JHymn is a program that can strip the DRM (Digital Rights Management) from an iTunes purchased song. DRM was designed primarily to prevent music piracy but in exchange made it hard for honest people to have “fair use” of their music. Right now, Pepsi and iTunes are running a “contest” where you can win a free iTunes song which normally costs $0.99. What if you win an iTunes song but your portable mp3 player can’t play the DRM encrypted .m4p file? Apple would expect you to burn that song to CD and then rip it back to the computer as an .mp3. Taking an already compressed audio format, uncompressing it to put it onto a CD, and then recompressing it to another lossy file format not only takes time and wastes a CD in the process; but also degrades the quality of the original song. With JHymn, I can simply tell it to convert the .m4p file into a DRM-free .mp3 without hurting the sound quality.
I found out about JHymn from reading a post over at plastic bugs, which is a blog created by Scott Moschella, who is the line producer for The ScreenSavers. He won a free song from the Pepsi/iTunes contest and downloaded silence. 1 minute and 3 seconds of silence to be exact. And Apple would actually charge somebody $0.99 to listen to silence. So he decided to stick it to the RIAA and to Apple (only for their DRM) by detailing how he went about removing the DRM from the silence. His site wound up getting slashdotted from all the exposure he got. It was mentioned on Slashdot, kevin rose dot com, digg.com, and Alex Albrecht’s site.

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