HiFiiPod

If you have ever tried to play music you have purchased from iTunes on-line music store on your cheap flash based mp3/aac player (or any other non-apple player) you may have noticed it won’t play or makes the player hang. This is because Apple has put their own proprietary DRM (digital rights management) in that track. Digital rights management is designed to protect the record companies from having people steal their music by redistributing it for free.

What DRM has really done is just encouraged people to continue buying CD’s instead of moving on to the on-line stores like the record companies had wanted. With a CD you can transfer the music to any player and it will play fine, because there is no proprietary DRM to make the player choke.

If you follow these three simple steps you can remove the DRM from your iTunes store purchased music from within iTunes, and allow it to be played on your non-apple player (just like a store bought CD). This also allows you to recode it into any other format that your player supports. You will need CD burner (nearly every computer has one of these nowadays), and obviously a blank CD. (I recommend a blank CD-RW so you can reuse the CD again and again instead of buying a new one.)

1. Create a new play-list (click the + sign on the bottom right) and put your DRM songs into it (drag them onto you play-list).

2. Right click on the play-list and click Burn from the contextual menu, when prompted insert your blank disc and click Burn.

3. Put the burned disc back into your computer (it should have been ejected automatically) and re-import it into your library (right click on the disc under the sources list, and click import in the contextual menu).

Optional:
You can create a smart play-list that shows you songs with Apple’s DRM. All you have to do is hold down “option” on a Mac, or “control” on a PC and click on the + sign in the bottom left of the sources list. When prompted, change the rule so that all files with a kind that contains “protected” are added, and that’s it.