With over 1000 purchased songs, some would say that I am one of the biggest fans of the iTunes Music Store. Increasingly, I’ve been wanting to play my music on a variety of platforms, something which the DRM on most of the ITMS catalog would not let me do. Here are some places I’ve wanted to play my rightfully purchased music over the last few months, but was not able to:
- Chumby!
- Nintendo Wii
- My Linux box at work
- Logitech Squeezebox
Up until recently, the only ways to convert your protected .m4p files to open .m4a files was to have a copy of Windows, and myFairTunes7 or QTFairUse6. So, I rushed yesterday to download VMware Fusion and install Windows so that I could get rid of the copy protection forever. In the end, there was no reason to.
Enter ffh
While looking at the forums, I noticed that there is now a way to remove the DRM from a Mac, without having to run a virtual Windows environment. It’s called ffh. The instructions on the page are pretty good, but it’s not the most user-friendly package yet. This is what I did.
First, I downloaded the FFH Leopard Intel Binary, then the AtomicParsely mac binary, and finally the ffhPerlMetadataScript.pl script.
I opened up ffhPerlMetadataScript.pl and added a line before everything to make it self-executable:
#!/usr/bin/perl
And changed the musicPath variable so that I can pass the intended directory via the command-line:
my $musicPath = $ARGV[0];
I didn’t yet have a /usr/local/bin, so I created it, and moved all the files there:
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/bin sudo chown -R thomas /usr/local mv ffh AtomicParsley ffhPerlMetadataScript.pl /usr/local/bin
I then made sure this machine was authorized to play my purchases within iTunes, and then ran it on my mp3 collection:
ffhPerlMetadataScript.pl /Music
On my system, it takes about 18s a file to convert it. This may not sound like much, but in my case, this means 6h+ to run. This box is not yet stable, so it’s thankful that the ffhPerlMetadataScript.pl recognizes files that it has already converted, and resumes properly.
Final Thoughts
I recommend that you still backup your m4p files. Several years ago, when jHymn did the same thing, a new iTunes version came out that blocked your unprotected songs from being played. Now that everyone, including Apple, is selling songs without DRM, I don’t see this happening again.
If you want to buy songs without DRM in the first place, I heartily recommend the Amazon.com MP3 Downloads service. You can buy albums there for only $8.99, and the quality is fantastic. The experience still isn’t as seamless as the iTunes Store, but they’ve done a fantastic job integrating it with iTunes anyhow. Kudos to them for pulling it off.
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