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Monday Releases Cause Crashes
The two big releases yesterday, Apple's Security Update and the DRM-canceling PlayFair, are causing problems. The Security Update appears to break cvs over pserver under some conditions (hangs for a long time, then quits with a malloc error), and ryanw writes, "according to the SF.net forum for playfair, the 'iTMS DRM stripping tool' destroys your purchased songs: the resulting files crash iTunes, the iPod, and QuickTime." Those who follow the rules -- wait a few days to install Apple's updates, and make backups of your iTMS files -- will be unaffected.
The way PlayFair snags a decryption key doesn't always work, but it tries to decrypt the song anyway. If it finds a bad key and uses it, of course the files are going to come out as garbage! If you swap headers of an m4a file and an m4p file, QuickTime, iTunes and the iPod all crash while reading it also. It does not, as the post suggests, even touch your purchased songs. All decryption is made on a copy. Just more fear mongering.
I have, however, had no trouble decrypting my songs under Mac OS X. They work perfectly.
Sigh....did we not already talk about this? iTUNES -> CDAUDIO -> MP3 is extra loss. ITUNES-> CDAUDIO -> AAC also possibly extra loss. The CDAUDIO is same quality, but not portable, and I do not have an iPod, or disk space to hold the uncompressed ripped cd's. That is why I am also a big fan of physical goods in the mail.
So point by point:
THAT *is* fair use
It is also fair use to break their encryption. One fair use does not stop another. DMCA may make it illegal though, but that is a different story.
Why go thru the trouble of breaking encryption?
To avoid the loss incurred by ITUNES -> CDAUDIO -> MP3/AAC/OGG/LOSSY and still keep the file size low.
just so you could listen to your music on linux?
Yes. I have no non linux/bsd machines. I had to use my roommate's windows machine to download songs from iTunes via Pepsi promo.
if you're going thru all that trouble then why not create a few audio CDs from all your purchased music, so you could listen to it on your stereo and in your car
Swapping CD's is a pain.
AND RIP UN-DRM'ed MP3s onto your linux box?
Extra loss incurred. See above.
get a clue or stick to WMA
WMA is not any better. I already have a clue.
rather than bashing Apple
I have no problem with apple. They can do what they want, I can do what I want via fair use.
DRM scheme that has always been loose in the first place.
Not loose enough for what I am trying to accomplish.
i still buy most my music off of amazon, i'm a big fan of physical goods in the mail.
Ditto, however this is getting to be more annoying as the cd's are becoming more copy protected every day.
For the people who stumbled into this discussion late, see the previous discussion
badness 10000
It really does work. The crashing is caused by it not acquiring the key and decrypting it incorrectly with no error checking. This is what you have to do(the only way I know how, because I don't know how to compile it on windows).
./configure, make, make install(if you're root).
./playfair whatever.m4p new.m4p.
Download it on *nix and do
On windows, download VLC. Run it and open your encrypted m4p file.
Now, in c:\documents and settings\username(whatever you're logged in as)\application data\drms, you have the key file. Copy that key file to your ~/.drms dir(create it) on the *nix box.
Then on the *nix box run
WHAM! It now works. It grabs the key from your ~/.drms and decrypts it to new.m4p. It works! I've tried it. This is great. Now I can actually buy music(Until apple "fixes" this).
If someone could compile this on windows it would cut down this process to 2 steps: 1. Run VLC with the file. 2. Run playfair.exe in.mp4 out.m4p
Thanks,
Chris Benard
Firstly, this tool never touches the original so unless you deleted the original before testing the new one, you are fine. For Example: /usr/local/bin/playfair
Secondly, the tool works fine most of the time. At least the mac version, but likely the pc one too. For me, its spits out 3/4 properly drm'd songs then spits out the rest garabage that crash iTunes/Quicktime. Try it yourself people, all you need is a mac with an ipod hooked up to it or just a windows pc.
Dont do school. Stay in milk. Drink your drugs.
If you had any understanding of the process, you would get that going AAC->MP3 does cause a quality loss.
Whether or not you care is another question, but denying that it happens just shows you don't know what you are talking about and therefore should probably keep quiet.
It's easy to prove you wrong -- just compare the waveforms. Also, in my limited experiments with this, it sound very degraded, but that's just me.
Besides, if this technique produced a "good" copy, there's no way RIAApple would let you do it. They're happy to have people flood the filesharing networks with crap.
The fact that you don't care doesn't mean anything. Lots of people love listening totally crapy 64Kbps MP3s and 4th generation mixtapes that have sat on the floor of their car for 5 years. Only a tool would say those are good copies though.
cant you just stream the music between all five macs. Saves disk space too.
The crashing is because it can't find a key. Read some of the other posts explaining how to fix that. As for uninstalling it, download the source code, and in the Terminal, go to that directory. Then type: make uninstall