Fairplay is the digital rights management created by Apple and it’s used on all of iTunes Store purchases (with the exception of non-DRM’d iTunes Plus purchases). Ever since version 5 or so of iTunes, no one has been able to crack it.
Now, I don’t need to crack DRM to pirate music (there’s easier ways to do this if that was my goal). However I do need to do something about the DRM if I want to listen to my music on a non-apple approved device (like streaming to an Xbox with XBMC installed on it, or a PS3, or a Slingbox, or a Zune (not that I’d be caught dead with one of those)… and burning hundreds of songs (yikes, how much money have I sank into music?) to CD, only re-rip them (and reencode them… do you know how wonderful adding a needless generation of encoding sounds?) is a waste of time, CD’s and energy.
Enter jHymn. jHymn worked up until iTunes 5 (or whatever version they upped Fairplay and changed the name to iTunes Store from iTunes Music Store). It was Winblow’s program, but it did the job. Anything your machine was authorized to play, it would simply strip the DRM from and change the extension. Then it quit working.
Years went by.
People tried everything they knew to crack the FairPlay DRM, but no one was really successfull.
Then someone posted on hymn-project.org’s website a little app for Terminal that would losslessly strip the DRM, just like the old jHymn. The problem was, it was too good. Whoever wrote it cracked not only the DRM, but the keystore encryption on Mac’s in general. He was so good, that Apple sent Cease and Desist letters to just about anyone that even posted a link to information about Requiem.
Requiem is incredible. I tried it and (due to a little mix up with a syncing iPod) it decrypted iTunes music I wasn’t even authorized to play… It tries to remove the DRM from iTunes video files even and it successfully decrypts them, but it doesn’t quite get it right when rebuilding the file.
For those of you with Slingboxes and other devices you want to stream your iTunes music to (or if you just want to put it on your Black Jack because you’re not cool enough to have an iPhone), hunt up Requiem from it’s normal pirate locales and enjoy!
I thought I’d add a link to an article on Engadet… basically Microsoft decided to quit giving
authorizations for it’s now defunct MSN Music. So basically whatever machines and/or devices it’s authorized to play on, you’re stuck with… you can’t even upgrade them to a newer OS (who’d want Vista anyway, right?). Just imagine if iTunes decided to quit giving out authorizations… you’re music would be stuck on the machines it’s on now, or you’d have to re-buy it. Who wants to strip out DRM now, huh?
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