Long saga about one of the things that’s wrong with DRM. Fortunately, something of a happy ending. No surprises here to any of you who have thought about the issue of DRM, but it is a first-person illustration.
All of a sudden (after having to reinstall Windows XP for a reason having nothing to do with itunes) itunes tells me that 122 purchased songs (m4p’s) will not be transferred to the ipod on synchronization because I am “not authorized to play them on this machine.” This happened to me several years ago and I recall the solution was arduous, but for the life of me I no longer remember what I did back then to solve the problem (I think I should keep a log of these bedevilling Windows quirks with which I struggle and eventually solve, to recreate them in the future. Because it sseems almost certain they will recur.). Burn me once, shame on you; burn me twice, shame on me, don’t they say that? So why the heck have I continued to buy music from the itunes store???
I start at the obvious place, by DEauthorizing the machine and REauthorizing it with the itunes store, over and over again. It tells me, each time, that authorization was successful and I have now authorized 3 out of my allowed 5 machines (altho I only have ever had itunes installed on one machine). No matter, it obviously sees the machine as changed and therefore as having a different identity. That’s okay, at least I’m authorized now, I’ll deal with deauthorizing the ‘phantom’ machines later. But, even tho’ successfully authorized, I still cannot transfer those 122 tunes to the ipod and itunes still tells me I am not authorized to play them.
Oh yeah, now I remember, you’re supposed to click on one of the “disallowed” songs in itunes and try and play it, and it will get you authorized in a more enduring way. So I do that but it will not play any of the songs in the “purchased” folder no matter how I try.
The old time-honored solution to de-DRM songs, which is to burn the “purchased” playlist to a CD and then re-import the music from the CD into itunes aas plain mp3s, doesn’t work because you can’t burn music you are not authorized to play in itunes. So I research the software the freedom-lovers have made available out there to de-DRM itunes music, like TuneBites. People say it works great. I download a trial version. One fatal hitch, the clever way it works is that it plays your .m4p tune to a virtual CD device it sets up and then rips it back to itunes as an .mp3, de-DRM’ed. Great. You have to be able to play the tune in itunes in the first place to convert it. I guess that makes a twisted sort of sense, since the point of TuneBites is not to steal music but just to allow you to truly own what you bought and paid for, without DRM, to do with as you please. But it will not work for me in this situation.
More research. I look for non-itunes music software for my desktop machine that would play .m4p’s. Maybe then I can burn them or convert them somehow. There’s a plugin for Winamp that’s supposed to do that, but damned if iI can get it to work for me, despite the fact that I know what I’m doing.
Finally I come across a shareware program called m4p2mp3.exe. Download it, install it, let it loose on the 122 songs. It succeeds in converting *most* of them to unprotected mp3s (can’t for the life of me figure out what the difference is between the ones it fails at and those it succeeds with, despite several trials.) Almost good enough, I’ve freed around 100 of the 122 songs. The converted mp3s are perfect copies. Yep, they play great. So I pay for the shareware, in gratitude, and reimport the 100 mp3’s into itunes. I’m gonna “find duplicates” and remove all the DRM’ed original versions, keeping the free versions. But for some reason I click on one of the originals, just to try it one last time before erasing it now that I have a sanitized duplicate of it, and by God it plays. SO DO All THE ORIGINAL M4P VERSIONS OF THOSE 122 SONGS!! Somehow I got reauthorized to play them along the way! I can transfer them to the ipod, burn them to CD, etc etc etc.
WTF?
Still probably a good idea to free everything with my nifty new conversion software (as long as it continues to work, til Apple catches up with it). From now on, I am going to convert anything I buy from the itunes store to a plain ‘ol .mp3 and get rid of the protected .m4p version.
