Do m4p files need to be repurchased?

Doublej · « **on:** 28 Feb 2013, 03:00 am »

My wife has a bunch of DRM protected (.m4p) music she bought on itunes. Can these be un-DRMed so they can be put on a USB stick and played in the car without repurchasing them? If so how?

dB Cooper · « **Reply #1 on:** 28 Feb 2013, 03:03 am »

If you re-download them they should come thru without DRM AFAIK. Gotta go into 'Purchased' in your itunes account to see the tracks. May be necessary to delete the original files (and park them somewhere just in case) to get itunes to replace them. This should also replace any that are still in the older 128K format.

srb · « **Reply #2 on:** 28 Feb 2013, 03:32 am »

I believe you have to subscribe to the iTunes Match cloud service for $24.99/year. Previously you could upgrade individual songs with iTunes Match at $0.30/song, but the individual upgrade feature was discontinued.

Steve

dB Cooper · « **Reply #3 on:** 2 Mar 2013, 03:42 am »

I stand corrected.

Stu Pitt · « **Reply #4 on:** 2 Mar 2013, 04:39 am »

Burn them to a disc, then import the disc back to iTunes. DRM should be gone. Or at least that's how it was a few years ago.

srb · « **Reply #5 on:** 2 Mar 2013, 04:49 am »

Quote from: Stu Pitt on 2 Mar 2013, 04:39 am

Burn them to a disc, then import the disc back to iTunes. DRM should be gone. Or at least that's how it was a few years ago.

I did verify last October that this workaround still worked and there shouldn't be any reason that it wouldn't work now with the latest iTunes.

Steve

dB Cooper · « **Reply #6 on:** 3 Mar 2013, 01:08 am »

Problem there is that you are decompressing and recompressing the file if burning to audio CD. Burning a data disc won't eliminate the DRM AFAIK. May be easiest just to get iTunes Match and download non-DRM tracks. (I presume you can keep local copies if you later cancel.) Even the non DRM tracks are watermarked btw.

Doublej · « **Reply #7 on:** 3 Mar 2013, 01:51 am »

So much for Apple's brilliance. I was on the phone with them for a half hour maybe longer. The tech told me to try a couple of things that didn't work. He even had to call me back after he consulted with an expert. I tried deleting and redownloading but of course it just redownloaded the exact same m4p file, which makes sense since I would expect the non DRM version of a song to have a different ID number in their database.

Stu, I followed your advice and just burned to rewritable CD and then imported them into itunes. I had to make more than one CD and the import was not completely consistent. Once it couldn't find any of the song data so I wound up reburning it. A couple of times it asked me if I wanted to overwrite the existing entries and a couple of times it just added them leading to 'duplicate' entries one being m4p and the other being m4a files.

It should be good enough for the expensive but crappy stock sound system I have in my Honda.