Monday, 18 September 2006

Hymn Project Busts Apple iTunes 7 DRM

The Hymn (Hear Your Music aNywhere) project has already found a way to remove the protection from downloaded songs from Apple’s updated iTunes. Here are details on the program; "QTFairUse6 works fine for converting one iTunes 7 song at a time, although apparently the function for batch converting an entire library of purchased songs doesn't work. In order to convert a single song, you'd just drag it from your iTunes Music folder onto the QTFairUse6.exe file and enter "Y" in the DOS command line interface that pops up".

The existence of the Hymn Project, and the fact that the DRM in iTunes 7 was cracked after only one day, makes consumers wonder how serious Apple is about DRM.

The makers say that the Hymn projects has been set up to all users to exercise their fair-use rights under copyright law. The various software provided on the project web site web site are aimed to allow users to free theor iTunes Music Store purchases (protected AAC / .m4p) from their DRM restrictions “with no loss of sound quality”. These songs can then be played outside of the iTunes environment, even on operating systems not supported by iTunes and on hardware not supported by Apple.