Brent's Blog

How To: Regain fair use of iTunes songs

I love iTunes, I use it to download all my favorite music. But iTunes has a problem, its songs are in a protected AAC format. The only portable music player capable of playing this protected AAC format is the iPod. What a coincidence! Some would argue that by not allowing the consumer to burn mp3 cd's, put their music on other portable music players, or play it in other applications, that Apple has violated 'fair use' copyright law. I'm no law expert, so I can't tell you if Apple has or not, but what I can tell you is how to convert propriatary .m4p (protected AAC) files into standard .mp3's using a program called hymn.

Now this is pretty easy if you run OSX. Just grab The Mac OS X binary. This version of the program is graphical and easy to use. If you run Linux then you should be enough of a geek to figure it out for yourself (I'm also too lazy to compile the hymn for Linux sourcecode). Windows users need to download the Windows binary and unzip it and move hymn.exe to the folder with the songs that you wish to convert.

Next open the command prompt by clicking on run in the start menu and typing "command". Use the change directory command by typing "cd [location of the folder with songs]". The prompt should change to that location.

(keep in mind that special characters such as &,_,@ and so on, are not supported by the change directory command. The only way to get to folders with nonstandard characters is to right-click the folder and select "open command window here" (requires the Open Command Window Here power toy), or just change the name of the folder. The same name rules apply to song file names.)

Next type "hymn" followed by a space and the song name in quotes. (see underlined text)

Hymn.exe will create a new file with the .m4a extention. (.m4a is unprotected, .m4p is protected)

The last step is to convert the unprotected AAC to .mp3 format. iTunes includes a AAC to mp3 converter. In iTunes go to the song that was converted from the protected format and double-click on it. You will get an error that looks like this:

Click yes and direct iTunes to the newely decripted song. Acsess the prefrences by holding down "ctrl" and "," at the same time. Then change your prefered import type to mp3 encoder.

Now just right-click on the song and select "convert to mp3" and you're done!

¶ 4:01 PM

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