Mac iLife runs down the changes in Apple’s just-released ver. 4.5 upgrade to iTunes. Many are incensed that Apple used the upgrade as an opportunity to tighten up on the DRM rights they extend to their users —
In iTunes 4.5, you can authorize up to five Macs or Windows computers to play your purchased music — up from three. But Apple giveth and Apple taketh away: you can now burn a playlist containing purchased music up to seven times (down from ten). And the old workaround of simply changing the playlist slightly does not work.
What is not being discussed as much is that Apple seems to have found a way to defeat the widely available de-DRM hacks developed under earlier iTunes versions by changing their protection scheme. After buying music from the iTunes Store, it is reasonable to convert the protected .m4p’s in which form they arrive to .mp3’s with m4p2mp4 (which strips off the copy protection and writes plain .mp4’s — as I understand it, m4p2mp4.exe is just a Win-executable wrapper around the much-publicized QTFairUse DRM-busting code) and dbPowerAmp (which takes the .mp4’s to .mp3’s). Many have no compunctions about doing this for their own “fair use”. Having bought these songs (or the rights to them) for $0.99 apiece, the feeling is that one ought to be able to play them on a non-iPod .mp3 player or continue to listen to them after going through the fifth ‘authorized’ computer. But since iTunes’ upgrade this week, m4p2mp4.exe doesn’t work anymore; the .mp4 file it writes from an .m4p song is the right size, and it has the song’s ‘tags’, but it is empty of musical content. Anyone know of a source where the Windows installation package of the previous iTunes version is still available for download, and if deinstalling the new iTunes and reinstalling the old one will work? It doesn’t work. The fallback is to burn the purchased music playlist to audio CDs (a person ought to have a hard backup of the music they have purchased anyway, right?) and then rip the CDs into iTunes. But how long do you suppose it will be before Apple finds a way to close this ‘hole’ in their DRM?
