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Apple to remove DRM copy-protection from ITunes
According to CNET, Apple announced yesterday that they will be removing DRM copy-protection from their entire ITunes store catalogue.
This means that you will be able to purchase music from ITunes, and listen to it on any MP3 player, essentially decoupling ITunes from the IPOD, and making the store available to non IPOD users.
Since I firmly believe that the only future for the music industry is to make it cheaper and easier to legally obtain music than to obtain it illegally, I think that this is a major move in the right direction.
The pricing of music will change, whereby current chart songs will be more expensive and the majority of the catalogue will reduce to 79c per song (the price has been $1 since they start trading about 5 years ago). I am convinced that this is only the first step, and that we can expect further price reductions.
Now, if only Apple will open up the store to users in South Africa…
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iTunes music is drm-free now, but for the old itunes users, full of
music must pay a 30-cent upgrade per song, 60 cents for video
upgrades, it seems a bit expensive and isn’t worthwhile, the very
economical way I use is with this media converter, it can handle with
all types drm and common video music files, and also supports batch
conversion, works easy and great:)
http://www.wmatomp3-converter.com/digital-media-converter-pro.html#123
That is a shame, especially since a lot of their catalogue is going down in price, is effectively you will have paid $1.30 for a .79c song.
Basically, when you buy music from iTunes, it comes with a copyright protection called DRM. These DRM-protected songs are locked so that they only work with Apple MP3 players. That means that if you bought a Microsoft Zune, you cannot use iTunes music.
So, what is the solution? You have to burn a CD. When you do this, the DRM is removed (because the music is converted to a non-DRM-compatible media). After you burn the CD, you can rip it to your PC as an MP3 file which no longer has DRM.
Alternatively, you can use TuneClone ( http://www.tuneclone.com/ ). TuneClone makes a virtual CD-ROM drive, tricking your PC into believing that you are burning a CD. Therefore, the DRM is removed without wasting a CD.
Here is a link to a tutorial using TuneClone and iTunes 8:
http://itunesm4ptomp3.wordpress.com/2008/09/16/convert-itunes8-music-to-mp3/
I think that is what Apple have finally realised. For every DRM or security measure put into place to prevent people from playing their music on whatever device they want, there are several tools or manual processes created to get around this.
So hopefully what they have done now will mean that we don’t need to worry about any of that. Simply buy the music and play it where ever you want.