JHymn
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.
Anonymous said,
Wrote on February 22, 2005 @ 10:44 am
You overstate what JHymn does a little bit. There is no loss of sound quality when JHymn converts protected AAC to unprotected *AAC*. Doing so opens up a few more portable players for you, but not too many play AAC. The bigger advantage is being able to use network audio players like Slim Device’s Squeezebox, which supports AAC, but not protected AAC.
When you convert to MP3 you do lose some sound quality because the audio gets decompressed (AAC->WAV) then recompressed (WAV->MP3). What JHymn’s built-in MP3 conversion gains you is that it’s a whole lot more convenient that burning to a CD and then re-ripping, the LAME encoder built into JHymn (3.96.1) is a better MP3 converter than the one built into iTunes, and the default LAME sound quality settings (you can tweak them if you like) re-encode the MP3 files at a higher average bit rate than the original 128 kbps from the iTunes Music Store, making the MP3 files a little bigger than the original AAC files, but reducing the audible impact of the extra generation of lossy compression.