Ed Hewitt Yet another Tech & Gaming Blog!

iTunes is not totally DRM-Free!

I have never been a fan of iTunes. It does have a great interface and buying and syncing music to your iPod is seamless. My main issue with iTunes is a problem I spotted early on which prevented me from using the store and the device. iTunes music used to be DRM, Digital Rights Management, which means the provider has control when and how you use that file. I did not want to be involved in that service, for mainly two reason. One, what happens if iTunes disappears, what happens to all my music??? Second, if I wanted to listen to music on a computer without iTunes or another device which is not an iPod, I can not.

Thankfully a few years later, a music store arrived which provided high quality DRM-free MP3 music. Amazon MP3 is the greatest thing to happen to digital music! I can play these tracks on any device I have (my three computers which run different OSes, my phone and my PSP) and if Amazon MP3 disappeared, I can still play all my music!

iTunes quickly followed suit and changed all their music to DRM-free. However, is iTunes music completely DRM-free like Amazon. The answer is NO! iTunes music has some DRM removed, mainly allowing you to play your music files on a different media player other than iTunes, but that is it. However, you will have to find a media player which can play iTunes strange file format. Instead of using the very popular industry standard, MP3, it uses .m4a. Which you will find it not supported by many players. With MP3 files, you know that you can play them any player, computer and device, with m4a you can not.

One major DRM trait is how users obtain their music. If you need to download your music, you still have to use iTunes and bypass their authentication service. Which means you can not download music onto that computer, unless its been authenticated and you can only authorise 5 computers. This is still DRM, Apple controlling how and when you can download your music. What happens iTunes goes, you wont be able to use this authentication service to get your tracks.

The finally DRM trait by Apple is what they do to every single music track you own. They use a method called Water-marking, which means to put the user's data in the file. Apple put the customers details into the file, so if that file ends up on a file sharing website, they can trace it back to the customer. This is still DRM in the sense of controlling and track your data.

Apple still use a strange file format with DRM surrounding it. Apple have made good steps forward, by allowing you to not require iTunes to listen to the music. Though they have a long way to go DRM-Free!