When it comes to owning an iPod, as over 70% MP3 player owners do, you find you’re self purchasing the majority of your music from the iTunes Music Store (iTMS). The iTMS is a great source for music, movies, TV shows, podcasts and more but there is one small issue with the Apple service… Digital Rights Management! I’m not going to get into a discussion over why DRM is bad or how the Apple limitations to only 5 “Authorized” devices is ridiculous considering the fact that I own 4 iPods and 3 computers… No, I’m not going to get into that here but what I would like to share is a few methods to stripping your iTMS purchases of that DRM.

Up until Apple released version 6.0 of iTunes an anonymous coder by the name of FutureProof had developed a great Java based application called JHYMN (Java Hear Your Music aNywhere). JHymn provides an easy to use GUI with much added functionality including multiple was of scrubbing your iTunes purchases of Apple’s FairPlay DRM. Apple is no longer allowing iTunes versions other than 7.x to purchase music (or otherwise) from the iTunes Store but if you have (or can find) a copy of the iTunes 5.x installer you could install it onto another computer on your network and use this system to scrub your DRM music. This will NOT work if you have previously installed iTunes version 6 or higher on the same computer.

Now on to the newer but less direct approaches to the DRM issue.

Seidai Software has developed a piece of Mac OS X only software called FairGame that will convert songs you bought on the iTunes Store to an unprotected format (using iTunes default encoder) and keep all the original metadata, lyrics and artwork. They say that a 4 minute song will take around 2 and a half minutes to convert to a fully scrubbed AAC file on a MacBook Pro 2.16 GHz notebook. This is one of the best solutions since JHYMN was a viable solution… that is until Apple released a “fix” for many of the new iTunes 7.01 problems. Once version 7.02 was released FairGame no longer worked.

So you’ve read up on the previous two methods but you have already upgraded to iTunes version 7.02 and you still need to rid your precious music library of that filthy FairPlay (ya right) DRM! Well if you’re a long time iTunes user you may have noticed that there is a somewhat “legal” method to removing your DRM’d music by simply burning a CD of that music and then re-importing that CD back into your iTunes library. Yes, I can hear you saying “That will take forEVER! and a day to scrub my ultimate iTunes library!” I completely agree with you on this point and that is why I use BurningThumb’s DRM Dumpster application. This Mac OS X application is built of the premise that you can indeed just burn you MP3’s to a CD followed by reimporting your music back into iTunes. Nothing too new here except DRM Dumpster DRM Dumpster is able to erase and reuse a single CD-RW disc to handle your entire MP3 library without you having to babysit and pop discs in and out of your optical drive. How sweet is that and this process will work with any version of iTunes you are currently running under Mac OS X.

I hope this post helps someone out there figure out what the best method for DRM removal is for their particular situation. Please feel free to drop comments as well

*UPDATE 1/20/2007 *
Many people have been asking about a Windows solution for stripping iTunes DRM and so I have done a bit of research and found that the JHYMN peeps have a project called MyFairTunes6 which may due just that. This project is still in it’s infancy but should be working with only a few bug left. Give it a shot and let me know how it works for you!