DRM, Digital rights management, is the process by which music companies license the music and enforce restrictions on what you can do with the digital music files. If you’ve ever downloaded any Audio from the iTunes store in the past, chances are you’ve been served DRM infested files. What that means is that while you’ll be able to play those files just fine on your iPod/iPhone, if in the future you purchase, say, a Creative MP3 player, your music will not be playable on those.
Innovative and determined hackers have found a number of ways to strip DRM from iTunes’ audio, but they’re always playing catch up with Apple as the company keeps changing and improving their DRM scheme.
In this post today, we’ll talk about a method to not only circumvent DRM, we’ll convert the audio files into the .ogg format, which is an open source format for Audio. Once you have the music in the ogg format, it is quite easy to convert it to MP3/AAC/WAV or any other format you want.
First of all, download and install DVDnextCopy on your windows PC. DVDnext is a utitlity which creates a virtual CD writer on your system. What this means is that any application will be able to write files to this virtual drive as if it’s a real CD burner, even if your machine doesn’t have a physical CD burner.
Once you have DVDnext installed, fire up iTunes and create a new playlist (ctrl+N) and add all the songs that you want to strip DRM off, to this playlist.
Right click the playlist name and select the Burn playlist to Disc option.
Now, in the dialogue box that pops up, make sure that you select the iTurns drive that DVDnext created.
Click on Burn and iTunes will start burning all the files in the playlist to the virtual CD writer.
In the taskbar, you should see a popup indicating that DVDnext has started it’s work.
The conversion will take a while and you’ll be informed when it has finished.
Double click the DVDnext icon in the taskbar and you will see the list of all the songs in the playlist converted to the OGG format.
Tell me that wasn’t easier than you thought ?
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About Sharninder: Programmer, blogger and a geek making a living shifting bits around the Internet. Sharninder is the owner of Geeky Ninja |
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