Topic: iTunes Plus - Higher quality, DRM free

[idolminds]

More expensive.

So if you spend a little more on your iTunes purchases ($1.29 per song), you get a higher quality encode and the file is DRM free. Only certain labels are on board for this, though.

Step in the right direction, but raising the price is bullshit. 90% of the people that buy music from iTunes have no idea what DRM even is and will still buy the $0.99 songs since they are cheaper.

[WindAndConfusion]

The lack of DRM is cool, but I wish they bumped the bitrate higher. Maybe added more than two audio channels. I understand that 256kbps is "near CD quality" - I just don't think "almost as good as a thirty year old format" is actually all that much quality.

(Also - is that 256kbps CBR or VBR?)

[WindAndConfusion]

Whoa whoa whoa, hold up.

Apple hides account info in DRM-free music, too

Embedded data or not, the mere presence of the data in a file found on a share is not unassailable indicator of copyright infringement.

That said, it would be trivial for iTunes to report back to Apple, indicating that "Joe User" has M4As on this hard drive belonging to "Jane Userette," or even "two other users." This is not to say that Apple is going to get into the copyright enforcement business. What Apple and indeed the record labels want to watch closely is, will one user buy music for his five close friends?  The entertainment industry is obsessed with the idea of "casual piracy," or the occasional sharing of content between friends. I wouldn't be surprised if some data was being analyzed in aggregate, although Apple's current privacy policy does not appear to allow for this. As with the dust-up over the mini-store, Apple should clarify what this embedded data is used for. 

[ren]

Didn't Apple do this a few weeks back with songs from the EMI label? or am I thinking of something different

[idolminds]

Whoa whoa whoa, hold up.

Apple hides account info in DRM-free music, too

Just give it a few more hours and there will be a program that strips the personal data out.

[Cobra951]

Whoa whoa whoa, hold up.

Apple hides account info in DRM-free music, too

Why does anyone ever trust these people?  If the music data is truly unprotected, though, it won't take long until some one-button tool to strip out all spurious data pops up on the net.

Edit:  Hahaha!  Idol, bite a bug.

[scottws]

I'm sure it is quite trivial to remove the data.

[idolminds]

Meaning it'll be trivial to spoof other peoples information. I'm going to distribute songs with the information of someone I don't like...get them in trouble.

[sirean_syan]

Someone should put jerks like Paris Hilton and Dr Phil on hundreds of thousands of files. That'd be awesome.

[WindAndConfusion]

Just give it a few more hours and there will be a program that strips the personal data out.

Why wait that long? Any transcoder will do it for you, and audio transcoding has been around for years.

But that's not the point.

[WindAndConfusion]

Someone should put jerks like Paris Hilton and Dr Phil on hundreds of thousands of files. That'd be awesome.

If Apple put any thought at all into this, they're combining the plaintext information with an encrypted watermark.

[idolminds]

Transcoding lossy-lossy? Don't think so.

[Quemaqua]

Apple is big on the "Hey, look what you're getting!" when you aren't really getting anything.  I mean, I guess you're getting *something*, but there always has to be strings attached with big companies nowadays.  Look hard enough at any pleasant proposal and you'll find a dick move lurking in there somewhere.

Anyway... the only reason this registers on my radar at all is because I just found out the Children of Mana soundtrack is available via iTunes but not anywhere else.  This annoys me greatly, but still not to the point where I'd actually use iTunes.  It'll take a hell of a lot more than that.

[WindAndConfusion]

Transcoding lossy-lossy? Don't think so.

Behold, W&C's ultra-sophisticated three-step process for using a transcoder to remove the iTunes watermark with no loss in quality:

• Convert the original AAC files into a lossless format (PCM, FLAC, ALAC, etc)
• Convert the lossless file back into AAC with the same parameters and bitrate, minus the identifying information
• Copy over any metadata you want to keep (song name, artist, album, etc)

Steps 1 and 2 can be combined by transcoding directly from AAC to AAC.[/list]
Edit: Why can't I get rid of that trailing [/list]?

[Cools]

And I couldn't care less. I have never bought an album online and probably never will.

[scottws]

Pretty sure it doesn't work that way.  When you "convert" back to AAC, you're basically going through the encoding step again.  Even if you use the same parameters, it still rescans the file and applies it's lossy compression.

[WindAndConfusion]

I just tried an experiment. Convert a song to MP3 (from Vorbis), convert the MP3 to lossless (ALAC), then convert the lossless into another MP3. (I probably should have used AAC, but I'm really freakin' lazy.) diff them.

They differ, but only in the file headers. (I verified this with 0xed, a hex editor.) I suspect their PCM outputs would be bit-for-bit identical, but I'm too lazy to compare them.

PS - my Ogg files are suddenly working in iTunes again. Which is odd, because from my previous experiences with iTunes I was under the impression that Apple was deliberately trying to break Vorbis/QTcomponents compatibility.)

[WindAndConfusion]

Just for the record, I tried re-running the experiment with the only iTunes-purchased DRM-protected files I own, and learned that they can't "be converted because protected files cannot be converted into other formats." Thus spake iTunes 7.1.1(5) for Intel Macs.

[WindAndConfusion]

Didn't Apple do this a few weeks back with songs from the EMI label? or am I thinking of something different

They do it with all their songs, including those few I own, purchased October 2006. (Example: my name is stored at offset 2AD, and my email address at ****.)

And those few songs I own were published by an artist on an indie label.

Edit: removed second offset, because I think the address itself might (possibly) encode personal information. Forgive my paranoia.

[WindAndConfusion]

Hey, I'm not the only one who got curious about this.

EFF: DeepLinks

We compared two DRM-free copies of the track Daftendirekt by Daft Punk. When decoded to PCM/WAV data, both copies produced an identical audio signal (the MD5sum is e40b006497f9b417760ca5015c3fa937). So there is no audio watermark. But one of the .m4a files is almost 360K larger than the other!

Hat tip: I love Ars Technica.