A Death Knell For Requiem?
The DRM arms race continues. A couple of weeks ago I told you about Requiem, a DRM removal tool for iTunes. At the time Requiem 1.7.3 was out, and since them 1.7.4 was released, and they worked on the latest iTunes, 7.7.1.
Well, today Apple released iTunes 8 and have changed something which breaks Requiem. This back and forth has been going on for a long time, as I covered, so it is too early to say if this is the end of Requiem, or if the community will be able to update it to work around whatever change Apple has made.
There may yet be a new version of Requiem released which restores functionality under iTunes 8. Or some brand new tool could emerge from the community, just as Hymn, myFairTunes, QTFairUse6, and Requiem have. The best thing I can recommend is keeping an eye on the Requiem thread at the Hymn forums for new news.
In the meantime, if being able to remove the DRM from iTunes purchases is important to you, do not upgrade to iTunes 8! As long as you continue using 7.7.1 (or earlier builds) you should be able to continue using Requiem. The real question is how aggressive Apple will be in pushing users on to iTunes 8 by making it a requirement to download content. They’ve done this in the past, forcing users to upgrade before they can purchase newer content.
No matter what, I’m sure the dev community is already actively looking for ways to crack iTunes 8. DRM really doesn’t do anything to stop piracy, and it is especially stupid when the same music is available from other stores, like Amazon, as DRM-free MP3s.
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September 10th, 2008 at 10:36
True, true, true…
Keep up the great work people, looking forward to being able to upgrade!
September 16th, 2008 at 20:07
If you’re willing to spend money, TuneBite has always worked for me. Just scripts the iTunes interface and hacks into the playback audio path to capture and convert it to mp3. Obviously there is some transcoding loss, but its not obvious and obviously you should be buying things elsewhere whenever possible anyway, so hopefully you don’t need it too often.
September 16th, 2008 at 20:58
Yeah, I’ve played with Tunebite. But it is a lossy program. More than just transcoding, it actually captures the sound after decoding. So it ‘plays’ the track and it is decoded into analog form, but it captures that with a special sound device and routes that into an encoder. So it is effectively the same as burning a DVD and re-ripping it, just a lot faster and more convenient.
The good news is the author of Requiem is working on making it work in iTunes 8.0.
October 21st, 2008 at 18:07
For the technically minded, you can back up “/Users/Shared/SC Info” (”%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\\Application Data\\Apple Computer\\iTunes\\SC Info” under MS Windows), then patch the requiem source to use the old directory. You could also backup the new authorization data once you upgrade and put the old SC Info folder in its place, but this might prevent iTunes from playing protected files (not much of a problem, obviously). Personally, I don’t find iTunes 8 to be that much of an improvement over 7.7.1.