Itunes fairplay workaround?

[OSXpert]

I'm not sure how useful this is or even if its been mentioned before but i came up with a way to get rid of protection of songs bought on iTunes without burning a CD and ripping it back to the computer.

Basically you

A.) start a new project in iMovie and import the desired song
B.) Export (share) the movie in quicktime at full quality
C.) in quicktime, export the audio to no compression .wav

and you are done
few problems i see are: i dunno how much is lossed in the conversion, you need quicktime pro, and you have to do it for each song individually.

However, it seems like quality on a file made this way would be better than something burned than ripped, and you don't have to waste a CD. furthermore, if this really is a good way to get around the protection, someone could easily make an applescript to make the process easy.

I tested it out a song i bought (or won with a pepsi i guess) and it sounded very good.

Thats all...

 

[gwuMACaddict]

how big is the new file as compared to the original?

 

[zimv20]

how big is the new file as compared to the original?

it's probably on the order of 7-10x as large.

of course, one could recompress it as an mp3 or m4a, but the real signal degradation would come in on the second compression.

 

[OSXpert]

yeah

original file was 2.8MB and the new file is 32MB, i really don't consider this workaround too practical, but i thought it was interesting enough to post. As stated before, you can convert it back to AAC or mp3, and yes youll lose some quality but i would imagine most people couldn't tell the difference, i know i cant

 

[Kingsnapped]

This is exactly how I use songs I purchace off itms in Final Cut. A script would be awesome.

 

[zimv20]

youll lose some quality but i would imagine most people couldn't tell the difference, i know i cant

one way of telling is to listen to the cymbals. they may sound "phasey" and/or move back and forth across the stereo field. it's not pretty.

 

[OSXpert]

interesting

thanks, ill try listening for that

I tried this:i opened the protected AAC and the converted AAC both in Quicktime, changed the settings to "play only frontmost movie" then plugged my headphones in and started them both at the same time. i then clicked back and forth between the two to see if there was a difference. I personally didn't notice an ounce of difference between the two, but maybe its just cause i have crappy headphones? in any case, they are both the same file size and the converted one is good enough for me. im sure some people won't be happy with the quality, but then again, lots of people aren't happy with the quality of iTunes downloaded songs to begin with.

Meh