Madness and Macness

A look at the possible methods of removing the DRM in iTunes, advantages, disadvantages, and their legal implications
Part 1: the ‘Apple’ method and hints to avoid major loss of quality,
Part 2: removing the DRM without loss of quality

Note: this article is only about music that you have bought and own.

DRM? What’s not to hate. You buy a song, and then the DRM prevents you doing things that you are legally entitled to - like playing the song at its originally quality on another mp3 player that’s not an iPod. Apple and the record companies of course are thinking, DRM? What’s not to like? DRM prevents users from doing things they are not legally entitled to - copying the song and distributing it to other people.

The needs of the customer and those of the record companies are fundamentally at odds. The user has a right to use the product they paid for. The record companies have a right to turn a profit. They also have a right to market the crap they do, and screw over most of the bands they ‘represent’. It’s called market economics or something.

The 100% legal way to remove the DRM

The obvious way to remove the DRM is the one sanctioned by Apple.
1. Make a playlist
2. Burn your playlist to a CD (i.e. a wav/aiff file) *
3. Re-import your songs from the CD
(* you are limited to doing a particular playlist 7 times. If you still own Roxio Toast 6, you can burn to a disk image, mount the image into iTunes and save yourself a blank CD)

For many people, this is an acceptable approach. But let’s take a look at what happening here to see why it’s not ideal.

When you buy a song from iTunes it’s been compressed into an AAC file. In other words, the quality is not as good as an original CD you’d buy at the record store. For many people this loss of quality is unnoticeable or they simply don’t care - fair enough.

Now, when you burn these AAC files to a CD they are converted to standard CD files which are about about 10 times the size (so a 4MB AAC file will end up being a 40MB file on the CD). This does not recreate the original quality of a CD! The bigger file is simply what CD players understand. The quality will essentially be the same as your iTunes purchase.

So now, you can simply import the songs back into iTunes (or any other software that you like) from the CD. But, and its a big BUT:

You have to convert the CD back to an MP3 file or AAC file which means a further loss of quality. This is called transcoding.

Avoiding reduction in Quality

But there are still things you can do to make minimize this loss. First, let’s clear up a misunderstanding. If you convert a 128kbps file to a CD, it does NOT follow that you should reimport using 128kbps. The aim any time you import a song is to reduce the size of that approx. 40MB file to something much smaller without reducing the quality too much:

.m4p file —–(1)——> CD File —–(2)——> .m4a or .mp3 (minus DRM)

Step 1 maintains the quality, Step 2 will always reduce it. (ignoring FLAC)

This means that you choose an encoding that is not going to reduce quality too much. Remember, whatever you do the resultant file will have a (slightly) worse quality than the one you bought from iTunes. How much worse is the choice you make. My recommendation is to use at the very least:

192kbps and to use VBR.

Which encoding?

Should you use AAC or MP3? They both have good support (AAC is not proprietary). AAC theoretically has better quality, but modern MP3 encoders such as LAME are highly regarded. You may end up choosing whatever is convenient to you - but remembering to set the bit-rate high enough and to use VBR:

So what have you achieved?

You have removed the DRM, but the file is bigger and the quality is slightly reduced. You need to burn a CD and the process is hardly fast. If this is acceptable to you, then you’re done.

Part 2 will explain how you can remove the DRM without going through this process, and without a loss of quality.