4a from m4p and back them up!

No iTMS for me until hymn catches up. And, no, I won't downgrade to 4.6. That's just silly.

Or, you could just use HYMN (which, interestingly enough, is available on MacUpdate -- I'm surprised they haven't gotten a cease-and-desist yet).

http://www.hymn-project.org

how about hymn? "It allows you to free your iTunes Music Store (protected AAC / m4p) purchases from their DRM restrictions with no sound quality loss."

If they broke RealNetworks playback on iPods, what about files de-protected by Project Hymn?

I would assume it's broken since I figured Real used some of the code from this app. But the article does not say, and there is no news on the Hymn site (lterally, some kind of server error).

Indeed. Does the book even say anything about decrypting your iTMS tunes?

http://nanocrew.net/software/
http://www.hymn-project.org/

playfair was first. Jon didn't write playfair. in fact, the usage notes for deDRMS mention you need to use VLC to get your "user key"; a feature that was part of the original playfair which was later integrated into VLC.

* drms.c : DRMS
* Copyright (C) 2004 VideoLAN
* $Id: drms.c,v 1.2 2004/04/01 19:48:01 play_fair Exp $
*
* Author: Jon Lech Johansen

Jon is the person who first reverse-engineered the FairPlay DRM scheme.

* drms.c : DRMS
* Copyright (C) 2004 VideoLAN
* $Id: drms.c,v 1.1 2004/01/05 12:37:52 jlj Exp $
* Author: Jon Lech Johansen

Similarly, we've got no evidence he's done anything except compile the freely available VC-1 code in this latest iteration.

People said the same thing about music. A solution arrives -- one from which you can even remove the DRM -- and music sharing networks still get plenty of traffic.

I'd say one track + instant gratification + hymn (so I can actually do what I want with the music I purchase) is even more attractive.

• Music/Video player/Game player with camera, gameboy-sized screen and TV output and still feasable to fit in the pocket. Will not displace iPod, but will sure have it's own market. Pictures/video at iPod original size are IMHO useless.
  
• Light, small $100 device with >1GB capacity. Have no idea if that's feasable yet.
  
• A cell phone with >1GB MP3 capacity which is still not too huge/heavy. Again, don't know about technology.
  
• PJMS (Pure Java music store) that runs on Win95, MacOS9 or X and Linux in addition to current Microsoft offerings. Yes, DRM would be breakable, but so is Apple's. Music downloads are still for early adopters, so supporting non-XP users could give Creative significant traction.
  
• Be Creative :-)
  

No, but I bet you could get hymn to compile on linux :-).

You might find Hymn interesting. Works well for me.
Hymn DRM Stripper

i too buy music through the iTMS and have an iPod. I have made a habit of running every track I buy through Hymn to strip out the DRM bollocks. 90% of my collection is in AAC format ripped from my own CDs. IANAL but figure it's well within my fair-use rights to keep the music I buy digitally in whatever format I like.

Why not use HYMN to remove the DRM from the AAC? http://hymn-project.org/

Is that you can rip out the DRM. I refuse to buy anything that has DRM such that if the company goes under I'm stuck.

I don't like the DRM either. But I did run into this nice little utility which takes care of that. Obvioulsy it would be ideal to not have DRM at all, but unfortunately we live in reality.

Now - if Apple will just start offering lossless downloads on iTMS, I'll actually be a regular customer. I don't mind the relative headache of unDRM'ing the music, but there's nothing I can do to bring the quality back to the original. Also - if iTMS sold lossless quality music, I could unDRM it and then convert it to FLAC/Ogg without losing anything.

hymn (Hear Your Music aNywhere) formerly called PlayFair - Removes Apple's FairPlay DRM from iPod / iTunes http://hymn-project.org/

The solution is to make non-DRM-encrusted backup copies of your music. Here's a program that will do that:

http://hymn-project.org/

Get it now, before Apple shuts it down with the DMCA...

good thing I disinfect my ITMS music. wow, that was really hard. try doing that with an encrypted WMA file.

--
Daniel C. Slagle
Keeper of the "Unofficial" iMovie FAQ

Well, if you don't use Windows or OSX, the point is moot; no major online music store is Linux-compatible (although Crossover is working on iTunes). However, if you were downloading on a Windows/OSX box, you could use hymn to decrypt it and play under whatever OS you please.

Don't forget hymn. It allows you to convert protected AAC files that you purchase through the iTunes Music Store to unprotected AAC files that can be played back on any device, or with any piece of software, that supports AAC.

Just be sure to backup the original protected AAC file somewhere just in case. Oh and I wouldn't be sharing these unprotected files on any P2P service. It does remove the DRM, but it doesn't remove certain tags within the file (called atoms) that can uniquely identify the user who purchased it. There are other pieces of software available that can remove those, but I'm not going to post any links.

I'd love to be able to load protected AAC onto my NetMD minidisc player without having to burn it to CD first.

...that nobody's broken the current generation of Windows Media DRM yet. Also, an online music store peddling WMA tracks is hardly a new idea - OD2 have been doing it in Europe for years, but I never bothered with legit music services until iTunes came out here. Why? Because if I buy a DRM'ed WMA track, the only thing I can do with it is sit at my computer and listen to it. Now I grant that most of the time that's probably what I'll want to do, but it means that if at some point in the future I decide I want to do something else with it (for example, putting it on my laptop so I can listen to it on the train) I can't. And even if they've made that sort of thing possible now, I bet it involves some sort of horribly complicated license transfer process or something. With iTunes, I can buy music, run it through hymn and Bob's your uncle, I can do whatever I want with it. Course, it's still in AAC format, so if I want to put it on a device that isn't compatible with AAC, such as an MP3 player, I need to do some conversion, but at least I can do that.

Well, technically it does work with the iTunes store, so long as you convert the songs to MP3 files, using hymn and an AAC to MP3 converter. Yes, the quality will drop but oh-so-very-slightly. (People tend to really overestimate the quality loss when transcoding a single time. Do it like five or ten times though....)

Since you're paying for it, use it. Yes, yes, I know, you use Linux and can't. Blah. Find a Windows PC, download a song. Follow me here...

Now, since it's that DRM encoded garbage AAC or whatever, you're going to want to strip that crap out.

Use Hymn for that. Now add your unlocked song to your collection in iTunes. Use iTune's built in "CONVERT TO MP3" feature, which it will do nicely and you now have a file you can use on your Linux machine. iTunes has a built in converter that works really well, but it won't convert it's own DRM protected trash. So once you've taken that out....

There are a few things to note. First off, when iTunes converts it to MP3 it will grow in size, nearly almost double it's original depending on the content. Next, your MP3 player has to support variable rate MP3s, which most do.

I know supporting iTunes is kind of like saying you accept DRM, but if you have to pay for it then use it the way you want. After all, You paid and can't listen to it on your chosen platform. Exercise your fair rights!

But you can run that file though hymn, and then share it. But since it doesn't (AFAIR) remove the tag on the file that uniquely identies each buyer, it would probably be a pretty stupid idea (unless of course you remove that as well which should be easy when the file isn't encrypted...)

and is at this web site - http://www.hymn-project.org/. Enjoy!

I think you meant to say: HYMN.

Only if you save the audio stream to a lossless format. Save it as MP3/AAC/OGG/etc and you get transcoding artifacts. Yes, this breaks DRM 99%, but it's not perfect.

Insightful my ass. Could parent or parent's moderator please explain, how the hell it is supposed to affect Apple's bottom line if Apple's customer using iTMS with iTunes for Windows client is actually some other os, which just happens to provide the same interfaces iTunes for Windows needs? That customer is still shopping on iTMS, and DRM is still effective. That customer may still own an iPod, too.

Theoretically one could explain that it is easier to bypass DRM on Linux than on Windows, but as we now have things like a commercially licensed PowerDVD for Linux and Hymn for Windows, I think that argument won't really hold any water.

You can already de-DRM iTMS songs with Hymn. If you don't like leaving your Apple ID in the file, it's probably not a big deal to modify the Hymn source.

I'd caution people authorizing iTunes under Wine (and Windows, for that matter) to be aware of the DRM scheme, so that you don't accidentally lose the right to play your songs. You can authorize up to five computers, and you may unwittingly reauthorize the same computer multiple times with no clear way to fix it. With Wine, it is probably quite easy to reset some of the data that determines the system key:

• Windows product ID
• BIOS version
• CPU name
• serial number of C: drive

And lucky for Real, all that groundwork was already done for them.

Personally I don't mind Real doing this, it's an interesting approach - but it would seem to me this would leave themselves open to people using Hymn to strip the DRM from the files!

So after this, will we start seeing Real attacking Hymn? That would be sort of amusing...

The word "hackers" was successfully successfully co-opted long, long, long ago ("a person who illegally gains access to and sometimes tampers with information in a computer system"), so don't fault Apple's (currently correct and appropriate) use of the word, and save us the tiresome lectures.

Ummm. This is *OLD* news. See the hymn project.

According to this

Quote: "It says its engineers used publicly-available information in order to work out how to make files compatible with Apple's digital rights management (DRM) software, which is called FairPlay."

It sounds like they used the open source Hymn/Playfair" project - which is GPL...
... so they're about to violate the GPL aswell?!

Does anyone have any clue as to their method?

Most of all, I would like to congratulate Apple on their fantastic use of the DMCA to crush free software developer writing applications (PlayFair) that can handle the formats in which they sell music.

You seem to have missed a small point. PlayFair is not crushed, it lives on as Hymn!

Kind of takes the wind out of your sales.

I can burn as many CD's as I like from any ITMS song, and if I get tired of what restrictions there are I can use Hymn to strip away the DRM.

Napster is far more restrictive in terms of use (and not consistnat either with some songs having different restrictions), and what does it matter if I can use it with ten sanctioned devices if they all suck? It's like saying I can have a free breakfast and giving me ten flavors of cement to choose from.

You'll also find out just how "free" Napster is when they go bankrupt and the licencing servers go offline... What is the path to un-DRM Napster songs?

$1 is a rip off if the tune is from Apple. Unless you want proprietary hardware (the overpriced iPod) you can't play the tune on anything but your computer.

I have a Palm Tungsten T that disagrees with you...quit spreading FUD.

The other poster how you missed the boat about being able to burn a song as much as you liked to a CD that you can play anywhere.

But you also seen to forget that Hymn exists, which lets you remove the DRM and use the file as you like.

Either way, you just come off as terribly uninformed.

Apple is NOT attacking free software developers, Apple went after sites that were hosting a piece of software that is illegal under the DMCA (which if they didn't I'm sure the RIAA would have pulled the plug on iTMS).

So you overclocked a CPU by 25%. Because it's not the only part in your computer, your system runs 10% faster. So what?

I understand overclocking 8088 from 4.77 to 8MHz to speed up compiles. Or projects like hymn that remove artificialy imposed limitations which really hinder users. But what is achived here that can not be better done with a dual processor, perhaps a nice G5?

Some how, I think the Play Fair guys should have had some inkling in advance that this was going to happen.

Or do you seriously think Apple shouldn't do anything about people breaking their DRM scheme?

After all, it is the only way they could get labels to sign on to the iTunes music store.

If someone wrote an open source computer virus for the mac, would you still cry foul when apple tries to shut them down? Just because something's open source, doesn't make it good.

He did however hack Apple's FairPlay DRM system.

The hymn utility (aka playfair) uses his GPL'ed code. He's credited in the hymn manual.

He did however hack Apple's FairPlay DRM system.

The hymn utility (aka playfair) uses his GPL'ed code. He's credited in the hymn manual.

I'll admit that the iRiver h120 isn't as convenient as the iPod with the iTunes Music Store (I have to convert all of my iTunes music to mp3 before putting them on mine), but the device itself is extremely nice. It is only slightly larger than the iPod, considerably cheaper, and lighter. It comes with the carrying case, a built in mp3 encoder, optical audio in and out, and a built in FM Tuner. It plays mp3, ogg, or wma, and is firmware upgradable to play new technologies as they emerge. Battery life is right at 16hrs. It's not marketed as highly as iPod, but I vastly prefer it.

DeDRMS
hymn

find ~/Music -iname '*.m4a' -exec perl -pi -e 'BEGIN{$b=0}if(!$b){if(s/geID\x00\x00/DIeg\x00\x00 /){$b=1}}' {} ";"