The Negatives of iTunes Plus
Posted by Daniel Hollister on August 12th, 2008 in Music | Digg This!
I love the iTunes Store. Well, most of the time.
The easiest way to buy music online can also be a massive headache if you’re one of the people out there who care about DRM. We already know that music purchased through iTunes is riddled with it, but what many people don’t know is that iTunes Plus — Apple’s pricier alternative to their DRM’d music — has a dirty little secret: Your personal information.
Since iTunes Plus is labeled as “DRM-free,” one would think it would not retain any of the purchaser’s information, but alas this is not correct. While the files are in excellent 256kbit AAC format with no copy protection, you will notice that if you Get Info on the track within iTunes, the purchaser’s full name and email address are fully intact. Furthermore, you cannot remove them by editing the ID3 tags. In fact, you cannot remove them at all from within iTunes.
But you can with an excellent program called Fission. This application is unique in that it can open, edit, and save compressed audio files (such as MP3 or AAC) without losing any quality. It does this by not decompressing the file in the first place as most audio editing applications do.
In order to strip your personal data from the iTunes Plus track, you simply need to open it in Fission and then immediately do a File > Save Audio. The resulting file will not have lost any data or quality, but your personal information will be gone!
The only downside of this is that, at the time of this writing, Fission can only open one file at a time. Since I have over 300 iTunes Plus files, the process of stripping my personal information from them could be quite time-consuming.
Of course, the bigger problem is why Apple is doing this in the first place. We all know that it’s largely the fault of the labels that so little of their music is available DRM-free, but I have my doubts about their involvement in burning your personal information into the iTunes Plus tracks.
So what gives, Apple?
Recent statistics show Amazon’s music store gaining in market share. It’s not anywhere at all close to iTunes’ yet, but hopefully the existence of some real competition will entice Apple to continue improving their own store.
2 Responses
Not to mention iTunes is the biggest memory hog of all time.
Yeah, but hopefully with Apple’s new focus on refined file sizes and optimized code (Snow Leopard) we’ll see a more streamlined iTunes in the near future.
For the amount of stuff it does though, it’s actually fairly decent on the memory, especially when you consider how many files (at sometimes massive sizes) it need to be able to access at the touch of a finger.