Dear Lazyweb... (itunes edition)

[curgoth]

Dear LazyWeb,

Having long since surrendered and moved my music into iTunes, I find myself with several itunes related questions.

1. iTunes tracks are now DRM-free, which is great. However, I have a number of older tracks that still have DRM on them. Is there an easy way to strip the DRM off the files, or am I going to have to do it the hard way

Comments

[ink_13]

Can't you tell the iTunes store to redownload your purchases?

[curgoth]

It seems like that would be an intuitive and natural feature to have - I was surprised when I couldn't find it. As near as I can tell from googling, it comes down to pestering a support person at Apple and talking them into authorizing you for redownloads.

[immlass]

You can solve problem 2 by sharing in your options/preferences.

Problem 1, assuming you've already paid for all the upgrades ($0.30/song for those that could be upgraded, which was worth it for me), used to be solvable by an app called Hymn. I don't know whether that still exists or not or whether it works with current iTunes, but it might be a place to start looking. I still have a bunch of songs that iTunes no longer sells. I'm just backing them up for now.

[curgoth]

Sharing is exactly what I want to do. Apparently it won't work between my living room (where the TV is) and the bedroom (where the desktop I want to share from is), presumably because there is a switch in between them and itunes doesn't think it's the same "network".

[immlass]

That's a problem you need to address at the router level. If you're wireless and on a Mac, I might have useful suggestions, but if you're on Wintel or Linux, I'm not going to have good advice. Sorry.

[curgoth]

Yeah, windows. I'll fiddle with it later when I am less frustrated.

[scarywhitegirl]

2. This is not a perfect fix, but if you have all of your iTunes library on your iPod, you can connect your iPod to the laptop and play the music from there, through iTunes. This is how I play my music when I travel, and it seems to work just fine for my purposes. Not positive you can run the visualizations through that, though, as I've never tried it. :)

[misslynx]

I read a rant by someone when iTunes first introduced the new DRM-free format, about the fact that they required anyone who'd downloaded songs in the original format to upgrade them for an additional cost if they wanted to be able to download any songs in the new format, because all your iTunes-purchased had to be in one format or the other. The iTunes store helpfully offered him the option of paying one flat fee to upgrade his entire music collection at once - which given how much he'd bought from them in the past, was something like $1000. But they may have changed that now - not sure

[curgoth]

Yeah, that'll work, but I would have to do it every time I played music from the laptop. iTunes figures out that I'm trying to access my purchases on a different computer, but that's okay. It's most the having to copy the library every time that I'm trying to avoid.

Synchronicity strikes!

[misslynx]

Strangely enough, what should show up in my e-mail today but an ad for a program that, from the sound of it, does exactly what you want? It appears to be cheap, and comes in both Mac and a Windows versions.

Just so you know, the e-mail in question wasn't spam, it's from a company I've bought stuff from in the past. Anyway, thought you might find it useful...

[insaint]

There are programs that strip away iTunes DRM. Google should help you. (I used one myself a while back... I don't think I have any protected iTunes files left, though, so I don't recall the name.)